Anticipating Birth in Early Modern England

Scholars have described the days leading up to birth in the early modern period as a time when women purchased linens, prepared bedchambers, and called upon the services of a midwife and their gossips. However, manuscript recipe collections reveal that preparations in anticipation of labour went beyond such measures and incorporated the consumption of specific medicines. This article studies remedies that were designed to be taken six weeks before birth to reveal, in new ways, the experiences of late pregnancy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These remedies, we argue, show women’s anticipation of birthing beyond fears of their own or their infant’s mortality. We suggest that they emphasize the centrality of women’s ‘felt maternity’, which we define as an embodied sense of responsibility for the infant and its passage into the world, and that they demonstrate that anticipation involved multi-layered experiences of time. Moreover, we suggest that these remedies make manifest the physical areas of concern for women in late pregnancy, revealing a perceived need for the body to be fortified and dried, as well as the desire to relieve uncomfortable corporeal symptoms associated with this point in the lifecycle.