Childbirth Miracles in Swedish Miracle Collections

According to a report published by the Millennium Project of the United Nations, a woman living in sub-Saharan Africa has a one in sixteen chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth.¹ The result is an extremely high mortality of young female adults in those societies that severely affects the overall average life expectancy of women at birth. It would not be surprising if women’s views of marriage and sexuality were influenced by these grim perspectives—perhaps even the view that these women have of themselves and their place in society.

That pregnancy and childbirth were also risky in medieval and early modern Europe can be exemplified by the destinies of two of the wives of the English king Henry VIII, Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr. Although they would have had access to the best medical care available, the first died soon after having given birth to the future King Edward VI in 1537, while the second outlived her royal husband only to die after giving birth to a daughter in 1548 in her marriage with Thomas Seymour. A Scandinavian counterpart is Queen Dagmar of Denmark, who died in childbed in 1212 and was commemorated in a well-known medieval ballad.² Were the destinies of these three royal women typical for the situation in medieval and early modern Europe as a whole? Lack of relevant and unambiguous source material has led to very varied opinions among scholars of mortality rates in pregnancy and childbirth. Calvin Wells, often considered as the father of paleopathology, warned against overrating the deaths ascribable to parturition in premodern societies in an influential study from 1975. Still, Swedish scholar Ulf Högberg estimated the number of maternal deaths to ten per one thousand live births in prehistoric Sweden in a study from 1983.³ A 1992 study by Elisabeth Iregren gives evidence of eight to nine maternal deaths per one thousand from Swedish medieval graveyards. It must be remembered that many maternal deaths are not visible in archaeological data and that the real mortality rate would have been higher.⁴ Studies of maternal mortality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England by Audrey Eccles have resulted in estimations as high as twenty-five deaths per one thousand births.⁵

During the Middle Ages, the risks involved at childbirth and the absence of medically schooled persons who could give effective help at complicated deliveries led many women to turn to the saints for assistance. The practices of recording witnesses’ perceptions of saintly interventions in miracle collections (often referred to as miracula) and of collecting testimony during the canonization processes of the Catholic Church have left ample evidence that allows historians to reconstruct the childbirth experience of women who are otherwise silent in the historical record. Miracle collections were assembled with the intent of increasing the reputation of a particular shrine and often with the direct purpose of initiating a process of canonization for a deceased person considered to be a saint. As has been noted by André Vauchez, Christian Krötzl, and other scholars, the miracula genre underwent important changes during the Middle Ages. These changes were due to two factors: first, the miracle collections had to meet very high standards for a canonization process to be successful in the later Middle Ages, and, second, there was an increased frequency of miracles occurring at a distance from the shrine.⁶ The first of these changes resulted in richer descriptions of the circumstances surrounding the miracles and the persons involved, while the second made possible many new categories of miracles, some of which occurred—or, strictly speaking, were reported to have occurred—in the homes of the persons concerned. As a result of these changes, late medieval miracle accounts are typically not literary and edifying stories but reflections of events that actually took place. They are thus better suited for sociohistorical analysis than those of an earlier period, something that has been emphasized by Christian Krötzl in an article from 1989.⁷ The Swedish miracle collections belong mainly to the late medieval period, and they have been used...