Maternal Measures

Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period

Naomi Yavneh, Naomi J. Miller

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138725560
• eBook ISBN: 9781351753173
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2000: Care-givers in the early modern period included not only mothers and stepmothers, but also midwives and nurses, tutors and educators, wise women and witches. The contributors to this volume present research and criticism on a wide range of early modern care-giving roles by women in England, Italy, Spain, France, Latin America, Mexico and the New World. The essays are not only cross-cultural but also interdisciplinary, spanning literature, history, music and art history; and they focus on differences of gender, class and race. A wide variety of scholarly and critical approaches are represented. Essays are grouped in categories on conception and lactation; maternal nurture and instruction; domestic production; and social authority.

CHAPTER ONE

Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modem Period

Naomi J. Miller

During the early modern period, maternity was constantly evaluated, conceptualized and redefined, from a range of social and artistic perspectives, even as maternal practices shaped standards of care. The spectrum of early modern maternal roles and responsibilities extended well beyond actual mothers to the many female caregivers who participated and assisted in childbirth and lactation, nurtured and instructed their own and others’ offspring with advice, managed the domestic production of their own and others’ households, wrote polemics, ruled courts, and administered the final stages of care in illness and death. The participation of female caregivers in all areas of early modern life offered not only a spectrum of care from birth to death, but also a spectacle of caregiving powers, potentially life-threatening as well as life-giving, that were scrutinized, idealized, criticized, and represented in a range of social and literary texts as well as visual works of art and musical compositions.

The spectrum, and spectacle, of maternity in and of female caregivers at large in the early modern period, is the subject of the essays in this volume. Exploring such figures as mothers and stepmothers, midwives and wet nurses, wise women and witches, saints and amazons, murderers and nurturers, the contributors to the present volume examine a striking range of positive and negative constructions of female caregiving in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (with individual examples dated as early as 1340 and as late as 1812), in countries that include England, Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Latin America, Mexico, and the New World. Linking the disciplines of literature, social history, music history, and art history, and attending to differences of gender, class, and race, this volume highlights a spectacular spectrum of early modern women caregivers, from prototypes to antitypes.

Recent multidisciplinary volumes of essays in the field of early modern gender studies have posed important questions regarding the variations among different disciplinary approaches. James Grantham Turner, for example, introduces his collection of essays on sexuality and gender in early modern Europe by drawing connections among historians of society, literature, and art, and by calling attention to the concomitant challenge and advantage of establishing moments of common ground among literary characters, visual images, and “real” individuals, as well as among the different national cultures of Europe.¹ In her essay collection on Renaissance culture and the everyday, Patricia Fumerton identifies a “new social historicism of the everyday,” which juxtaposes material details and conceptualizations of everyday life, attending not only to factual historical data, but also to collective meanings, values, representations, and practices.² Similarly, Susan Frye and Karen Robertson’s recent collection of essays on women’s alliances in early modern England brings together a variety of literary and historic texts, examining material culture and social practice.³

In the present volume on early modern caregivers, the methods and materials of several disciplines appear not simply in alternating essays, but at times in the same essay, resulting in a conjunction of different disciplines and cultures that serves to revise and deepen our understanding of maternal measures both within and beyond traditional cultural and disciplinary boundaries. It is important to point out that the focus of this multidisciplinary volume on representations of maternity and female caregiving in the early modern period at once arises from and builds upon the extraordinary work of social historians over the past two decades, whose detailed archival investigations and transformative visions of the nature of history itself have reshaped our understanding of gender and culture in early modern society. As Merry Wiesner observes in her landmark study of women and gender in early modern Europe, scholars working in women’s history have had to search for new sources to reveal the experiences of women and have used traditional sources in innovative ways, drawing upon sociology, anthropology, art history and literary studies for theories and methodology.⁴ Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford note in their extensive survey of women in early modern England that “women are everywhere and nowhere in the archives,” impelling historians to reconstruct evidence of women’s lives from a wide range of indirect source material, including literary and visual representations, and necessitating techniques of “reading against the grain, of asking where women are absent as well as present in the documents.”⁵ The roster of social historians of gender in early modern Europe who offer an array of historical data accompanied by analyses of their own methodologies and usage of sources, and whose work contains detailed discussions of women’s experiences as mothers, includes Olwen Hufton, Anthony Fletcher, Susan Dwyer Amussen, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, to note only a few.⁶ Standing out as a particularly important predecessor to the present volume, among a number of valuable essay collections on topics related to women and gender in the early modern period, is Valerie Fildes’s Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England, which gathered together an illuminating group of essays on social constructions of maternity that provided a starting point for further interpretive analyses of maternity in a variety of disciplines.⁷

Mendelson and Crawford, Wiesner, and many of the other historians cited above discuss how research by social historians has expanded to include the use of sources such as literary texts and visual images. So, too, the literary, musical, and art historians included in the present volume draw upon historical data and social texts to inform their analyses of early modern conceptualizations and practices of caregiving and maternity. At the same time, while historical studies of maternity have tended to present women’s experiences primarily in terms of the female life-cycle denoted by the familial roles of maid, wife and widow, the multidisciplinary essays in the present volume explore a wider variety of female caregiving roles, extending from birth to death within overlapping arenas of health, education, labor, religion, and politics, as well as the family.

What gave early modern women caregivers some measure of power to shape the very societies that worked to delimit and define their roles, both within and outside the home? One answer lies in the often strikingly malleable boundaries of those social roles for women: not only as mothers and daughters, wives and widows, but also as educators and advice-givers, role models and friends.⁸ The wide range of writings by and about early modern women that address social issues and experiences offers contemporary scholars the opportunity to identify interconnected realms of social existence, and to consider the flexible operation in practice of theoretical social boundaries. On the one hand, representations of women by men, whether in texts or images, at once reflected and dominated many of the gendered assumptions of the society at large. On the other hand, across a spectrum of differences in class and culture and medium, women’s voices extended from intimate musings in letters and diaries to assertive and even polemical engagements, not only with skeptical male onlookers, but also with a mixed audience of other women. Whether confronting social and political customs at large, or charting a passage through life-cycles at home, from birth, childrearing, education, and household management to death, early modern women worked to define roles for themselves that tested the assumptions and sometimes reformed the practices of the societies in which they lived.

Not surprisingly, early modern women were often identified and represented, both by themselves and by men, in terms of their caregiving functions. Within the family, the roles of mothers, grandmothers, stepmothers, and mothers-in-law, as well as daughters, wives, and widows, provided women with opportunities for authority as well as service, and for instruction as well as training. At the same time, an increasing range of caregiving roles outside the family placed women in positions of nurture, instruction, and even power in a variety of social settings. Women who served as midwives, wetnurses and family nurses were respected in many cases, and yet denigrated in others, when their influence and knowledge came to be perceived as a threat to existing structures of authority.⁹ In instances where women served as tutors or educators in upper class families, or even as teachers through the venue of middle class mothers’ advice books, both the range of their influence and the perceived challenge to more traditional sources of authority was heightened.¹⁰ The very issue of education for women was marked by vehement debates, with variations across class lines, in which advocates of early modern women’s learning, particularly women, faced opposition and hostility, and yet managed to both attain and transmit literacy in a striking range of circumstances.¹¹ In the case of wise women or witches, notions of sustenance and destruction were linked in ways that made explicit the implicit links between forces of nurture and rejection already associated with women in general.¹²

When scrutinizing measures of maternity, it is useful to juxtapose representations of actual and mythic mothers in different mediums of representation and different countries, in order to attend to some of the cultural undercurrents, encompassing both norms and aberrations, that shaped the spectacle as well as the spectrum of early modern women caregivers. Maternity itself was both a physical and social construct in the early modern period. The physicality of the woman’s body was measured quite frequently in terms of maternal functions and responsibilities that received varying emphases across classes and cultures, raising questions as to when and how the breast and the womb serve as signs signifying “woman.”¹³

A female organ associated at once with sexuality and maternity, the breast often functioned as a site for the sexual definition of women. Mythic representations of the breast as a symbol of femininity in the early modern period ranged from Greek legends of Amazons, described as female warriors who burned off their right breasts in order to enhance their ability to draw their bows and who destroyed or sent away their male children, to the figure of the Virgin Mary, whose breast milk served as an image of infinitely divisible grace. Representations of women’s breasts in literature and the visual arts frequently alluded to metonymic images, such as lilies, ivory, and snow, which eroticized the breast as an object of masculine desire while divorcing it from connotations of unstable flow and change.¹⁴

In social texts, women’s breasts were constructed in both maternal and erotic terms, sometimes conflating their significance as symbols of caregiving nurturance with their function as sexual spectacle. In early modern Europe, breast milk was believed to be a purified form of menstrual blood, which changed color as it passed back and forth between the breast and the womb, bearing witness to the fluid materiality of women’s bodies and their reproductive function.¹⁵ In the same period, the breast was subject to newly eroticized interest and signification, accompanied by increased exposure and decoration of women’s breasts in clothing fashions.¹⁶ Attesting to a different set of issues, treatises on breastfeeding which proliferated in a number of early modern countries conveyed class tensions associated with the use of the breast. Although the hiring of lower class women as wet nurses for infants from upper class families had a long and established history, it gradually became an increasingly controversial practice, due to perceived associations between the quality of breast milk and maternal social status.¹⁷

The uterus was another female organ that came to be associated both with powers of femininity in physical reproduction, and with apparently female weaknesses such as fluidity and instability, through its link with the physical flows of blood in menstruation and childbirth and through historical associations connecting disorders such as hysteria with a “wandering womb.” In the Hippocratic writings that influenced medical practices in the early modern period, certain behavioral disorders were given the name “hysteria,” from hystera, the Greek word for womb, and treatments were prescribed in order to induce the uterus to move downward to its proper position.¹⁸ Plato and Aristotle described the womb as an animal within an animal, with its own consciousness, capable of moving around within the lower part of the body and upsetting the bodily economy with its disturbed state.¹⁹ Such conceptions supported stereotypes of feminine error and changeability. In midwifery manuals of sixteenth-century England, the womb was represented as so greedy for male seed that it could descend to snatch and suck semen, indicating the unsettling power of female sexual desire.²⁰

In the early modern period, both breast and uterus represented life-giving nurturance arid reproduction as well as the potential disruption of patriarchal order. Beyond the purview of masculine control or regulation, the female reproductive organs could serve simultaneously to validate women’s caregiving roles and to undermine male social authority. When mothers and other female caregivers claimed positions for themselves as generators of their own words and images, issues of authority and authorship collided.²¹

Among many examples of male-authored treatises on maternity, Jacques Guillemeau’s influential treatises on childbirth and nursing in Seventeenth-Century France, later translated and widely circulated in England, focus on women’s functions as caregivers.²² Guillemeau includes explicit descriptions, in some cases illustrated by woodcuts, of women’s sexual organs, while addressing the issue of female sexuality seemingly only in terms of medical concerns regarding pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Although Guillemeau’s nursing text opens with a straightforward recommendation that mothers nurse their own children, substantial space is devoted to discussion of the size, shape and color of suitable breasts for nursing when wet-nurses must be selected. By contrast, in seventeenth-century England, Elizabeth Clinton offers an explicitly maternal perspective on the same issue in a treatise addressed to her daughter-in-law, in which she urges mothers to nurse their own children for reasons of spiritual as well as physical nourishment — without concomitant attention to breast size and nipple shape.²³ Female caregiving in Elizabeth Clinton’s text, whether through breast milk or words of wisdom, is valued for its powerful shaping force rather than purely for the physicality of the originary female body.

“Therefore let no man blame a mother, though she something exceed in writing to her children,” declares Dorothy Leigh in England in 1616, “since every man knows that the love of a mother to her children is hardly contained within the bounds of reason.” Explaining the significance of her task, Leigh adds: “my mind will continue long after me in writing.”²⁴ Expressing maternity, for Dorothy Leigh, signifies writing to excess, beyond the bounds of reason and concomitantly “hardly contained” within the boundaries of generic constraints. In fact, early modern women’s varying expressions of maternity not only could not be contained within traditional generic boundaries, but also served to extend the boundaries of their caregiving roles in other capacities.

Dorothy Leigh focuses specifically upon the authority of maternal expression in writing, explaining in her dedicatory preface to her children that she could conceive of no better way of directing them than “to write them the right way.”²⁵ While acknowledging that writing is considered “a thing so unusual” among women, Leigh locates the origins of her authorship in her “motherly affection,” and asserts the authority of her words over her sons. Moreover, Leigh’s claim that her mind will “continue long after me in writing” maintains the lasting power of her maternal expression. At several moments, expanding the generic boundaries of her maternal advice text, Leigh even links the authority of her written words with the text of the Bible, which her sons may learn to read “in their own mother tongue,” under the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Mothering Others: Caregiving as Spectrum and Spectacle in the Early Modern Period
• PART I CONCEPTION AND LACTATION
• PART II NURTURE AND INSTRUCTION
• PART III DOMESTIC PRODUCTION
• PART IV SOCIAL AUTHORITY
• PART V MORTALITY
• Index