My wife is my adopted selfe, and she
As me, so what I love, to love must frame:
For when by mariage both in one concurre,
Woman converts to man, not man to her.
Despite Overbury’s efforts, the pair were married. John Donne wrote a verse for the occasion.
Overbury had made a powerful enemy in the countess, who persuaded James to send him off to Russia as ambassador to the court of Michael Romanov — a prospect that, as it happened, suited James, as his fancy was already turning to a new favorite. Sensing his influence slipping away, Overbury refused the assignment, and James, furious, imprisoned him in the Tower of London. There, with the help of some of his jailers, he was fatally poisoned by one or both of the newlyweds, creating the biggest scandal of James’s reign. Following a high-profile trial, the couple were found guilty in 1616 (but later released).
How could a man be certain that his beloved was not concealing a latent harlot beneath her petticoats? Author Banabe Rich, in My Lady’s Looking Glass, another work published in 1616, offered a helpful guide containing “rules how to distinguish between a good woman and a bad.” The bad woman, he advised, “is impudent, she is shameless, she cannot blush: and she that hath lost all these virtues, hath lost her evidence of honesty; for the ornaments of a good woman is temperance in her mind, silence in her tongue, and bashfulness in her countenance…. The woman that is impudent, immodest, shameless, insolent, audacious, a nightwalker, a company-keeper, a gadder from place to place, a reveler, a ramper, a roister, a rioter: she that hath these properties hath the certain signs and marks of an harlot.”
Lady Frances Howard, Countess of Somerset, ca. 1615, attributed to William Larkin. Oil on canvas, 44 × 58 cm.
Lady Frances Howard (1590–1632) was already notorious as a woman of purportedly less than sterling virtue when she determined to annul her marriage to her husband, Robert Devereux, Third Earl of Essex, and marry instead Robert Carr, King James’s favorite.
A farcical trial ensued after she petitioned for annulment on the grounds that the marriage had not been consummated and she was still a virgin — a claim regarded by many as preposterous. A team of matrons and midwives was presented with a woman who was veiled “for modesty’s sake,” and they confirmed her virginity. It was commonly believed the veiled woman a substitute, as expressed in a popular verse:
The dame was inspected but fraud interjected
A maid of more perfection
Whom the midwives did handle
While the knight held the candle
O there was a clear inspection!
Friends of her husband, meanwhile, to demonstrate that he was sexually capable, reported that once during a chat he had lifted his nightshirt to show off a fine erection.
In defense of his marriage, Devereux further asserted that he had managed sex with several other women. Finally the king personally put an end to the proceedings by annulling the marriage himself.
A friend of Carr’s, Thomas Overbury, wrote a pedantic poem called “A Wife,” which implied that Lady Howard possessed none of a wife’s desired virtues. He soon ended up in the Tower of London, where he was murdered by the newlyweds with poisoned drinks and enemas.
A good woman was, above all, a mother. Martin Luther had said that birthing children was a woman’s obligation. “Even if they bear themselves weary, or bear themselves out,” he said. “This is the purpose for which they exist.” Often women had a great many children, in part because many did not survive childhood (a fifteenth-century woman in Florence had thirty-nine children before dying at the age of fifty-seven). Aristocratic women had more children than did the lower classes, partly to preserve wealth in the family line but also because they did not nurse their own children. Lower-class women served as wet-nurses for the rich. The result was a cycle in which some women were constantly birthing and others constantly suckling. (A wet-nurse in Ming China was so mortified to find herself pregnant before the end of her three-year nursing contract that she committed suicide by drinking mercury. Her case comes down to us through an account by a member of the employing family, who wished to make it clear that they did not pressure her into the act.) Births were viewed as the most heroic moments in women’s lives, when, briefly, they were lauded and cheered. Madonna and Child images expressed the Renaissance esteem for motherhood (while depictions of the Immaculate Conception were a way of overcoming the seemingly contradictory valuation of virginity).
The reverence for motherhood provided an opening for some women to break the proscription against speaking up. One of the best-selling titles of the seventeenth century was written by Dorothy Leigh on her deathbed and published in 1616. In format it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Mary Wroth’s folio: it was a tenpenny duodecimo edition — one of the cheapest books available, the equivalent of today’s mass market newsrack paperback. By 1674 it had gone through twenty-three reprintings, making it far and away the most reprinted text by a woman of the period.
Leigh, born Dorothy Kempe, was a gentlewoman from a distinguished family. Her maternal grandfather had been an influential minister during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. The Kempe family was notably pious, and family members often left bequests for the funding of sermons in their wills. The origins of her husband, Ralph Leigh, are much less clear, with the implication that she married (remarried actually: she was widowed by her first husband) beneath her station. It has been suggested that for Leigh her husband’s spiritual integrity was more important than his worldly position; certainly this would be consistent with the content of her book.
Today Leigh’s best-seller, The Mothers Blessing, would come across to most readers as a litany of conventional pieties, but by the standards of its time it was seen as opinionated and outspoken. Leigh addressed the text to her three sons, thereby fulfilling the legacy of her second husband that the boys be brought up “godily.” Aware of her own impending death and cognizant of her sons’ young ages, she chose to put her motherly advice into print. In this way she defended herself against the injunction against women speaking up — she was only fulfilling her husband’s wishes and preparing her sons for the world. But in fact she made clear that she intended the work for a wider audience. Indeed, the title page explicitly advises that the book would be “profitable for all Parents to leaue as a Legacy to their Children.”
Leigh claimed that if she left the book in manuscript “should it be left with the eldest, it is likely the youngest should haue but little part in it. Wherefore setting aside all fear, I have adventured to shew my imperfections to the view of the world.” It’s a thin pretext for a sizeable printing, but one that suggests an erosion of conventional hierarchies in Leigh’s worldview. Just as she appears to have been relatively unconcerned with social station in her marriage, so she implies in this argument a lessened regard for the traditional priority of the firstborn. Although she advises women to “giue men the first and chiefe place,” she seems less conventional in other views. She always adopts a tone of grave piety, advising her sons regarding their “choyse of wiues” that “a little with a godly woman is better than great riches with the wicked.” For Leigh spiritual salvation was to be found through individual communion with God rather than through rituals and social systems, and she is especially scathing on the subject of “Catholic superstitions.” She also dedicated the book to King James’s daughter Elizabeth, a champion of the Protestant cause who married Frederick V — the Calvinist monarch ruled a portion of the Holy Roman Empire around the Rhine River, known as the Palatinate; he would soon be at the center of the devastating religious conflict known as the Thirty Years War. In counter-reaction to attempts to standardize religious belief by means of confessional practice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some Christians had begun to place greater emphasis on interior piety and personal spiritual communion (a development paralleled by kabbalah in Judaism and Sufism in Islam).
As a result of her belief in individual salvation, Leigh was a champion of f
emale literacy at all levels of society. The main point of literacy, in her view, was the ability to read the Bible. This view, which was most common in Protestant communities, had sometimes been outweighed by a concern that if young women were literate they would use the skill to write love notes — a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit had for this reason proposed that women should be taught to read but not to write. But Leigh urged her sons (and her wider readership) to begin teaching their children to read at the age of four and continue teaching until the age of ten. She even advised “witnesses” (a Puritan word for “godparent”) at baptisms to refuse to participate unless the parents promised to teach the child to read. Leigh’s book helped to fuel a craze for mothers’ advice books, and to advance the cause of female literacy beyond the privileged classes.
Title Page from The Mothers Blessing, 1616, by Dorothy Leigh.
Leigh’s book was one of the best-selling titles of the seventeenth century. It started a vogue for advice books and helped forge a path into print for women writers. Leigh was an advocate for universal literacy. Rising rates of female literacy resulted both in a bigger pool of women authors and in larger potential audiences for their work.
Throughout much of the early modern world family relations were a key to status and power. At the highest level, rule itself was most often hereditary. An unexpected death in the royal line could alter the political map to the benefit of sometimes quite distant rivals — this was how the Habsburg dynasty came to dominate the political map of Europe. It was important to produce healthy heirs. Consequently, royal midwives were persons of importance.
Henri IV of France, who ruled from 1589 until his death by assassination in 1610, had been the king of Navarre since 1572. Navarre today is a region in northern Spain, but at the time it was an independent kingdom uncomfortably situated between hostile powers, France and Spain. (“Spain” was really a loose confederacy of bickering states, which often seemed to share little beyond a king. France too was far from homogenous, with even its linguistic unification still incomplete — in fact, as late as 1794 a report showed that the majority of people in France did not speak French.) Succession to the French throne fell to Henri IV on the death of the brother of Henri III in 1584. Henri IV assumed titular rule when that king (his ninth cousin) was assassinated five years later — French law disinherited all of the king’s sisters and those descended from the mother’s line. But, unfortunately for France, Henri was a Protestant, and the powers of Paris recoiled at the prospect of Protestant rule; this ratcheted up the drawn-out Wars of Religion that ravaged the country throughout the second half of the sixteenth century. Henri attempted for years to secure his birthright by force but only succeeded in entering Paris and assuming the throne after he converted to Catholicism — history ascribes to him the wry comment that “Paris is well worth a mass.” Whether he actually uttered those words is questionable, but he must have thought them.
Among those who found their lives disrupted by the Wars of Religion were Martin Bousier, a barber-surgeon, and his wife, Louise Bourgeois. The young couple (Bourgeois was born in 1563) were living comfortably in Saint-Germain, then a rural suburb of Paris, when Henri IV’s troops attacked the area in 1589; Henri would use Saint-Germain as a staging area for a siege of the city, before resorting to the more convenient and effective expedient of religious conversion. As a barber-surgeon Martin was called away with the army, and Louise, years later, recalled those times. “We paid a high price,” she wrote. “My mother and I along with my three children went into the city with a few pieces of furniture…. Anything of value was pillaged.” The soldiers “finished off everything, right down to the straw.”
The family fled to Paris with only a few possessions, which they gradually sold off in order to survive. Now living in desperate conditions and in dire need of a livelihood, Bourgeois turned first to stitching, weaving, and embroidery but soon began to get work as a midwife, passing the examinations for a license in 1598. The city was dense with refugees from the war, and there was no shortage of babies to be delivered, especially in the Latin Quarter, where she lived in proximity to the colleges, which seem to have been nearly as randy at that time as they are today.
By then Henri IV was established as king, but as yet had no heir. His strained first marriage was childless, though he had three children with a favored mistress, whom he hoped to make his queen by annulling his marriage; but the mistress died in giving birth prematurely to a stillborn son. Succeeding in annulling his first marriage, he then married Marie de Medicis in 1600, but this marriage too would be an unhappy one. The new queen had an unseemly propensity to quarrel publicly with the king’s paramours. When she became regent of France following Henri’s assassination in 1610, she quickly banished his chief mistress.
The Apotheosis of Henri IV and the Proclamation of the Regency of Marie de Medicis (detail), 1621–1625, by Peter Paul Rubens. Oil on canvas, 394 × 727 cm. Louvre, 1779.
In the early 1620s Rubens painted a series of twenty-four monumental canvases exalting Marie de Medicis. A reconciliation between the queen and her son Louis XIII had been arranged by the future Cardinal Richelieu, who had been appointed prime minister in 1616.
This painting represents the key moment when power passed to the queen regent. On the left (not shown here) Henri IV is carried into heaven by Jupiter while his assassin is depicted as a snake pierced by an arrow. On the right, in the detail shown here, the queen is surrounded by mythological figures heralding her coming reign. Divine Providence hands over the helm of state, the queen is advised by Prudence and Minerva the warrior goddess, and a helmeted figure representing France kneels before her with the globe of government.
Meanwhile Louise Bourgeois’s client list was moving up the social ladder, and among her many satisfied mothers were women among the circle of the queen. She won the support of the queen’s favorite, Leonora Galigai, and secured the position of royal midwife in 1601. Like most important positions it had been the subject of factional wrangling, and by succeeding in choosing Bourgeois over the king’s own preference, a Mme. Dupuis (who had delivered his mistress’s children), the queen asserted her independence and authority. The future of France would now be in Bourgeois’s hands, and she successfully delivered the future king Louis XIII in September of the same year, living among the court for a month before and after the birth before returning home.
The birth of the future king was a public spectacle. Bourgeois estimated that there were about two hundred people in the antechamber and the birthing room. Characteristically unafraid to speak up, Bourgeois complained that this might be too many for the new mother, to which the king responded “Hush, hush, midwife, do not be angry, this child is everyone’s, everyone must rejoice.” Bourgeois noticed that the infant was weak, and asked permission to blow some wine into his mouth, as she would do with other infants in the same condition. “Do as you would do onto another,” the king replied, and the baby revived. The next day, when the midwife came to visit the queen, the king publicly commended her, saying “I have known many people, but I have never seen one, either a man or a woman, with such resolve — not at war or anywhere — as this woman.” Such, at least, was Bourgeois’s own account of the birth. One of the king’s physicians left a very different version, in which she serves only a subordinate role as an assistant to the physicians. Already Bourgeois was locked in rivalry with the king’s physicians. It would take another quarter century before they would prevail. A power struggle between the queen and the future king Louis XIII that came to a head in 1616–1617 would contribute to their triumph.
During the subsequent decade Bourgeois and Martin Boursier lived well in a house on the Left Bank. Each royal birth paid 900 livres, compared to an average midwife’s income of 50 livres a year, and she received additional payments as well, such as a lump sum of 6,000 livres in 1608. She also continued to work for other clients, and a book she published in 1609 suggests that by that time she had delivered about two thousand babies.
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br /> Bourgeois continued as midwife to the royal court for twenty-six years. After the future Louis XIII, she delivered five more children of Marie de Medici (among them future queens of Spain and England), including one breech birth. On that occasion a male midwife was kept in reserve in an anteroom in case the problem proved beyond the skill of a woman. Bourgeois scorned this help and delivered the child successfully. Over her career she dealt with many difficult situations and complications, and performed minor surgeries. She was the first midwife to write extensively of her work, issuing several substantial publications between 1609 and 1635; German, Dutch, and English translations of her writings popularized her level-headed advice. She was a woman of great confidence: as she advised in her first book, “Never seem to be at a loss; for there is nothing so unpleasant to witness as those households all at sixes and sevens. Never be surprised if something does not go well, because fear troubles the senses. Someone who is self-contained and does not become upset is able to set important matters right.”
In 1627, when she was sixty-four, Bourgeois served as midwife to an aristocratic woman who died of the inflammatory condition now called puerperal peritonitis. An autopsy was performed and signed by no fewer than five physicians and five surgeons. The report left the cause of death open but implied that Bourgeois might have been partly at fault. Bourgeois responded fiercely, publishing an Apology of Louise Bourgeois that defended her actions and competence. “I have practiced my profession now for fully thirty-four years, faithfully, diligently, and honorably, and acquired not only a good certificate, after various examinations, but have also written books and published several editions that were translated into foreign languages, for which trouble many noted physicians have rendered me thanks and have gladly confessed that they were of great use to humanity,” she said. She flatly called the physicians and surgeons unethical and ignorant — a bold attack on a professional fraternity of men from a woman. The problem, she said, was that they knew nothing about women’s bodies. “Based on your report you make it clear,” she insisted, “that you have no knowledge of the placenta and the womb of a woman, either before or after her delivery.”
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