Childbirth, 'Madness', and Bodies in History

Abstract

Looking at the casebooks kept by the early modern astrologer-physician Richard Napier, this article offers a close reading of cases in which he linked his patients’ ‘madness’ to their recent childbearing. Exploring this linkage, it engages with a longstanding historiographical debate about the relationship of culture, corporeality, and subjective embodiment. Napier’s ideas about childbirth-related mental ill health were profoundly gendered, and we cannot begin to understand them without studying the early modern gendering of planets, seasons, flesh, and blood. Contemporaries’ constructions of sex difference, in particular, underline the distance between their phenomenology of bodies and our own. Yet reading the case histories of these patients can give rise to impressions of familiarity, as well as strangeness. The article asks how historians should interpret the parallels between present-day understandings of childbirth-related health risks and those described in early modern England. It argues that we need to develop historical methodologies which allow room for both culture and the ‘extra-cultural’, even if we cannot separate out the two for scrutiny.