Response: Going Vernacular

Thanks so much to all of my interlocutors here for their generous comments. It is very exciting to see how an investigation into the politics of reproduction in early modern England might provoke all kinds of interesting questions about cultures as wide-ranging as early modern Japan and contemporary Niger. Reading these rich commentaries brought back memories of how I began the project that became Vernacular Bodies. My dissertation and first book was an exploration of healthcare for the poor in eighteenth-century Bristol, in the southwest of England. It was conceived and written in the exciting years when historians of medicine embraced social history and embarked upon writing the history of the patient. At the beginning, I encountered a good bit of skepticism about the possibility of finding sources to be able to say anything about poor patients. As is so often the case, skeptics were wrong, and I found plenty of sources to write my book. However, I never saw a document that was in the handwriting of a poor patient. All of my work was, in some ways, at one remove. Either I was looking at hospital or welfare records that showed me details about poor patients, or in some rare examples I was reading printed working-class autobiographies and letters that gave me a valuable window into how poor people constructed the meanings of illness for themselves.

When I began working on the history of reproduction, what I really wanted was, in effect, to eavesdrop on ordinary seventeenth-century women as they spoke among themselves about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering. But once again I found myself working at one remove, reading small midwifery books intended for women readers. Initially I situated these books in a larger realm of prescriptive literature, reading, for example, conduct manuals that told women how they were expected to behave. Then I got lucky. A friend took me to the movies to cheer me up. We went to see Elizabeth, the film about Elizabeth I starring Cate Blanchett. I remember muttering to him at the beginning of the movie “oh great, human immolation, very cheering” as the camera panned towards Protestants being burned at the stake for their religious beliefs during the reign of Mary Tudor.

But by the end the movie I was giggling. I could not get over the way that Catholics and Protestants were portrayed: Catholics wore black, scowled a lot, and they were always filmed indoors, while Protestants looked like hygiene product commercials, they wore brightly colored clothing and frolicked in fields of wildflowers. Wow, I thought, the Reformation isn’t over yet (an insight already apparent to any thoughtful observer of Northern Ireland). As a thought experiment I started asking myself what did the Reformation mean for the history of the body? At first I just played with the idea, but then I started reading some of the rich secondary literature on the English Reformation, which led me to sources that astonished me. Bishops were seriously worried about what was happening in birthing rooms. Women were filling churches with thank-offerings for their safe delivery. Almost before I knew it, I had discarded the five chapters of the book I had already written, moved the starting date of the project back by more than a century, and begun anew. Instead of conduct manuals, I started reading cheap print—those small pamphlets that were the lowest common denominator of print culture. And, I warn you now, once you start reading cheap print, you’re hooked.

I was lucky in another way: I could browse cheap print in new ways because of digitalization. Thanks to the English Short Title Catalogue [ESTC], the digitalization of extensive catalogues of early modern English printed works, I could find new sources by doing keyword searches of those long titles employed by early-modern printers; I could see what other books a particular printshop produced; I could get really obsessive and find every extant broadside ballad about cuckolds. By the time I was writing the last chapter of the book (actually chapter 2), Early English Books Online (EEBO) had come into being, and I...