← New Books Network
New Books Network
Leah Astbury, "Making Babies in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
00:56:25
Loading summary
Transcript71 lines
- [00:01]
Elspeth Curry
Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today.
- [00:08]
Leah Astbury
Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class.
- [00:12]
Elspeth Curry
I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts.
- [00:14]
Leah Astbury
Oh my gosh, they're so fast.
- [00:16]
Elspeth Curry
And breathe. Oh, sorry.
- [00:18]
Leah Astbury
I almost couldn't breathe when I saw the discount they gave me on my first order. Oh, sorry. Namaste.
- [00:25]
Elspeth Curry
Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order.
- [00:28]
Commercial Narrator
1-800-contacts New Year, new me. Cute. But how about New Year, new money? With Experian, you can actually take control of your finances. Check your FICO score, find ways to save and get matched with credit card offers giving you time to power through those New Year's goals. You know you're gonna crush start the year off right. Download the Experian app based on FICO scoring model offers an approval not guaranteed. Eligibility requirements. Interns apply subject to credit check which may impact your credit scores. Offers not available in all states. See experian.com for details. Experian Disney wants to know, are you ready?
- [01:03]
Leah Astbury
Yes.
- [01:04]
Commercial Narrator
For Marvel Studios the New Avengers, now streaming on Disney.
- [01:09]
Elspeth Curry
Let's do this.
- [01:10]
Commercial Narrator
One of the best Marvel movies of all time is now streaming on Disney.
- [01:14]
Elspeth Curry
Hey, you weren't listening to me.
- [01:16]
Commercial Narrator
I said Thunderbolts. The New Avengers is now streaming on Disney.
- [01:21]
Elspeth Curry
Meet the New Avengers.
- [01:24]
Leah Astbury
That's cool then.
- [01:25]
Commercial Narrator
Marvel Studios Thunderbolts, the New Avengers, rated PG 13, now streaming on. You guessed it, Disney. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
Elspeth Curry
Hello everyone and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Elspeth Curry, your host today. This afternoon we'll be talking to Dr. Leah Astbury about her new book, Making Babies in Early Modern England. An exploration of all that went into conceiving, bearing, delivering and caring for babies in 16th and 17th century England. Leah, welcome to the show.
- [01:56]
Leah Astbury
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:57]
Elspeth Curry
It's lovely to talk with you today. I'm really excited in part because I know you from many years ago back at Oxford when you were there with Torch. But I wonder if you could introduce our readers or our listeners rather to yourself a little bit and your background.
- [02:12]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, sure. So, I'm Leah Astbury and I'm currently a lecturer in health history at the University of Bristol in the uk. And before that I had a postdoctoral position at the University of Manchester and before that another postdoc at the University of Cambridge. And I had this six month job where I met Elspeth as part of the Women's studies program at TORCH in Oxford. Yeah. So I'm excited to be. This is my first book. Excited to be talking to you about it today. Awesome.
- [02:53]
Elspeth Curry
And how did you end up interested in your topic?
- [02:56]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, so I think I discovered early Modern history when I was an undergraduate, having previously thought that I would be a die hard modernist. And I did a unit on the history of witchcraft. And I just found the early modern period so fascinating because there are so many things that we've kind of inherited from that period in a lot of ways. So many things that feel really familiar to us, like family structures and, you know, often religious ideas, all kinds of sort of frameworks that feel very familiar to us. And yet there are so many things about the early modern period and the ways that people write and understand the body in particular, that are so alien and so different. And I think for that reason, the early modern period has always really intrigued me as a kind of, I suppose, a good test case as a historian for understanding, I guess, for sort of disambiguating us from the present and seeing how, particularly with regards to the body, I've always been interested in the history of the body, that we think about that as being kind of like a stable biological entity. And of course there isn't, you know, an aspect to like corporeal reality which persists across time and space. But the ways that we understand our bodies, our definitions of health and illness are so historically contingent. And so that was kind of how I became an early modernist. And I became really interested in childbirth and in motherhood when I was doing my Masters. And I became involved in this Wellcome Trust, which is a funding agency in the uk and they have this big strategic grant, they called it called Generation to Reproduction, which was about the history of reproduction. So I became involved in that through my Ph.D. and that was kind of the beginning of this book project, was my PhD project, essentially. Lovely.
- [05:07]
Elspeth Curry
I totally agree with you. The interplay between recognition and just total alienation from the early modern period, I think, is what I quite enjoy about it too. And then fun to explore kind of where those dissonances show up. So in your book, you call it. Well, it's called entitled Making Babies in Early Modern England. But the term you use for this process throughout the book is generation. So what does generation entail and why is it that? Why do you find it a helpful term to use rather than something like reproduction, which is probably what we would call it today?
- [05:44]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, well, I think for one, reproduction sort of as a term comes out of A very sort of specific late 18th century, early 19th century scientific discourse. And of course it becomes kind of related to economic ideas about production too. So. So for that reason, although reproduction is quite an open ended term that didn't seem to kind of fit obviously with my period. And then in terms of using the word generation and using it to kind of think about what that says about childbirth in the period. Early modern people use lots of these kind of capacious terms to talk about, I guess, procreation. So generation is one of them. But you also see in the titles of the books Breeding or Teaming Women. And I think it's important to kind of gesture to the ways in which understandings of kind of making babies was fluid and capacious and the kind of the boundaries between being pregnant and being fertile were often indistinct. And I think it also speaks to an idea that, that there's a phase in your life cycle in which you would be concerned with fertility and having babies. So I suppose because in this book I'm interested at looking at sort of the whole process of having babies, from kind of conception to, you know, recovery and after birth care, then it seemed to me important to look at those kind of, I guess, what we often call actors, categories or the terms that early modern people use to talk about them and not to kind of put these harsh of divisions in place around different parts of the experience in the way that we would maybe in a kind of modern clinical setting, talk about first, second, third, trimester, et cetera. You know, all these kind of technical terms that kind of bind the sort of experience into certain stages.
- [07:51]
Elspeth Curry
I came across teeming in the title of a book the other day and it really threw me off of just going back to that feeling of alienation. It's definitely not a term that I think people would use today to describe a pregnant woman.
- [08:04]
Leah Astbury
I guess I'm not sure this is in American English, but sometimes we kind of. In English you'd use it as sort of a slang term, like if something's teeming with people or whatever it means that it's like overflowing with people and it's an unpleasant experience. Whereas in this context it's quite a kind of a positive experience. I think it means that someone's sort of so amazingly fertile.
- [08:25]
Elspeth Curry
Yeah, yeah, it definitely made me pause. So one of your main interventions in the book that I really appreciated was to place the history of generation in the framework of the household. Can you talk more about why viewing generation as a family matter, not just a woman's affair is really important historically.
- [08:44]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, I mean, I think childbirth was of particular interest to historians in the kind of 1960s and 70s. Certain kinds of feminist historians were really interested in what childbirth might tell us in the past about women's relationship to reproduction and power, etc. And one of the arguments that kind of comes out of that is the idea that childbirth might have been a space in the past in which women experienced agency and because it was kind of a female only space within the actual kind of childbearing chamber, that this might have been a space and a time in which women sort of unequivocally supported one another and chose the kind of the bonds of sisterhood over any other kind of, I guess, divisions, like social divisions or even ethnic or racial ones. And I guess there's been a lot of work since to show that that's not necessarily the case, that women weren't always completely supportive of one another, particularly unmarried women. So, you know, the work of Laura Gowing, for example, in Linda Pollock, Laura Gowing, particularly on unmarried women, shows that, you know, a lot of these kind of social rituals were just not afforded to unmarried women. But nevertheless, I think a lot of these histories have focused on the moment of delivery rather than kind of the whole process of getting pregnant and having a baby. And I think when we focus on the whole process, what becomes clear is that it's sort of the birth. Birth itself is quite a female social event. But everything else kind of involves other household members. And particularly, you know, I was interested to look at elite women, which might seem surprising because I guess in some ways, you know, we're obviously, we're all keen on kind of understanding history from below. But in some ways the women I look at and the families that I look at are sort of the ideal situation in that they really fit into at first glance what, say, conduct writers and religious reformers would imagine would be an ideal way in which to have a family. And yet even for them, I guess there's this ideal that they're expected to live up to that they don't always live up to. So yeah, I guess my kind of interest in the family and the household, one reveals sort of how active men were in making babies, which might be kind of surprising. But two, I think also reveals all these other household members that are not like blood related, so servants, etc. That kind of also put in work in order to raise children, assist pregnant women, et cetera. And I guess what it kind of reveals to us as well is sort of how anxious people were to have children and to have children in a way that kind of redounded to their status and respectability. So I guess what I want to push back on as well, as part of that kind of older argument, I think there's often a separation of women as being kind of non medical experts and then men coming along later and being kind of medical experts. And so I think Adrian Wilson has this phrase where he says, before childbirth belonged to medicine, it belonged to women. As if those two things are completely separate. And actually what men and women know and practice as medicine in this period, many other historians have shown as super blurred and actually is not nearly as kind of rigid and gendered as we might imagine.
- [12:41]
Elspeth Curry
Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And I know we'll get into it a little bit later about the male midwife and how that changes or starts occurring in this era, but interesting to think about the blurring of that medical work and care. And that's something you really do talk a lot about throughout. And in your first chapter on fertility and you're talking about all the efforts people took to conceive and you know that this does fall along gendered lines. So how did men and women interact with the labor of fertility in this era?
- [13:13]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, so I think looking at recipe books, rather than kind of say doctor's case books or kind of medical literature, trying to foreground that shows that there was a profound amount of effort that people went into in trying to encourage fertility, or at least profound amount of effort they went into. They went to, to kind of collect information about fertility because we can't quite always know what, how practice maps onto, excuse me, what people kind of keep in these recipe books. But what seems to often be the case is that although men and women are very concerned about fertility and often write in their diaries and letters, both of both men and women, that they're concerned about, you know, barrenness is often the term that they use, that it's often kind of redounds to women to do that work, whether that be finding the remedies for both parties, if it's understood as being kind of the fault, as you were, as it were, of the man, of the husband and the wife, or sometimes even these treatments are kind of to be taken by the woman to sort of treat the man. And we can see that coming up in say, doctor's case books as well, where husband and wife will go to a practitioner and ask for help getting pregnant, but they'll quite explicitly say it's for the woman. And I guess what this reveals and what sort of letters and diaries reveal more generally as well, is how profoundly embarrassing not being able to get pregnant quickly was for married couples, but particularly for men, how shameful this was. Um, and so, yeah, so I guess although kind of men are involved and knowledgeable, which is something that maybe historians have neglected to kind of note before about fertility. And, you know, medical guides do acknowledge that men and women can suffer from problems that hamper conception because it's so shameful for men. There's often a kind of a concealing of. Of masculine responsibility or even kind of masculine efforts. And I think people feel much more comfortable with the idea of women, with women taking fertility treatments often to sort of cleanse the womb, encourage menstruation, et cetera. But also some of these other treatments, like is this recipe book by a woman called Jane Jackson, who has a recipe for fruitfulness that involves kind of anointing the man's penis with a particular ointment, which is supposed to sort of increase the fertility of her womb when they have sex. But also, we assume there's kind of some acknowledgment there that it's also increasing kind of masculine fertility as well at the same time.
- [16:18]
Elspeth Curry
So there is some awareness that men can be responsible for infertility, but it's kind of buried under a lot of layers of shame and assumption and all sorts of things.
- [16:30]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, I mean, the main kind of things that they think might cause infertility and men be responsible for, of course, impotence, but also weak seed, which resembles these kind of more intangible ways of talking about female infertility, because there's sort of not a precise or approvable aspect to that. But there's another really important idea which also brings shame with it, which is that couples that don't love each other enough or are not kind of well matched might not be procreative and that both parties could be fertile with a different husband or wife. And of course, there are lots of sort of worries and anxieties about divine will there, that perhaps this is an ungodly match, or perhaps one or both parties have sinned and this is the punishment that's been meted out to them.
- [17:25]
Elspeth Curry
Hmm, interesting. So lots of challenges people faced getting pregnant once they were pregnant. In chapter two, you're discussing the culture on pregnancy and particularly knowing when it was pregnant. So why were married women encouraged to watch their bodies so closely to know about pregnancy as soon as possible? Was it just so that they wouldn't be ashamed or trying to show that they're properly married or what was going into that advice to watch your body?
- [17:55]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, I mean, I think there are two things going on. One is this broader kind of Protestant culture of self examination in the period, which manifests in some might say, like, excessive diary writing.
- [18:12]
Elspeth Curry
All the self writing.
- [18:14]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, all the self writing. And every single part of your life is kind of potentially full of portents of where you stand with God. And of course, you know, monitoring one's health in general and making sure to be as healthy as possible is also kind of part of embodied devotion, as it were. And there's kind of an emphasis on women in particular making those records. But of course, it's not just women that do it. But the other thing that's going on here with regards to wanting to know that you're pregnant quickly and announcing it or writing it down, kind of having some sort of proof that you think that you're pregnant very quickly. And when I say quickly, I mean, like, medical guides expect that you might be able to know that you're pregnant immediately upon conception, which, of course, you know, doesn't bear out into diaries and letters. But nevertheless, people do, you know, elite people write that they think they're pregnant much sooner than a lot of historians have suggested previously. I think it's just a profound anxiety about legitimacy and making sure that you've got the kind of. The dates right that show that, you know, this is a baby conceived in wedlock, conceived under kind of favorable conditions. It's wanted. And it speaks to the kind of, I guess, also the idea that kind of pregnancy for those who are godly and have done everything kind of correctly, if you will, will be something that is difficult, will be kind of physically challenging. And so in that sense, kind of knowing you're pregnant quickly shows that you're kind of experiencing the bodily signs of pregnancy. Because there is a thought or kind of a belief that women who, say, have loads and loads of sex or are unmarried and have conceived a child out of wedlock that often they will have very easy pregnancies and very easy births. So there's something going on there about kind of wanting to prove one's godliness through both attentiveness to your body and knowing your body very well, but also kind of having this tangible proof of the legitimacy of your conception, which is very important to men as well. Men are very proud about kind of pointing to this sort of date in women's diaries or their own diaries, about when they think they've got pregnant and when they think they're going to give birth.
- [20:51]
Elspeth Curry
Interesting. So I know, or in the literature, often the quickening is the point at which people say, historians say, okay, that's when early modern people knew that they were pregnant and that's when they feel the baby move, which nowadays we say happens around like week 16 or like 4ish months. But you're saying that you have evidence of people at least trying or saying or announcing even before that point.
- [21:14]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, quite explicitly, sometimes saying, you know, I knew I was pregnant before my quickening. Yeah, interesting. Yeah.
- [21:24]
Elspeth Curry
It's just fun to see kind of where the narratives have maybe overstated things or need to be complicated.
- [21:32]
Leah Astbury
I guess the other thing to say is that, you know, in general, like, pregnancy is a very uncertain experience. There's a lot of unknowns even today. And I suppose that kind of collective desire to impose some sort of certainty on an experience which is otherwise very unknowable is also important with this kind of date giving. Because I will say they're not particularly upset when that date is wrong. You know that if they write, oh, I think I will give birth on this date, and then they're a month out or two weeks out, et cetera, that doesn't cause them consternation. It's sort of the act of seeking to impose certainty on it, it which has kind of important, I guess, emotional weight for families.
- [22:20]
Elspeth Curry
Yeah. And I suppose by the time that the date was wrong, many months had passed by and it was separated out enough maybe to laugh your clothes into
- [22:29]
Leah Astbury
clues, then I guess, of how far along you are, et cetera.
- [22:33]
Elspeth Curry
Interesting. Well, to move from more of the self writing side to the material aspect, could you say a little more about the material culture of childbearing? I was struck by this quote you wrote in chapter three that men got material goods and wives worked to bring this to fruition. Being a good husband or father to be during pregnancy was tangible, observable and simply put, easy. Being a good wife and mother was intangible and was measured constantly and inconsistently.
- [23:04]
Leah Astbury
Gosh, that's pretty. Sounds like a very difficult experience to be a pregnant and birthing woman in the period. Yeah. So the material culture of childbirth is an interesting one because women, well, families are very keen to kind of borrow items before in the lead up to a birth. And these are items like clothing or linens, food, I guess you can't really borrow food, but they get gifted food swaddling bands and in some circumstances birthing chairs, which are these kind of stools that have a hole in the middle that facilitate birth. And this is not just like of course, these are elite people that I'm looking at, for the most part, or middling sort at the kind of lowest end. So they have the kind of money to be able to purchase these things if they wanted to. So the kind of. The act of gathering these items is a way of kind of involving the larger. The sort of more extended family and others in the kind of the process of having a baby emotionally and kind of practically. And this is one that I think previously historians have often represented as being quite a female culture of exchange. But actually, if we look at kind of men's letters and women's letters, the men are actively involved in this kind of material culture, gathering of items or gifting items. And I think within that there's an idea that that's the right thing. The kind of. The appropriate thing for a husband to do to make sure that his wife is kind of well provided for. Her lying in which is the period of giving birth and then the month afterwards as well. So it kind of ties in with early modern ideals about the respective roles of husbands and wives that are kind of very key in conduct, literature, et cetera, that talk about the kind of the financial and the material responsibility of husbands. And then I guess this kind of wives, as their help meets, that sort of put in the kind of bodily labor in order to minister to members of the household or even kind of create those members of the household, if you will.
- [25:30]
Elspeth Curry
And am I remembering there was one man, or like you discuss a letter where a man was. Kind of one of the reasons he was charged with abandoning his wife was not providing for her in this case. And so we see not just that men are doing this, but there's an expectation that this is what a good husband ought to do.
- [25:50]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, that's right. That in cases where women are seeking to separate from what's called bed and board. So that's to separate from husbands, but is in no longer living together, but they are not divorced. Because, of course, that doesn't really exist in this period or not until the kind of the end of my period anyway. That. That. That can be quite a kind of a strong argument that women can use to proffer the kind of. To evidence the fact that their husbands have wholly abdicated their sort of proper husbandly function. So, yeah, I think. And in terms of sort of status that, you know, often letters will talk about how shocked and appalled they are that a particular husband hasn't sort of provided for his wife in the way that he ought to. I think there's one letter Where a family member sort of says, like, he's provided as well as he would for a cow in her carving, as in one of his kind of domestic animals. That's so very kind of emotive, but sort of judgmental language about men in this respect for kind of not putting in the right amount of kind of effort and concern into childbearing.
- [27:11]
Elspeth Curry
So we've seen men there kind of preparing the material goods for birth. And I'd love now for you to talk a little bit. We hinted at the beginning about male midwives and sort of. It's just such a key moment that you've highlighted in the historiography of how female only are these spaces. Is this the moment is the early modern era, the moment when women get kicked out of the birth space as being the ones in charge for male midwives, laying the groundwork for later male doctors. Could you just maybe touch on that debate a little bit or tell us more about how your research putting birth in the context of the family kind of changes the simple narrative of things were great in all women. And then those dang men came in and mucked it all up for all the feminists. Yeah. What have you found?
- [28:01]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, I mean, I guess just to kind of, you know, for those that are not so familiar with the debate or the context that, you know, midwives are almost entirely female in England Anyway, in the 16th and 17th centuries and before that period as well. And then Suddenly in the 18th century, we get the rise of a new kind of practitioner who is, for the most part a physician. So somebody who's been to university, who's trained as a doctor, who is a man, but then also starts to market themselves as being. As having the skills of a midwife as well. So they often get called man midwives. They often refer to themselves as family doctors to kind of gesture to this capacious kind of role that they might play. And they're very successful in convincing elite families to go for them rather than to go for female midwives. And one of the reasons they're successful is print culture that they kind of really sort of sell their services. And there's a big debate within historians about why they sort of become particularly successful and become an attractive option. And one of the arguments is that they often. They offer instruments in a way that female midwives don't. The kind of the four steps come from a famous Huguenot man midwife family, the Chamberlains. And so that's one argument. And then I guess there's another kind of discussion about whether or not this is women that push this new agenda of wanting men delivering them, or whether it's men that push other men coming into the birthing room and all of the kind of the social tensions that arise with that. But nevertheless, it is true that it is quite surprising that at the beginning of the 18th century, not many babies are delivered by men. By the 1720s, there's a significant proportion of babies that are delivered by men. And this becomes kind of a growing trend over the period. And in terms of what I discovered, I guess for me, in seeking to show that there's never this sort of haven, I guess, of female solidarity, and that men have always been deeply involved in childbirth and even if they might not be in the room while a woman is being delivered, all of the items that they've gathered are, and all of their kind of prescriptions and advice about how women should conduct themselves during childbirth are as well. So in that sense, for me, it doesn't seem like such a kind of a shame. Shocking change. And what is shocking is how much people are willing to pay for man midwives. That kind of shocked me and reading some of these letters. So there's a particular set of letters by a woman called Ann Wentworth to her son. And she's trying to get her daughter in law to go for a man midwife and uses all kinds of tactics. And it's clear from her letters that one of the things that man midwives, you know, provide is they're very well connected within kind of London society often. And, you know, they've got a litany of other kind of very elite women that they've delivered who often kind of write testimonies, you know, stating how good they are. And she, in the end they do go for this man midwife and he charges a hundred guineas. This is Hugh Chamberlain. And then they also at the same time go for a female midwife who ends up doing most of the work for the kind of the 12 hours that Anne is in labor. And Chamberlain kind of walks in right at the end and she's sort of miraculously delivered just merely by his presence. So I guess the point that I want to make there is that it's not as dramatic of a shift as we might imagine because of that kind of long standing, I guess, male involvement in childbirth as a whole. But there are really interesting things going on here about people kind of wanting their practitioners to have, I guess, a kind of a name and identity, because often in, in sort of diaries and account books, midwives just get listed as the midwife. Or, you know, we don't really get much of a description of sort of who they are as people and who they know in society, et cetera, whereas with these man midwives, they become almost sort of minor celebrities within an elite London kind of culture.
- [32:53]
Elspeth Curry
Yeah. It's interesting to hear you say that. In looking at account books that I've done, I've seen some midwife payments and they're generally not very high. So, yeah, 100 guineas is kind of a wild amount.
- [33:06]
Leah Astbury
It's a lot amount. Yeah.
- [33:08]
Elspeth Curry
To spend, particularly if they were just kind of there, but not actually involved with physically interacting with the mother or offering suggestions.
- [33:19]
Leah Astbury
Yeah.
- [33:20]
Elspeth Curry
It is just a different way of thinking about them. So to whatever degree they were involved, they were there at birth in increasing numbers. But to the early modern mind, how was birth and recovery supposed to work, whether you had a female midwife or a male midwife, what was kind of the goal or what was the ideal, and then what have you found people's actual experiences were?
- [33:46]
Leah Astbury
Yeah. So the ideal, as it's sort of described in medical literature, is that you sort of, I guess, give birth with some pain and suffering, but that once you're delivered and the baby is healthy and you are kind of healthy, then that sort of. That should be the kind of the end, I guess, of your travails, and that you ought to bleed for kind of up to a month after birth. And that corresponds with the churching ceremony, which is a kind of a ceremony in which women kind of go to church to give thanks for having survived childbirth and to sort of signify that the process is over and that you're sort of returning to your normal duties. But what I found in kind of looking at letters and diaries is that women often didn't bleed on this timeline. They either didn't bleed enough, which caused anxiety and often triggered families to seek medical support to intensify that bleeding, or they bled too long, which was less of a concern in the kind of early medical framework view because of the kind of humoral system which sees disease and illness coming from kind of blockage and a superfluity of humours, bad humours, then kind of purging is potentially a good sign. It's kind of a healthy thing to do. Of course, there are also descriptions of what they call flooding or haemorrhaging after birth, but that's sort of quite immediate. Whereas I'm talking about the sort of the weeks after childbirth and ideas of recovery there. And I think, as I'm sure most people will tell you, who have had a baby that the physical experience of pregnancy and childbirth doesn't just end the moment you've given birth. And that there are lots things that might not appear worrying to a physician because they, you know, don't signify maybe impending death, but they nevertheless affect your ability to return to normal, which is the often the expectation of kind of these early modern conduct guides and medical texts. And I say a good example of that is breast problems, which, which appear to have very much kind of played early modern women, if recipe books are anything to go by. But also we can see in letters as well that women often are unable, say, to go back to church for several months after giving birth because of very sore, inflamed, chapped breasts, nipples. And similarly, recipe books are kind of really flooded with remedies to cure breast problems. And these didn't seem immediately kind of troubling to medical practitioners because they don't signify sort of humoral imbalance necessarily. But I guess what I wanted to do in that chapter, in that part of this project was really investigate what early modern people thought recovery was as a sort of a destination from childbirth. And what I discovered was that these kind of medical ideas definitely didn't map on to the ways in which women and families experienced recovery from childbirth. And I guess a kind of an obvious end point would be conceiving again. And that is definitely, you know, something that in diaries and letters is celebrated as sort of the end of one experience and the beginning of another. But for many of these women, particularly if they have kind of other weaknesses or health problems at the same time, then recovery can go on for months and months, if not years, and even kind of permanently affect their health. And I suppose I really wanted to capture that kind of, I guess, dissonance in between the kind of prescription and then practice and experience. Eczema is unpredictable. But you can flare less with epglis, a once monthly treatment for moderate to severe eczema. After an initial four month or longer dosing phase. About four in ten people taking EBGLIS achieved itch relief and clear or almost clear skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more clear at one year with monthly dosing.
- [38:17]
Commercial Narrator
Empglis Lebricizumab LBKZ, a 250 milligram per 2 milliliter injection, is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate to severe eczema, also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin or topicals or who cannot use topical therapies. EBGLIS can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglis. Allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with Ebglis. Before starting Ebglis, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection.
- [38:52]
Leah Astbury
Ask your doctor about evgliss and visit evglist.lily.com or call 1-800-lilyrx or 1-800-545-5979.
- [38:59]
Commercial Narrator
This episode is brought to you by White Claw Surge. Great podcast pick, friend. No surprises there. After all, you're all about finding the tastiest flavors out there, just like White Claw Surge. And with big, bold flavors to enjoy like blood orange, BlackBerry, cranberry and more, it's time to go all in on taste. Unleash the flag flavor. Unleash White Claw Surge. Please drink responsibly. Hard seltzer with flavors. 8% alcohol by volume. White cloth seltzer works Chicago, Illinois
- [39:26]
Elspeth Curry
yeah, it's, it's fascinating. It's making me think. I realize I know nothing at all about the early modern experience of menopause or what that was like. But if, if recovery is marked, if, if ideal recovery is marked by conception, again, I'm just, yeah, it's making me want to figure out how that transition would be considered.
- [39:45]
Leah Astbury
And I think there's some good work on menopause by, I think, Sarah Till Allen and another couple of. But yeah, no, I have to go read.
- [39:55]
Elspeth Curry
So we've been thinking a lot about the family and which to modern minds, we think of relatives, you know, certainly the nuclear family and maybe grandparents. If we're thinking about babies coming into the picture, maybe aunts and uncles. But you are really encouraging us to think about the family or the household from an early modern perspective, which includes probably more people than we might assume. Can you tell us a little more about what or who might be involved in an early modern household and how they played a role? You've discussed their role in kind of gathering items for birth and delivery. But how did the household come into effect once the baby was out and their role in infant care?
- [40:37]
Leah Astbury
Well, so there's an amazing kind of, I guess it's pretty established now, but amazing work by a scholar called Naomi Tadmore, who looked at early modern Diaries and showed that when people were describing their family, they meant those that kind of existed and lived within the household, and that those didn't just include blood kind of family members, but also servants. And an idea, you know, those servants are not always with you. So kind of the transient idea of an early modern household. But I suppose the best example of this is attitudes to infant feeding and wet nursing. And I found lots of instances in which people sort of in which elite families ask existing servants or former servants to return to the home, to the household, to feed infants when the mother is unable to do so. Yeah, I mean, I think that for these kind of families, having somebody who's known to them and has formally kind of been part of that household is a more attractive option than having kind of a newcomer. And also there is a kind of a. A stereotype that people prior to the 18th century almost always sent their children away to a wet nurse to live with a wet nurse. And I found that people often felt quite uncomfortable about that and didn't want to do that for emotional reasons, but also for kind of anxieties about infant health and not having kind of control over the sort of the diet and how the baby was cared for. And so getting servants or former servants to do that work was a much more kind of comfortable option for these families than getting kind of external help.
- [42:43]
Elspeth Curry
So they're often trying to source it with people who are known or source, particularly infant feeding. Is there a larger cultural acceptance of that? Or do we see contact literature that still encourages maternal breastfeeding or maternal infant care, even if in reality people are still trying to find some extra hands to help with the intensity of small, small people?
- [43:07]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, I mean, there's something slightly confusing in childbearing guides where they often represent, you know, in particular during the lying period. Women are not meant to really be doing any kind of physical work or et cetera. And yet childbearing guides are often extremely, like, vague about who's going to do this infant care. And there's occasionally kind of this explicit mention of mothers doing it. But one can assume that it wasn't just an elite mother who was doing all of this work, especially if she had many other children, too. And so I think there's often a kind of a disinterest, I guess, by these conduct guides. And who actually does that care, as long as it's somebody that's within the household and is someone that the parents trust. So in that sense, it's kind of hard often to work out who is doing that care. Who's expected to do that care. And I will also say that although it might sound kind of a bit rosy to get a current or former servant to come in and breastfeed your child rather than getting somebody external, the kind of. The emotional benefits of that quite quickly evaporate when there's a problem involved. Families do not feel that bad about asking someone just to stop breastfeeding or getting somebody else in. So I suppose it's important to note that although there are kind of emotional aspects to this household relationship and a kind of a fluid understanding of kind of blood boundaries, etc. This is not all kind of rosy equal. And, you know, wet nurses are often treated well, but not inevitably treated well. And what's often left out of these sources, both the conduct manuals and these kind of letters and diaries, is the emotional connection that presumably was there between infants and wet nurses or other people who cared for them that really kind of didn't fit into that ideal, kind of early modern ideal of mothers being the ones that would do so. And yeah, Connor, guys are constantly really kind of pushing maternal breastfeeding, but at the same time, they often suggest kind of waiting up to a week or maybe even two weeks after giving birth to begin breastfeeding. And so a lot of women struggle with lactation. And, you know, I described these breast problems before that really hampered mothers from being able to breastfeed their child. Interesting.
- [45:51]
Elspeth Curry
Yeah, that doesn't seem like that would work very well in setting a woman up for success. So, I mean, this is perhaps kind of a silly question, but why do you think early modern people cared so much about making babies? I mean, we might say, like, oh, people generally want to have kids, or that's a pretty common experience, but in this context, why do they care so much and what is at stake? And what do you think is kind of driving all of this concern?
- [46:19]
Leah Astbury
Yeah, I mean, of course, as you say, there's sort of ahistorical things that we could say about people always wanting to have babies. But the specific kind of, I guess, early modern context is that I suppose the most important way to view this is like the religious context around it, which is that having babies is a gift from God that shows that you're a good Christian. But also within Protestantism, there's sort of a real emphasis on godly marriage and procreation as a route to salvation and embodied devotion. But within that, you know, there's often the emphasis that, like, you know, having children is kind of redounds to the sort of survival of the Reformed church as well, that you're kind of quite literally repopulating the church, but more individually for families, I think it's sort of this opportunity to kind of make and remake their sort of family name. It's part of a kind of, I guess, a larger project of this kind of family's name and reputation, and not just the kind of. Of production of a baby in that family, but the whole process is part of that kind of making of the family in the eyes of kind of neighbors and community more broadly. And that's why kind of looking at the ways that this impacts men is important, because it really redounds to their kind of public life as well. That, you know, reproduction kind of adds to male stability and status all the way up to society. And I guess the process of kind of making babies sits at the sort of apex of all of these medical and social and emotional and religious concerns. So it becomes a sort of a real, I guess, focus point for a lot of these anxieties.
- [48:35]
Elspeth Curry
Yeah, it's interesting. It almost feels like a much more public act than we often think about childbearing today. Which does kind of bring me to my final question about the content of your book. Which reading. You do a very good job of being a historian and focusing on your specific context. But I did appreciate in your conclusion, you had a couple remarks about the kind of history you do and how it can challenge some current narratives of. In the current, you know, modern ways we talk about, particularly natural or intuitive childbearing and child rearing or infant care, that we have lost something with modernization. Could you say a little more. Bit more about that? Again, the book is very much a good history book. You're not trying to say like, this is how we should parent today, but you do have some interesting things, I think I at least appreciated as someone who is a parent and often gets thrown into the midst of these sort of pregnancy or childbearing debates today.
- [49:37]
Leah Astbury
I mean, how we choose to give birth and how we parent our children is still a deeply emotional and political thing. And it's bound up in all kinds of other questions about our identity and how we see ourselves in the world and. And what we think is natural and right. And so I suppose there I wanted to gesture to the fact that that's still the case that, you know, in some ways, a lot of the kind of, I guess, conclusions about the ways in which women are kind of the boundaries of, like, good childbearing are quite narrow in this early modern context. Right. In order to kind of fit that ideal. It's quite a kind of a strict journey which, you know, as I show, bodies don't always map onto the expectations of that kind of idealized view. And I think that's still the case that I think that, you know, pregnant people and families are still subject to those kinds of ideals and still define themselves in opposition or in, you know, conforming to them. And they continue to be really powerful within our culture. And one of those ideas is, is the idea that people in the past got it right somehow. And that before, you know, medicalization, if you will, like before the advent of hospital birth and kind of medical monitoring, that somehow women and families had it better and that it was an easier experience and one that was, I guess, kind of free from politics. I think that's often the sort of the underlying thread there. And I guess, you know, depressingly, I think my book shows that that is that sort of fantasy of a past in which women unconditionally supported one another and had a good time of it was never kind of of commonplace. And what we define as natural in childbirth is very historically contingent. You know, nowadays we would define natural childbirth. Well, I'm sure there are lots of different definitions, but one definition is that there's minimal medical intervention by kind of, you know, or drugs, for example, you know, pain relieving drugs. Now what an early modern person considered a natural delivery and what was kind of inappropriate intervention is very different. But nevertheless, they're still very powerful concepts in how people kind of are experiencing that. And yeah, I mean, I feel that particularly personally at the moment. I'm currently pregnant, and so I'm experiencing that kind of whole world experientially rather than just historically. And I think there's still a huge amount of pressure and judgment around the kind of the choices that people make in childbearing and parenting.
- [52:48]
Elspeth Curry
Well, congratulations on the pregnancy. Very exciting. I suppose it's probably good that you're on this side of the book that it's out and you're not having to write at the same time. But yeah, I love the challenge that your book offers of not just assuming that everything was great or better. And you said it is a little, I guess, depressing or sobering to realize that there were still challenge, like people are still in the past were having this really contentious experience in pregnancy. Or it could be contentious. But then it's also maybe freeing for us today that we don't have to try to recover something that never was as we go through it. Well, I guess my last question which is usual for when I interview people, is what are new directions for your future research? I know you'll have another not a research project, but another big thing happening in your life soon, but what else is on the horizon for you these days in your academic work or other things you're interested in?
- [53:51]
Leah Astbury
Yeah. So currently working on my new kind of project obviously might be interrupted in the next year or so, but my new project is on animal medicine or kind of early history of veterinary care. So 17th, 18th century husbandry and looking at kind of farmers account books and recipe books and husbandry manuals and trying to understand how people understood kind of animal health, how they catered to it and questions about sort of care versus cruelty and what does kind of care mean. And I guess, you know, still within the kind of realm of gender history that husbandry is, as the name suggests, is a particularly kind of masculine, I guess, science or body of knowledge and practice. And so thinking about how that relates to early modern ideas of masculinity.
- [54:52]
Elspeth Curry
Great. I look forward to hearing about it. I wonder if that quote about you mentioned in the woman who felt like she wasn't being cared for, like the calf and the coughing, if that'll show up or not. But yeah, I look forward to seeing what you find out. Again, thank you so much, Leah, for being on the show today. Lovely to catch up with you and hear about your book. And to our audience, thank you for joining us in this discussion of Making Babies in Early Modern England by Leah Astbury. I've been your host, Elspeth Curry, and you've been listening to the new books in early modern history. Take care.