T h e f o l l o w i n g a r T i c l e s o r i g i n a T e d in a session titled “Childbirth in the Middle Ages” at the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy of America in 2006. We are not aiming to present an exhaustive treatment of the subject. Indeed, the majority of the original papers dealt with the periphery of europe. Maeve Callan’s focuses on Ireland, while those of Anders Frojmark and Nancy Wicker deal with Scandinavia. Donald Prudlo traces a historical trail from Italy to Ireland. Two more articles have since been added. Valerie garver writes about the Carolingian empire from the mid-eighth to the late ninth century, an area covering much of Continental western europe. Fiona Harris-Stoertz looks at legal and related materials from France and england in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. regrettably, we were unable to include articles using eastern european, Jewish, or Muslim sources. The articles deal with the experiences of women who were generally not literate, either in the modern sense of being able to read and write or in the medieval sense of being able to read Latin. The vernaculars these women would have spoken include romance, germanic, and Celtic languages. However, our evidence is rarely from the women themselves. The oral lore that must have been passed from mother to daughter, from women experienced in the delivery of infants to those giving birth for the first time, is lost. As pointed out by Frojmark, some women could be called midwives (obstetrices in Latin) to designate their function of assisting with a birth, even if they were neighbors and relatives rather than paid professionals. However, the authors of the written materials that provide evidence about childbirth were men—as often as not, celibate men without firsthand knowledge of the subject. In the vast majority of cases, they wrote not in the vernacular