Who were medieval midwives and what did they do? This episode explores the answers to these questions, and why they can be hard to find. Hello, and welcome to Footnoting History. I’m Lucy, and on this episode, I’ll be discussing medieval midwives and the myths surrounding them. Both can tell us important things about women’s history and how we study it.
It’s important to note at the start that in talking about midwives and midwifery, I’m talking about categories of women, and women’s work, that aren’t defined in the sources in the ways modernity might expect of medical professionals. This does not mean that women were not acquiring, developing, and using their knowledge and skills as midwives in the European Middle Ages. It just means that we have to think beyond the categories of modern—and male-dominated—medical
professionalization to find them. As Montserrat Cabré has argued, if quantitative analysis of terms used for medical professionals doesn’t show us women, then that’s a problem of method, more than of source material. I’ll come back to this question of source material and how historians and literary scholars are using it to uncover the work of midwives in a bit. But before we get to that,
I want to address the “myth” part of “Medieval Midwives Beyond Myths.” If, like me, you read a lot of medieval mystery novels, or watch a lot of movies or TV set in versions of the Middle Ages, you’ve probably encountered some version of the midwife who has semi-mystical knowledge, is set apart in some way from her community, and may or may not be persecuted by that community because
of the inherently suspect nature of her knowledge and skills. You can see this trope in the figure of Magda the River-Woman in the Owen Archer novels (which I really like,) or “forest women” in the Hawkenlye novels (which I… do not.) There’s also a persecuted midwife subplot in Ken Follett’s World Without End and a similar narrative for the medically knowledgeable forest-dwelling herbalist in Le Moine et la Sorcière, a.k.a. The Sorceress, which is actually a good movie. I would also
argue that George R.R. Martin’s Mirri Maz Duur participates in this trope. So the question is: where did this trope come from? Tracing the origin story of the midwife as a persecuted and othered figure is, as it happens, easier than finding the starting point of historical myths sometimes is. This one was launched about a hundred years ago by an
anthropologist named Margaret Murray. Inspired by the speculative but influential work of Sir James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, Murray argued—based largely on early modern evidence—that midwives were, in fact, practitioners and representatives of an ancient pagan religion that flourished until it was prosecuted as witchcraft. So I say “early modern evidence” …and also speculation-slash-vibes. She asserted that “The number of midwives who were also witches was very
great, and the fact can hardly be accidental.” She even argued that, “in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the better the midwife the better the witch.” If you’re thinking: “Wait, what?” …that’s fair. Lots of historians, since then, have done archival work to try to see if that tracks. And the answer is no. It’s true that witchcraft, as defined in early modern Europe, was
often understood as undermining fertility, and/or the health of children. So it was possible that women—and men—who regularly provided fertility charms, etc., for their communities might be accused; but not in overwhelming numbers. Murray’s speculation about what she called a “Witch-Cult,” involving widespread networks of popular knowledge and belief, has been very thoroughly debunked—but
it was influential for a long time. In the 1960s and 70s, both medical professionals writing history, and feminist activists writing history, argued, “from virtually opposite points of view,” as Richard Horsley pointed out, that those accused of witchcraft “were really the midwives
and healers of peasant society.” [The fact that this isn’t the case is a long story, and if you want more on witchcraft and its history, you can see Kristin’s episode on that in our archives.] Building in part on Murray’s thesis, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English co-authored, in 1973, the influential pamphlet which is Witches, Midwives, and Nurses. And in this pamphlet, they do something not uncommon: they observe a significant, complex historical pattern… and
craft an overarching narrative to fit it. Now, Ehrenreich and English are both authors whose journalism I admire very much. But this attempt at history… not so much. As they accurately observe: as the medical profession was redefined in the western world in the 18th and 19th centuries, access to that profession was narrowed along lines of class and gender. But assuming that
this pattern is a conclusion of a linear trend over time is problematic. Moreover, Ehrenreich and English represent these changes as a quite deliberate and holistically pursued agenda of exclusion of women from medical care. And this bothers me, particularly as a feminist historian! Systemic bias doesn’t need to be applied consciously and strategically in order to have far-reaching effects. This takes us to what we do see midwives
doing—and how we see them being marginalized—in the European Middle Ages. The categories of “medicine” and “what women do” are sometimes explicitly divided by medieval commentators investigating situations where people required care. So, we are certainly seeing what we’d call a “reporting bias” along gendered lines. And it has taken careful work to read past this: Montserrat Cabré has analyzed how women described by familial words—like mothers or sisters—are shown practicing
medicine and sharing medical knowledge in letters and recipe collections. Female saints, too, are often praised for providing care within their communities in a variety of ways. The evidence we have, in short, indicates that women were accepted by their families and wider social networks as creators and administrators of remedies and providers of therapeutic care. So how do we as historians reach that conclusion, and what is that evidence? Some of that evidence
depictions of childbirth that matter-of-factly show women taking care of newborns and their exhausted mothers. Some of it is literary: there’s a whole sequence in the autobiography of a late medieval Englishwoman named Margery Kempe where she imagines herself, or has a vision of herself, as a birth assistant to the Virgin Mary, providing postpartum care. And much of this evidence, too, comes from collections of medical recipes, like those
studied by Footnoting History’s own Kristin Uscinski. Such recipe collections demonstrate, rather than a sharp divide between popular and academic medicine, or male and female spheres of knowledge, a continuum between learned and household medicine. Indeed, through the notes that the users of these texts made in them, we can sometimes trace details of this relationship
– that is the relationship between popular and learned medicine. One of the manuscripts I’ve studied, used by a women’s community managing a hospital, contains both excerpts from texts used in universities, and lots of original recipes and recommendations. Belle Tuten has called works like these hybrid medical texts, that may be translations or adaptations of works of learned medicine, but with interpolations and additions based on hands-on work.
When I say “hands-on work,” here, that was often literal. Monica Green’s analysis of the Trotula texts, from 12th-century Italy, has shown how paying close attention to verbs and pronouns—yes, it is that detailed—can tell us things about how women were, distinctively, trusted to provide reproductive healthcare for other women. Midwives, rather than male physicians, were trusted to apply birth girdles covered in prayers and saints’ lives; to palpate other women’s bodies;
to use their expert skill in reaching inside other women’s bodies. That this is revealed by a willingness to do a granular study of Latin parts of speech points to one reason that it can be, legitimately, challenging to trace the history of women’s activities in the sphere of healthcare. There’s no grand conspiracy; there’s just a lot of work to be done and a limited number
of people to do it. And both medieval and modern categories can get in our way as we try to understand what midwives were doing and how their work fit into social and medical networks. We see in the later Middle Ages, what is arguably an increasing divergence between written, clinical—to use a slightly anachronistic term—and professionalized medicine, and
spheres of providing care that are not dependent on texts and institutions in the same ways. There are also class dimensions of how “women’s knowledge” is defined as a craft rather than a profession. Margaret Ng, in analyzing texts on childbirth in Middle Kingdom China, has described
this as a kind of embodied art. It’s important to remember, though, as we talk about the ways in which the textual record privileges male authors and practitioners, that textual literacy simply did not function in the same way in the European Middle Ages as the same kind of tool it is in a society with literacy as the default assumption for navigating law, society, and labor. So several things are true at once. While women do participate in literate medicine, they are also
marginalized within it. Also, women’s expertise is often attested—whether described sympathetically or unsympathetically—in texts authored by men. First-person accounts written by male physicians, for instance, attest both to their own practical experience in antenatal and postpartum care, and the fact that they worked alongside female midwives. In both Hebrew and Latin texts, our evidence is often indirect, but it shows collaboration between Jewish and Christian
practitioners as well as between men and women. Figuring out what the work of midwives was requires putting together a lot of puzzle pieces. Normative texts tell us that it would have involved care of bodies, care of the bed, laundry—understandably—and, not least, emotional support. The process of childbirth—including the last weeks of pregnancy and the first weeks postpartum—was a culturally important one, and as Katherine Park has observed,
spaces of childbirth were set apart for and by women. In well-to-do households, these were spaces with their own material culture: special plates, for instance, and soothing images; things designed to ensure the comfort and well-being of the pregnant woman, as well as to encourage her by representing the best possible outcome: the successful, happy birth of a healthy child.
Not until the 15th and 16th centuries—the very end of the Middle Ages, and the beginning of the early modern period—do we see both the professionalization of midwifery and the expansion and creation of a male-authored obstetrical literature. Gynecology also becomes increasingly defined as an area of medical specialization (for men) during this period.
Monica Green has called this the process of making women’s medicine masculine. Alongside this, we see women continuing to offer their services to each other, and to have their services sought out. Their expertise was valued by many, even though increasingly denigrated by sources created by
male medical professionals seeking to establish and defend their distinctive authority. We can see continuities and resonances here, as well as some differences from earlier in the Middle Ages, when women’s place in a complex and pluralistic medical landscape was at least acknowledged, if too frequently marginalized. And this rich history is one that we are, always, continuing to uncover and explore. This and all of our Footnoting History
episodes are available captioned on our YouTube channel. Thank you for listening and subscribing, and until next time, remember: the best stories are always in the footnotes.