Surviving a Public Obsession: Reading the Female Body in Post-Reformation Legislation and Medicine

Abstract

In early modern England, the maternal experience was a public concern, and – through the symbiotic relationship of legal and medical discussions – the female reproductive body became a site of suspicion that required control. Framed by religious doctrine, women heard that their bodies were not theirs to control, yet experiences differed between married and unmarried women. For married women, control came in the form of fertility concerns, where medical literature discussed the female reproductive body openly, and where it became a source of anxiety if women struggled to reproduce. Unmarried women, however, were not applicable to these debates, as sexual activity – of course – was expected to remain inside of marriage. In the wake of the Reformation, surveillance became an integral part of the maternal experience, and this chapter therefore explores how the reproductive body was transformed into a public spectacle via the control imposed through the legislation and medical literature which emerged from the religious transformations wrought on society by Protestants. The chapter outlines the social, legislative and medical debates surrounding the gendered and reproductive body, and how careful reading of these can reveal to us a number of the consequences of religious reform. The female reproductive body was unconsciously framed as a microcosm of the increasing political and religious tensions experienced within seventeenth-century society.