Bodies of Knowledge, Local and Global

What, one might ask, upon seeing the title of Mary Fissell’s rich, multilayered, book, is a vernacular body? Typically, vernacular is associated with language: English as opposed to Latin and, indeed, the backbone of this book consists of an analysis of midwifery texts written in English during the tumultuous era of the English Reformation, Civil Wars, and Restoration. Rather than charting the impact of the translation of prominent learned medical texts by elites like William Harvey from Latin into English, she focuses on how texts originally written in Latin, German, or French were transmuted (i.e. appropriated and changed) by English writers into works tailored for a popular English audience. In practice, transmutation meant extracting bits and pieces of various texts by classical authors like Hippocrates and early modern doctors like Eucharius Rösslin, Jacob Rueff, and Levinus Lemnius or midwives like Louise Bourgeois and combining them in a heterogeneous mix that reflected and responded to the urgent concerns of the day. Here we have another dimension of vernacular: not only were the texts in the common tongue, they were intended for commoners.

Theoretically, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts could be transmuted from the moment they were first published, but Fissell asks why the ideas from particular texts entered the English popular domain in the 1650s as opposed to the 1630s or the 1670s as opposed to the 1650s. She argues that it was not a question of the progression of scientific knowledge. The ideas were not new; the sources had been available for decades, if not centuries, before they were transmuted. They became more pertinent as events unfolded and figured in the broader universe of cheap print that included broadsides, ballads, jokes, religious primers, and political propaganda. It was to these texts, which circulated far more widely than books for learned readers, that ordinary people, literate or not, could turn to make sense of their bodies and of social relations within the household and state. Fissell contends that such stories explored the meaning of femaleness as profoundly as any midwifery manual and precipitated changes in the ways in which female bodies were depicted in popular midwifery manuals.

In a period of religious, social, and political upheaval, traditional ideas and customs were called into question in many areas, including reproduction. In the 1540s, as dissenters were translating the Scripture into the vernacular, the publisher Thomas Raynalde, an advocate for English and Continental reform, commissioned a translation of Eucharius Rösslin’s 1513 German text, Birth of Mankind, from Latin into English. Yet the text bearing Raynalde’s name rather than Rösslin’s was selective: rejecting Rösslin’s misogynist views of midwives and women, it did not seek to transform midwifery into a male science, nor did it exalt fathers’ roles in conception over mothers’. Utilizing other sources, including pictures from Vesalius, it hailed the amazing, indeed, miraculous qualities of women’s bodies.

Even as Raynalde’s midwifery book bore the imprint of medieval religious views relating women’s bodies to the Virgin Mary, it is interesting to note that he published a little book of prayer three years later urging women to connect their suffering in childbirth not with the mother of God but with the sinner Eve. Drawing upon diverse sources and traditions, Raynalde’s publications did not speak with one voice, either Catholic or Protestant, and they entered a larger cacophonous print universe in which Anabaptists and Lollards offered independent readings of Scripture, battling with bishops on the contested ground of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth.

While describing a world in which so many ideas were in dispute and practices in flux, Fissell does present a sustained thesis that popular medical books depicted women in increasingly negative terms over the course of the seventeenth century. She notes that Raynalde’s positive view of the womb, which continued to be printed until 1654, was challenged in popular medical texts by a view of the womb as a dangerous organ, capable of destroying as well as nourishing life. This was not a more scientific view, nor was it new: both positive and negative views could be...