Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England by Adrian Wilson (review)

Like all good historians, Adrian Wilson is sensitive to method and theory, haunted by unanswered questions, and engaged with the work of predecessors and colleagues. History is the art of the tentative, founded on the fragmentary, but this does not prevent the author from venturing strong opinions. Wilson believes that domestic and familial relations in early modern England were fundamentally expressions of struggle. The social relations of coupling and procreation were gendered domains of contest and resistance, in which customary and ecclesiastical ceremonies veiled negotiations of power.

Ritual and Conflict sees women’s collective culture in conflict with male conjugal authority, and claims that women achieved temporary dominance in the customs and ceremonies of childbirth. Wilson begins by comparing legitimate and bastard births, revisiting statistics prepared by other scholars. He argues, contentiously, that “bastard-bearing was a risk which all women ran at the outset of their childbearing careers” (p. 8) and that “it was precisely the penalties of unmarried motherhood which made marriage itself a relatively attractive option for women” (p. 59). These grim conclusions emerge from a review of baptismal records, punishments, and attempted abortions, but very few case histories. Guesses about regional patterns of first-birth illegitimacy differentiate a highland zone that includes Somerset from a lowland zone that includes adjacent Wiltshire, though other regional historians group these counties together.

A central chapter on the bonds of marriage focuses on its structural features relating to equality, inequality, and power rather than companionship and security. It includes a close reading of the form of solemnization of matrimony in the Book of Common Prayer to demonstrate the symmetries and asymmetries of this life-cycle transaction. Wilson examines “the hortatory, the punitive and the ontological models of conjugal authority” (p. 79, emphasis in original) to argue that, appearances notwithstanding, “notions of women’s inferiority had rather less purchase in seventeenth-century England than historians have commonly assumed,” and that “the doctrine of wifely obedience … had no stable or consensual basis” (p. 92).

These challenging suggestions are further explored in a chapter on gender and power. Though legally subsumed within their husbands’ identity by the doctrine of coverture, large numbers of women successfully resisted the inequalities of dependence, to achieve both partnership and limited power. Wilson’s review of the literature on women and authority leads him to challenge designation of the early modern family as “patriarchal.” Rather, he stresses “ideological divergences between the authority of the husband and of the father” (p. 104), and opportunities women had for resistance.

These arguments come together in a major chapter on childbirth, in which Wilson revisits material he first aired some thirty years ago. Childbirth had biological, medical, social, legal, and ecclesiastical dimensions, from the management of pregnancy to parturition, from the midwife’s work in the birth room to the public rituals of baptism and churching. These activities, for Wilson, demonstrate female agency in the contests of gender and power. Postpartum social activities, in particular, have “immense political significance” as women successfully resisted masculine authority and power (p. 196). The crucial ingredients were childbed enclosure in a gender-segregated birth room, the attendance of female midwives and a gathering of women while the father was busy with chores, administration of a restorative caudle to the newly delivered mother, the swaddling of her child, and a month of leisurely lying-in followed by the ritual outing of churching, which was a popular women’s occasion rather than a ritual of purification. This is well-traveled ground, as Wilson acknowledges, though he misses opportunities to cite detailed case studies and micro-histories.

Caudles are variously described as sweet mulled wine or concoctions of ale or wine with sugar and spices, or perhaps beer alone for the poor, but neither their preparation nor consumption is well documented. Do none of the early modern recipe books yield evidence? Wilson...