Marketing Midwives in Seventeenth-Century London: A Re-examination of Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book (2014)
(Early paragraph) The seventeenth-century midwife Jane Sharp has been heralded as a pioneer of early modern English midwifery manuals. While the practice of childbirth remained a female domain in Sharp's day, the publishing of childbirth manuals was a decidedly male one. From the first printed treatise in 1540 -- The Byrth of Mankynde, an English translation of Eucharius R sslin's Rosegarden for Pregnant Women and Midwives (1513) -- until the appearance of Sharp's treatise in 1671, all published knowledge about childbirth came from male writers. Nearly all of these writers held positions within the early modern medical community -- whether as physicians, surgeons or apothecaries -- yet they did not commonly attend live births. Labour and delivery were the domains of the midwife, a term that referred exclusively to women. The few men who regularly attended childbirth in the seventeenth century were referred to as `man-midwives'. Sharp's exceptional status as an author writing from a midwife's perspective has sparked significant scholarly inquiry into the details of her life, but historians have yet to uncover any definitive information. No birth, marriage or death records exist for Sharp, and the only document with tenuous links to her is a will for the midwife Anne Parrott, a resident of St. Clement Danes, London.1 The lack of surviving evidence is intriguing given what Sharp tells readers about herself. The frontispiece of Sharp's treatise describes her as a `Practitioner in the Art of MIDWIFRY above thirty years', and in her prefatory materials, Sharp claims that she acquired and translated books in French, Dutch and Italian at `great cost' to herself.2 Her access to these materials, coupled with her ability to publish, indicate that Sharp was a woman of considerable means; however, she left no surviving records. Additionally, given her supposedly extensive midwifery practice, we might expect to see her name recorded on a birth register, but again, this information has yet to be found.
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