More Particular and More Contested: Vernacular Bodies and Local History

Abstract

Mary E. Fissell’s book, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, is comparable to Barbara Duden’s Disembodying Women or Emily Martin’s The Woman in the Body in its feminist desire to employ “history of the body” scholarship in the service of rendering women agents rather than victims of reproductive discourses. By reading ephemeral writings, such as broadsides, cheap-print pamphlets, newsbooks, decks of playing cards, and illustrated ballads, alongside such forebears of gynecological texts as Thomas Raynald’s The Byrth of Mankynde, Otherwyse named the Womans booke (1545) and Nicholas Culpeper’s Directory for Midwives (1651), Fissell documents the shifts and contours of reproduction as a process whose representation reflects power relations in early modern England. Fissell provides straight-up descriptive history of women as subjects embodied by gossip and its “cheap print” counterparts. These stories resemble Michel Foucault’s discussions of the village idiot whose erstwhile innocuous game of curdled milk became a cause for alarm, or of furtively masturbatory schoolchildren who were suddenly viewed as depraved onanists. But Fissell’s tales do not carry the same sweeping pronouncements that The History of Sexuality does. The time frame of Vernacular Bodies is sweeping (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), but the arguments are less grandiose than Foucault’s or Thomas Laqueur’s discursive analyses of corporeality, gender, and sexuality. Why? “Because I focus on cheap print, the body stories I analyse are more particular and more contested,” Fissell explains (248). Privileging stories that are “more particular and more contested” is an approach also appropriate for understanding current popular texts and reproductive bodies, or those that refuse to reproduce. Any of the historical figures in the abortion debate, for example, from Norma McCorvey, the Jane Roe plaintiff who converted to pro-life fundamentalism some twenty years after the landmark Supreme Court decision, to Barnett Slepian, the abortion provider who after returning from synagogue was shot in his kitchen by a sniper who claimed abortion was an extension of the Holocaust, are understandable only with keen attention to local history and popular understandings of bodies. In McCorvey’s case, her trade-book autobiography is loaded with popular assumptions about abortion as the