Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested
Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities
to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from
the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century.
Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating
the secrets of women's sexuality and the processes of generation. By the
eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even
successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives
continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An
examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never
made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex
social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of
reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery
in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for
pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth
century were not strictly medical developments but rather
socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor,
shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth
and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding
of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional
spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting
female honor.
It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious
history, social history, and Early Modern Italy.
