This thesis is a study of the prevalence, context, and experience of illegitimacy in Wales during the long eighteenth century, between approximately 1680 and 1800. It explores levels of illegitimacy across the Welsh counties of Montgomeryshire and Radnorshire, and investigates many of the underlying causes of childbirth outside of wedlock throughout eighteenth-century Wales. It is argued that Welsh illegitimacy was influenced by a combination of courtship-led marriage customs, a decline in traditional forms of social control, and worsening economic circumstances. In addition to exploring broader demographic trends, this study also examines the diverse individual identities, relationships and socioeconomic backgrounds of the mothers and fathers of illegitimate children in Wales, and the lived experience of conception, pregnancy and childbirth for unmarried mothers. The sexual encounters which resulted in the birth of an illegitimate child ranged from consensual sex which took place within the context of courtship, to sexual exploitation and rape. It is argued that these broad range of experiences are central to our understanding of illegitimacy. This thesis also examines infant and maternal survival chances, both in terms of overall risk of mortality in the days, weeks, and months after birth, and in terms of the ways in which fatal violence against illegitimate children and their mothers was contextualised in court records. These narratives reveal how the bodies of illegitimate infants and unmarried mothers often represented deviance, and served as the locus of anxieties surrounding unregulated reproduction. Finally, this study also analyses the provision of care for married and unmarried pauper women immediately before, during and after parturition. The skills, reputation, and availability of midwifery services in Wales are also explored. This thesis unites many disparate historical fields, including social and cultural history, historical demography, and the histories of crime, gender, sex, reproduction, and medicine, and analyses evidence from previously unstudied regions of Wales. It demonstrates that illegitimacy in eighteenth-century Wales was a deeply complex phenomenon governed by diverse regionally-specific social, cultural and economic influences.

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

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