Reviewed by: Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England Sara H. Mendelson Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England. By Mary E. Fissell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 283. $45.00 (cloth). Professor Fissell’s fascinating new book is an enjoyable as well as instructive example of the advantages of applying a sophisticated interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of complex historical topics. Written with wit and panache, her study offers something for nearly everyone, including social and political historians, scholars of gender and women’s studies, and historians of science and medicine. While Fissell’s erudition and meticulous scholarship enable her to make contributions in a number of separate fields, her book is in the end far more than the sum of its parts. Vernacular Bodies explores three basic themes. First, the narrative outlines major trends in ordinary people’s understanding of the workings of women’s reproductive bodies as well as commonly accepted notions about the physical and psychological determinants of female health and disease. [End Page 522] Second, Fissell analyzes the politics of reproduction—including the creation and perpetuation of lay medical knowledge and of gendered social institutions and also the reproduction of human beings—on every level of the social and political hierarchy. Third, the book investigates the ways that these two seemingly independent variables interacted with each other to generate new models of the human reproductive process over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With a continual focus on these general themes, Vernacular Bodies follows a chronological framework that allows Fissell to speculate on causal relations between medical theories about women’s bodies, the politics of the family, and the politics of the state. Four historical “moments” dominate the narrative: first, the sixteenth-century English Reformation, with its rejection of traditional female-centered rites of childbirth; second, the surge in negative images of the female sex, expressed in cheap popular print at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; third, the series of religio-political “gender troubles” that emerged throughout the English Civil War and Interregnum in the middle of the seventeenth century; and, finally, a “crisis in paternity” associated with the Restoration of monarchy after 1660. According to Fissell, each of these periods represents a different stage in the evolution of popular ideas about multiple connections between gender and sexuality, the reproductive process, and the social and political institutions that sustained the state as a stable entity. The first chapter, “Reforming the Body,” traces the effects on rituals of childbirth of Protestant theological reforms in sixteenth-century Britain. Catholic Europe had encouraged potential mothers to think of themselves as vital agents in the reproductive process, replicating in the pains and perils of labor the miracle of Christ’s birth from a mortal woman. In a venue defined as exclusively female, women in the throes of childbirth prayed to the Virgin Mary for an easy and successful labor while making use of magical charms, relics, and other cultic objects associated with the mother of Jesus. At least at the level of official church policy, all this changed radically with the English Reformation. Henrician reformers denounced “superstitions” linked to the rites of childbirth, commanding women to pray directly to Christ rather than resort to a female intermediary. The biblical Eve rather than the Virgin Mary was now the model for women in childbirth, and there was more emphasis on the Genesis doctrine that female labor pains were a well-deserved punishment for Eve’s active role in original sin. Yet theological mandates from above only gradually took hold among the female populace. Some contemporary religious works directed specifically at women, like Thomas Bentley’s Monument of Matrones (1582), show the extent to which beliefs and practices even among the educated elite were a mixture of the old and the new. Throughout the early modern period religious change was a process of “accommodation and appropriation,” as [End Page 523] Fissell points out (48). Instead of religious relics associated with the Virgin Mary, pregnant women made use of the “eagle-stone,” an object believed to have magical properties that was widely recommended for easing a difficult labor by sixteenth...
Read full abstract
Jun 30, 2009
Elizabeth Ettorre 
Open Access