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Leah Astbury's new book, Making Babies in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2025), explores the ideals and realities that governed generation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Astbury uses the family as her unit of study to understand how people approached fertility, pregnancy, preparing for birth, delivery, and the recovery process, as well as early infant care. As she argues, making babies was a family concern, one in which both women and men had a stake. Drawing on a wide range of manuscript and print sources, Making Babies is a lively read and sure to appeal to anyone interested in the history of the family, medicine, birth, or gender in early modern England.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe. Profile here

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