ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author want to argue that a woman’s becoming and being a mother in seventeenth-century England was suffused with political meaning; and specifically, that the ritual management of childbirth reflected the wider context of gender relations in what has been called ‘the world the people have lost’. Childbirth in seventeenth-century England was a social occasion, specifically an occasion for women. The early-modern ceremony of childbirth followed a coherent and consistent structure: it comprised an ordered pattern of actions governed by a discernible set of rules. It is likely that not only the general structure of the childbirth ritual, but also its specific details, will turn out to be intelligible in terms of the material lives of women. The historiographic context of the present argument is of course the increasing impact on early-modern history of women scholars, who are bringing into focus a variety of themes which male historians have tended to neglect, to marginalize, or to misunderstand.
