This paper examines midwives and their practice in the criminal and notarial records from the later-medieval Provencal town of Manosque. This town counted amongst its 5,000 Jewish and Christian inhabitants a relatively high number of medical practitioners; these practitioners appeared frequently in the criminal court to offer testimony and to petition for professional protection. Although the apparent absence in Manosque of midwifery regulation like that present in northern France makes it more difficult to define midwives’ exact responsibilities, their appearance in court alongside other medical practitioners suggests that they possessed an acknowledged expertise of the reproductive female body. This paper situates midwives within the socio-medical milieu from which they are often separated in current historiography. A consideration of cases involving women’s reproductive bodies within the broader context of Manosquin medicine reveals that gender dictated the production and application of knowledge about this subject, but not on the grounds of biological essentialism. Rather, as cases of conception, abortion, and postmortem caeasarean sections reveal, the masculinized professionalism of later-medieval medicine granted male practitioners increasing authority in the realms of reproduction and pregnancy. Although this granted men access to “women’s secrets,” prevailing notions of feminine propriety prevented their theoretical knowledge from transforming into practical application to, or examination of, women’s “secret places.” This placed uncomplicated childbirth, and its attendants, on the margins of the medieval medical. It also made midwives indispensible not only to the women whom she attended in childbirth, but also to the institutions that sought to extend their authority over these concerns to which society otherwise denied them access. The cases from Manosque of adultery, illegitimate pregnancy, and virginity in which midwives appear reveal that the concept of feminine propriety simultaneously granted midwives’ authority over women’s physical reproductive bodies and rendered them instruments in the courts regulation of the female body. These cases, then, illustrate the court’s ability to legitimate and regulate through a symbiotic relationship between institution and society.

This paper examines midwives and their practice in the criminal and notarial records from the later-medieval Provencal town of Manosque. This town counted amongst its 5,000 Jewish and Christian inhabitants a relatively high number of medical practitioners; these practitioners appeared frequently in the criminal court to offer testimony and to petition for professional protection. Although the apparent absence in Manosque of midwifery regulation like that present in northern France makes it more difficult to define midwives’ exact responsibilities, their appearance in court alongside other medical practitioners suggests that they possessed an acknowledged expertise of the reproductive female body. This paper situates midwives within the socio-medical milieu from which they are often separated in current historiography. A consideration of cases involving women’s reproductive bodies within the broader context of Manosquin medicine reveals that gender dictated the production and application of knowledge about this subject, but not on the grounds of biological essentialism. Rather, as cases of conception, abortion, and postmortem caeasarean sections reveal, the masculinized professionalism of later-medieval medicine granted male practitioners increasing authority in the realms of reproduction and pregnancy. Although this granted men access to “women’s secrets,” prevailing notions of feminine propriety prevented their theoretical knowledge from transforming into practical application to, or examination of, women’s “secret places.” This placed uncomplicated childbirth, and its attendants, on the margins of the medieval medical. It also made midwives indispensible not only to the women whom she attended in childbirth, but also to the institutions that sought to extend their authority over these concerns to which society otherwise denied them access. The cases from Manosque of adultery, illegitimate pregnancy, and virginity in which midwives appear reveal that the concept of feminine propriety simultaneously granted midwives’ authority over women’s physical reproductive bodies and rendered them instruments in the courts regulation of the female body. These cases, then, illustrate the court’s ability to legitimate and regulate through a symbiotic relationship between institution and society.

abstract: This dissertation focuses on the connections between childbirth and spirituality in fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. It argues that scholastic interest in conception and procreation led to a proliferation of texts mentioning obstetrics and gynecology, and that this attention to women's medicine and birth spread from the universities to the laity. This dissertation contends that there is interdependence between spiritual and physical health in late medieval English religious culture, correlated with and perhaps caused by an increasing fascination with materialism and women's bodies in religious practices and rhetoric. The first chapter provides an analysis of birth in medical and pastoral texts. Pastoral works were heavily influenced by the ecclesiastical emphasis on baptism, as well as by scholastic medicine's simultaneous disdain for and reluctant integration of folk medicine. The second chapter examines birth descriptions in narratives of saints' miracles and collections of exempla; these representations of childbirth were used in religious rhetoric to teach, motivate, and dissuade audiences. The third chapter turns to the cycle play representations of the nativity as depicting the mysteries of human generation and divine incarnation for public consumption. The fourth chapter analyzes the abstract uses of childbirth in visionary and other religious texts, especially in descriptions of spiritual rebirth and the development of vice and virtue in individuals or institutions. By identifying their roles as analogous with the roles of midwives, visionaries authorized themselves as spiritual caretakers, vital for communal health and necessary for collective spiritual growth. These chapters outline a trajectory of increasing male access to the birthing chamber through textual descriptions and prescriptions about birth and midwifery. At the same time, religious texts acknowledged, sought to regulate, and sometimes even utilized the potential authority of mothers and midwives as physical and spiritual caretakers. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. English 2014

Ce mémoire explore le concept de la sagefemme-sorcière dans le contexte de la masculinisation et la médicalisation du processus de l'accouchement. En m'appuyant sur le roman The Birth House, par Ami McKay, je développerai trois chapitres qui traitent de l'histoire du domaine obstétrique, la chasse aux sorcières, ainsi que l'historique de l'archétype de la sorcière dans un contexte féministe afin d'illuminer la caractérisation de Dora et Miss Babineau en tant que des véritables sorcières, malgré qu'elle ne pratiquent pas de magie dans l'histoire. De plus, ce mémoire examinera les implications féministes de l'adoption littéraire de l'archétype de la sorcière en ce qui concerne la culture populaire et le climat politique actuel en Amérique du Nord grâce à l'adoption d'une perspective historique afin d'illustrer l'importance culturelle non seulement du roman, mais des personnages qui y habitent. / In this paper, I explore the notion of the midwife-witch and how it relates to the medicalization and masculinization of birth as portrayed in The Birth House by Ami McKay. This subject is divided in three chapters that give historical context to the emergence of obstetrics and the prosecution of midwives, the history of the archetype of the witch and how it is explored in the characterization of Dora and Miss Babineau, as well as the feminist implications of the figure of the midwife-witch and how it is relevant to the current political and cultural climate. I argue that McKay's novel fictionalizes the question of how witchcraft influenced the process of excluding women from medicine as well as reinforces the overall patriarchal subjugation of women. In turn, the text suggests that the key to transcending gender-based oppression lies in embracing the magick of womanhood: the power to create life. This thesis draws a timeline in the history of women's medicine, witch hunts, and feminism to show how these three elements interact in McKay's novel, which serves as a feminist retelling of the real-world implications and power of negotiating and claiming identity.

As a writer of medical summaries and compendia, Oribasius has often been dismissed as a harbinger of late antique medical decline. This dissertation challenges this long-lived assumption by revaluating the compiler and his writings, and the place of medicine in the cultural and social landscape of late antiquity. Chapter one examines the scholarly biases that surround Oribasius’ career, positing that his Medical Collections were produced in response to the intellectual priorities of the Emperor Julian’s scholarly circle. Moreover, both the medical art and the physician were highly regarded in the fourth century, as chapter two demonstrates. Not only do the Collections reflect the priorities and order of empire, but the idea of the medical encounter granted both emperor and bishop a symbolic language with which to pose and articulate social questions in this period. Chapters three and four outline the ways Oribasius engaged with the medical realities of his day, by retaining in his compilation a sense of personal experience and patient interaction. In his borrowed case histories, female subservience in the face of medical authority is expected; whilst the hierarchy of the elite household is shown to dictate his approach to the patients within it. A messier reality of female agency in their own physical and spiritual care is better captured by Christian writers in the miracle account and sermon, in part because Christians like the Cappadocians and John Chrysostom imbued female choice with new theological meaning. Chapter five sets Oribasius’ approach to the female patient in the broader context of late antique social shifts. The compiler’s careful delineation of responsibility and blame in dealings with vulnerable pubertal and pregnant women reflect an attempt to reaffirm an unwritten social contract with the elite and the paterfamilias; a social priority which is also apparent in the legal compendia of the period. Christian writers, meanwhile, drew metaphorically upon medical discourses of generativity and patrimony to distinguish Christian society from the classical past, as chapter six demonstrates. In the final analysis, Oribasius’ Collections are shown to be intimately and variously in dialogue with the society that produced them, reflecting both the high standing of the art in late antiquity, and its symbolic role in defence of the social world, patriarchy and empire. Christian interactions with medicine are shown to reflect many of these same priorities, and to engage with medical norms in more pervasive ways than has often been noted. But it is only in the Christian text that the medical writers’ woman transcends the determinisms of her traditional generativity and physical inferiority, so central to the writings of Oribasius and his classical predecessors.