Cesarean Section and Religious Hierarchies in Fifteenth- Century Europe

Abstract

In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Cesarean section, the medical procedure whereby a child is delivered by cutting through the wall of the mother’s abdomen, was an extremely taut subject. More often that not Cesarean sections were performed as acts of desperation to save the child following the mother’s death, and as such, the procedure was embedded in the popular imagination and imbued with symbolic power. While it was promoted by the Catholic Church to save the souls of the infants through baptism, Jewish communities viewed the procedure with wariness due to its perceived unnaturalness. The coupling of divergent religious views on the procedure, a strained religious environment, and changes in the occupational landscape of obstetrics resulted in the utilization of Cesarean section by Christians as a means to demonstrate the corporeal and occupational inferiority of Jews. Mouat uses the Cesarean section as a springboard into the history of the religious tensions and hierarchies that came to define early modern obstretics.