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  • Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England by Adrian Wilson
  • Sybil M. Jack
Wilson, Adrian, Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England (History of Medicine in Context), Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 270; R.R.P. £65.00; ISBN 9781409468127.

The increasingly complex and conflicting theorising about the nature of gender relations in the past inevitably circles around the one function for which the female is essential, the production of the next generation of humans. Whether it was a means by which a woman could exert power depended in part on the accepted but fundamentally economic relationships between people in the particular society of the time. Shifts in modern perceptions of a woman’s role have led historians to re-examine whether women shared a separate culture in the past and if so how they were thereby enabled to protect and promote their own interests inside a legal and religious structure that gave men primacy.

Whereas it has long been recognised that the production of a legal heir gave most women an assured position, Adrian Wilson, in this work, seeks to give the rites of childbirth in themselves, quite apart from the outcome, a critical role in establishing women’s position in seventeenth-century England. He sees them as sufficiently powerful to render the idea of the patriarchal family largely mythical. Interest in the rituals surrounding childbirth is not new but the suggestion that by themselves they might significantly undermine the male-controlled family is surprising. Giving birth without assistance is risky and in most societies about which we have information there were established support practices around the event. Since so far as power within gender relations is concerned there were distinct variations between adjacent cultures one must wonder whether and how one set of practices in a closed environment produced a different power relationship to another. Wilson’s analysis, however, is narrowly focused on England and the seventeenth century. This provides a view of the detail largely at the expense of setting the rituals in a European context that might identify some useful differences, which he acknowledges in his conclusions.

He starts with illegitimacy as what he terms ‘a violation of the marital norm’ and uses the problems it created to indicate where and how it undermined women’s position. He sets out the relevant English Statutes clearly but does not analyse with equal clarity the expectations that underlay them, This is a pity, as a comparison with the approaches of the very different Irish, Scottish, or French law might indicate how the English attitude to the bastard came to differ.

His analysis of the usual rituals that established the bonds of marriage is restricted to the formulas laid down by the Church of England. Although he considers that the intellectually different approaches of non-Conformists, Roman Catholics, Jews, and others, although a small minority, might need to be considered as alternative interpretations of the gender order, particularly [End Page 219] where divorce was concerned, he does not look at their formulae. His analysis of the wife’s duty to obey makes clear that there were many contradictory explanations of the reasons for this. This, to a degree, undermines the historiographical construction of the patriarchal society but Wilson admits that the evidence to prove whether the ritual, as Natalie Zemon Davis long ago suggested, was a moment when women as a group were on top is fragmentary at best. Nevertheless, he suggests that this is only the tip of the iceberg of a flourishing separate women’s culture.

Wilson is selective in the sources he considers. Despite acknowledging that there might be differences between town and country, rich and poor, he treats the ritual as essentially common to all. He makes no use of the detailed information about royal ceremonial and practice in childbirth and does not reflect on the extent to which society may have seen monarchical behaviour as something to be copied. This social symbolism was possibly considerable and may well have helped mould cultural, social, and religious practices at other levels. Mircea Eliade’s ideas of the incorporation of the sacred in renewal rites...

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