Book ID: CBB190761294

Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries (2020)

unapi

Kosmin, Jennifer F. (Author)


Routledge


Publication Date: 2020
Physical Details: 236
Language: English

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.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB190761294/

Similar Citations

Article Jennifer F. Kosmin; (2018)
Midwifery Anatomized: Vesalius, Dissection, and Reproductive Authority in Early Modern Italy (/isis/citation/CBB376381318/)

Book Nadia Maria Filippini; (2017)
Generare, partorire, nascere: Una storia dall’antichità alla provetta (/isis/citation/CBB487767058/)

Book John Christopoulos; (2021)
Abortion in Early Modern Italy (/isis/citation/CBB469150810/)

Book Fallwell, Lynne Anne; (2013)
Modern German Midwifery, 1885-1960 (/isis/citation/CBB001551520/)

Article Swann, Alaya; (2015)
“By Expresse Experiment”: The Doubting Midwife Salome in Late Medieval England (/isis/citation/CBB001552377/)

Article Ruiz-Berdún, Dolores; Martín-Alcaide, Rosario; (2018)
La importancia del género en la historia de la atención al parto: la incorporación de los hombres a la profesión de matrona en España (/isis/citation/CBB385476582/)

Thesis Jennifer Edwell; (2020)
Origin Stories: The Rhetorical Ecology of American Birth Medicine (/isis/citation/CBB219382625/)

Book Bell, Susan E.; (2009)
DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Women's Health Politics (/isis/citation/CBB001021024/)

Book Gabrielle Robilliard; (2017)
Tending Mothers and the Fruits of the Womb (/isis/citation/CBB104568911/)

Article Paige Donaghy; (2023)
The Secrets of the Placenta in European Anatomy and Midwifery, 1560–1700 (/isis/citation/CBB420955717/)

Book Michele Savonarola; Gabriella Zuccolin; (2022)
A Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara: A Fifteenth-Century Guide to Pregnancy and Pediatrics (/isis/citation/CBB522168881/)

Authors & Contributors
Martin, Morag
Martin Marafioti
Edwell, Jennifer
Quiroz, Lissell
Robilliard, Gabrielle
Martín-Alcaide, Rosario
Concepts
Midwifery
Obstetrics and pregnancy
Medicine and gender
Authority of medicine
Medicine and religion
Childbirth
Time Periods
19th century
Early modern
Medieval
20th century
Modern
20th century, late
Places
Italy
England
United States
Germany
France
Europe
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment