The embodied life of an early modern woman

Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, Erin Maglaque, Jonathan Cape, £25

As a young scholar, the historian Erin Maglaque saw herself chiefly as a brain. Preoccupied with the life of the mind, her physical body often felt like a distraction, an irrelevance, even an embarrassment. But when, in her thirties, she gave birth to her son, something shifted – not just in her personal life, in which the borders between mind and body seemed to have broken down, but also in her work. As a historian of early modern Europe, she began to search the archives for sources that would reveal how the women she studied had lived and loved, ate and slept, had sex and babies, washed and worked and died.

Though the material she uncovered was often frustratingly fragmentary, offering only glimpses into women’s lives, combining these revealing anecdotes with autobiographical interludes has allowed Maglaque to construct an insightful portrait of the early modern female body. And though Presence is a deeply personal book, shaped by the author’s own embodied experience, many readers will be able to identify with women such as Elizabeth Clift (a Cornish servant, who, unable to get her young charge to settle in bed, gave up and wrote to her brother ‘with the Child in my arms’), Bridget Tomkyns (who told her doctor that she ‘feareth the loosing of her sences for lack of slepe’) and Alice Thornton (who, as a new mother, was ‘overjoyed to give my sweete Betty suck’.)

There is also much here that is strange. As Maglaque puts it, we find ourselves ‘volleying between recognition and estrangement’. This was a world in which the maternal imagination was so powerful that it could shape a baby’s features; women were warned that unsatisfied cravings could cause miscarriages, while German courts ordered ugly individuals to cover up or stay at home to avoid frightening pregnant women. Though both urban street lighting and (not unrelatedly) nightlife began to appear in the late 1700s, the early modern night was a much darker and more frightening place than our own. Bad dreams might be caused by a witch’s curse, and insomnia was treated with (highly effective, but easily fatal) opium-laced syrups, while fears of nocturnal hauntings were fuelled by popular ballads such as Young Bateman’s Ghost, in which a young wife is stolen away by the spirit of her dead lover.

Above all, religious belief touched and shaped every bodily experience, so that many women were preoccupied with the ideas of a good death. In 1538, as Londoner Alice Gysve lay dying, covered in blood and unable to respond to the priest who urged her to look at the sacrament, the women around her were so afraid that she would die unshriven that they beat at her breast, shouting ‘What wyll ye dye lyke a hellhound and a beast not remebbring your maker?’ Reproductive lives were also seen through the prism of faith. The unhappily married diarist Lady Sarah Cowper (1644-1720) consoled herself that she had conceived four children ‘without knowing what it is to have an unchaste thought or sexual pleasure’, while Alice Thornton (1626-1707) saw childbirth as a kind of martyrdom, the pain bringing her closer to God.

For reasons which become apparent in the chapter on early modern childbirth, Maglaque finds it easier to identify with Elizabeth Armitage, who described her labour as ‘a night [that] would have killed a horse’. Midwifery was transformed during the early modern period, with the traditional female midwife (whose main piece of equipment was a birthing stool, and whose technique of last resort during an obstructed labour was to insert a hook into the baby’s skull) being gradually replaced by the man-midwife. His ‘clanking’ bag of metal tools often included a set of recently invented forceps. Though these ‘Artificial Hands’ saved lives, they terrified many women. When Maglaque, after a difficult labour, herself undergoes a forceps delivery, she feels as if she is ‘being penetrated by the Enlightenment’.

Such evocative turns of phrase greatly enliven the book, but at times her subjects still feel frustratingly distant; first-person accounts of female sexuality, in particular, prove extremely elusive. Tiny scraps of evidence hint at real feelings: we meet Venetian women who used love magic to seduce the men they fancied, and hear the testimonies of women such as Ann Maund, who had an affair because ‘her husband had not f***t her in the space of half a year’. But so much of what we know comes from court records, in which women (usually attempting to explain relationships gone wrong) were obliged to present themselves as weak and ignorant, and in which male voices often dominate.

Similarly, since there are very few early modern accounts of breastfeeding from a woman’s perspective, we are almost entirely reliant on male writers – who tell us very little about the physical and emotional experience of nursing, and rather a lot about their own moral preoccupations and sexual fantasies. Until the 17th century, breastfeeding was often described in surprisingly erotic terms, so that Pierre de Ronsard (1524-85) wrote of his lover’s ‘lawns of milk’, and Giovanni Pontano’s late 15th-century lullaby, written in the voice of his wife, Adriana, lingered over the ‘naked breasts’ and ‘milk-bearing teats’ of their wet nurse, Lisa. Though such poetic fantasies fell out of fashion, 18th-century physicians such as William Buchan (1729-1805) frequently seem a little too interested in ‘the thrilling sensations… that accompany the act of giving suck.’

Maglaque’s arguments about early modern mothering sometimes overstate the originality of the 18th century: though breastfeeding practices certainly did change during this period, medieval mothers had also been accused of being too vain and selfish to nurse their own children. Nevertheless, she effectively demolishes some persistent myths about how things used to be. Though we now assume that maternal breastfeeding was the historical norm, many pre-modern babies were sent to wet nurses: in 1700, less than half of British mothers nursed their own children, and the figure was even lower in France. Even by 1800, when the cult of sentimental motherhood was sufficiently well-established that women who did not feed their own children were labelled ‘more cruell than seamonsters’, the figure was still only around two thirds.

Similarly, though the Catholic Church now claims that it has always considered abortion to be a mortal sin, for many centuries it took little notice of procedures performed before quickening. Only in the 18th century was the notion that life begins at conception widely accepted, prompting a wave of warnings that aborted ‘children will cry out for all eternity… for revenge’ and intensifying the preoccupation with the need to baptise short-lived infants. New shrines specialising in the temporary revival of stillborn babies sprang up across Northern Italy and in parts of France, drawing grieving parents such as Lorenzo, who in 1643 dug up his recently-deceased infant and went in search of such a miracle. A century later, Francesco Emanuele Cangiamila’s Embriologia Sacra (1745) insisted not only that abortion was never acceptable (even to save the life of the mother), but that a post-mortem caesarean must be performed on any pregnant woman who died, regardless of her family’s wishes – a practice that soon became law in Sicily.

Overall, Presence presents a convincing case that many of our most troubling attitudes towards the female body have their roots in the early modern period. At the end of the 17th century, Venetian brides were often fattened up with sweets; a few years later, it could still plausibly be claimed that women’s fat ‘beautifies the Body, by hiding the gaping Interstices of the Muscles, which would make the Body appear less agreeable and beautiful’. But, by the 1760s, physicians were encouraging their plumper patients to eat soap, reasoning that, since it removed oil stains from linen, it must also clean fat from the blood. By the end of the century, as fat became an aesthetic issue as well as a medical one, a fashionable young woman’s ‘puny appetite’ was seen as proof of an ‘exquisite sensibility’. Though weight-loss remedies have thankfully improved during the intervening years, the idea that a thin woman is a better woman has shaped the lives of countless women ever since – including Maglaque’s grandmother, ‘an extremely talented home cook who starved herself for most of her life’.