Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (review)

Performative, as a philosophical term, appeared in the late 1940s when John Austin was developing the idea of a speech act in opposition to A. J. Ayer's concept of the sentence. When Austin's successors tired of the term, it was taken up by Judith Butler for feminist analysis and this collection of essays by the next generation of feminists has adopted it as a stage prop, although few of the essays use it in formal analysis of the speech acts with which they are concerned. They also ignore the possibly fruitful consideration of the theatrical performance itself. Despite the editors' claim that the essays analyse a wealth of historical documents, the historian is mainly struck by the way in which most of the authors stick close to the literary canon of Shakespearean and early Stuart England and, apart from reference to well known gynaecological texts, make very sparing use of the considerable historical writing on the subject of maternity and midwifery. Disciplinary cross-pollinisation, perhaps an unfortunate term in the context of studies of reproduction, is not very evident.

Only a minority of the contributors use non-literary texts, primarily printed books. The most interesting is probably the chapter by Avra Kouffman. She examines the spiritual diaries kept by some Anglican and non-conformist women to interpret educated women's response to the loss of a child, although she cautions that many were edited or bowdlerised by a male and contrasts them with the autobiographies those same women produced. Christine Luckyi, a specialist on John Webster, looks at some of the conduct books allegedly produced by women and Kathryn McPherson who looks at churching in an article that seeks to dot the I's and cross the T's of David Cressy's magisterial analysis from the perspective of some surviving sermons and prayers. It is surprising that McPherson, in an essay that seeks to underline differences in attitudes to churching, ignores the question of how it shifted in England from a 'cleansing' ritual to one that stressed thanksgiving. Janelle Jenstad uses some of the recent historical works on midwives and midwifery in a study of Jonson's The Magnetic Lady but she does not refer to gynaecological works. The plot turns on midwives and childbirth but she misses some of the irony by which the Doctor, who is drawing directly on the German physician Lange, misidentifies the girl's condition as the green sickness in which an urge to eat non-food items is also typical, presumably because a physical examination is not permitted.

Chris Laoutaris's illustrated chapter presumably presents a version of his book which is due to appear this year and the biography of Elizabeth Russell he is writing that draws a conceptual parallel between women's monuments in English churches, heraldry and Cleopatra's dying posture. The longer work may clarify the argument and perhaps consider why monarchs continued to insist that a reluctant aristocracy engage in expensive public heraldic funerals.

The essays are divided into four parts: the performance of pregnancy, the performance of maternal authority, the performance of maternal suffering and the performance of maternal erasure. Drawing out the woman's approach to maternity in the plays can for the most part only be indirect, as the contributors acknowledge that the plays are focused on the problem of identifying the father, male concerns about fatherhood and what is seen as an exclusively paternal inheritance of 'property', including land and personality. This results in the re-inscribing of traditional images that are partially inaccurate. The representation of cultural preconceptions such as property in the plays is directed to narrowly class-defined concepts and runs contrary to recent historical scholarship.

More can be adduced from the few plays in which childbirth is a central issue. Reference to modern scientific knowledge, however, sometimes distracts from the historical cultural understanding the author is...