Bodies, Speech, and Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England

Sara D. Luttfring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317534457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This volume examines early modern representations of women's reproductive knowledge through new readings of plays, monstrous birth pamphlets, medical treatises, court records, histories, and more, which are often interpreted as depicting female reproductive bodies as passive, silenced objects of male control and critique. Luttfring argues instead that these texts represent women exercising epistemological control over reproduction through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance into what Luttfring calls 'bodily narratives.' The power of these bodily narratives extends beyond knowledge of individual bodies to include the ways that women's stories about reproduction shape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and kings. In the popular print and theater of early modern England, women's bodies, women's speech, and in particular women's speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. This book joins growing critical discussion of how female reproductive bodies were used to represent socio-political concerns and will be of interest to students and scholars working in early modern literature and culture, women's history, and the history of medicine.

1 Reproductive Bodies and Bodily Narratives in Early Modern England, 1603–1660

This study examines the conceptualization and representation of women’s reproductive bodies on the early modern page and stage. In the texts I analyze, differing and frequently contradictory depictions of the female body proliferate, leading to conflict and competition over representation. This conflict is frequently gendered, and the competitors range from kings to midwives, scholars of anatomy to female religious sectarians. Ultimately, meaning is produced through ever-shifting combinations of words and bodies, texts and speech, creating an atmosphere of instability in which women’s representational authority challenges and often supersedes that of men.

The remarkable story of Anne Greene serves as a fitting introduction to this study’s focus, methods, and themes. Greene, an Oxford woman, was hanged for infanticide on 14 December 1650. Greene’s child had been born in secret and found dead in an outhouse; during her trial, she admitted to having an affair with her employer’s grandson and conceiving his child. Although Greene insisted that her baby had been stillborn, the court found her guilty, assuming that she murdered her newborn in order to conceal her sexual misconduct. After her execution Greene’s body was turned over to local physicians for dissection, but before they could begin they noticed that she seemed to breathe. For several days the physicians labored to revive her, finally bringing her fully back to life. Upon hearing of her remarkable recovery, the governor and justices of the peace revoked the death sentence.

The most detailed print accounts of Anne Greene’s story appear in two pamphlets: Richard Watkins’s Newes from the Dead (1651) and William Burdet’s A Wonder of Wonders (1651).¹ In these accounts, Greene’s body consistently challenges attempts to control, contain, and explain it. First, the unmarried Greene engages in an illicit sexual affair with a social superior and successfully conceals her pregnancy prior to her delivery/miscarriage. This sexual unruliness is compounded by her body’s refusal to succumb to the punishment meted out by legal authorities: Despite her conviction, Greene simply will not die. As a result, her body also evades the attempts of medical authorities to probe its depths; Watkins notes that the physicians “missed the opportunity of improving their knowledge in the dissection of a Dead body,” but insists that they nevertheless “advanced their fame by restoring to the world a Living one.”² Although Watkins praises the physicians’ medical skill, he glosses over the fact that their reputation is enhanced not through the successful destruction and examination of Greene’s sexually unruly body (as was originally intended), but by her unexpected survival.

The pamphlets demonstrate the inability of male authority to completely control or definitively interpret women’s reproductive bodies, as well as the ability of unruly female bodies to undermine male authority. According to Watkins, after Greene revives, the governor and justices find themselves in the awkward position of having to reverse a verdict that appears to conflict with God’s will: perceiving “the hand of God in her preservation, and being willing rather to cooperate with divine providence in saving her, then to overstraine justice by condemning her to double shame & sufferings, they were pleas’d to grant her a Repreive.”³ In Burdet’s account, the reversal of the verdict is a matter of “dispute and controversie” between “a great man,” who wants to see Greene executed a second time, and a group of “honest Souldiers,” who successfully protest that re-executing Greene would be “contrary to all right and reason” since her recovery had the “great hand of God in it.”⁴ Greene’s body was supposed to be a passive object that could be broken, opened, explained, and classified by legal and medical authority. Instead, it becomes a catalyst for disagreement between common soldiers and “great men,” earthly justices and divine justice. Moreover, in Watkins’s pamphlet the execution of a lower-class, criminal woman is replaced by the death of the upper-class male legal authority who had condemned her; upon hearing of Greene’s revival, the “Grand Prosecutor Sir Thomas Read” (who happens to be the grandfather of the young man with whom Greene had the affair) promptly dies.⁵ The signifiers that were supposed to define and interpret Greene no longer apply, and Watkins and Burdet must rewrite a tale of sin, punishment, and death as one of innocence, redemption, and resurrection.

In Wonder of Wonders, Greene’s triumph over sexual, legal, and medical regulation is bolstered by her interpretive control over her body. When her dead child is discovered and Greene is examined by a justice, she “confessed, that she was guilty of the Act, in committing of the sin [of fornication], but clear and innocent of the crime for murdering of it, for that it was dead born.”⁶ Forced to submit to male legal authority, Greene nevertheless insists on defining the extent of her reproductive misconduct. Burdet’s pamphlet also includes Greene’s scaffold speech, in which she insists upon her innocence and her connection with God.⁷ At the foot of the scaffold, Greene begs God “for a signal and testification to the world of her innocency,” and it appears that her request is granted when she survives her hanging.⁸ Lest anyone doubt the miraculous nature of her survival, immediately upon reviving Greene makes another speech in which she interprets her recovery as the sign she wished for prior to her execution: “Behold Gods providence, and his wonder of wonders, which indeed, is a deliverance so remarkable, ... that it cannot be parallel’d ... for the space of 300 years.” She goes on to specifically critique the “Magistrates, and Courts of Judicature” who convicted her without the “due and legal process” of a trial by jury.⁹ In Burdet’s account, Greene turns the tables on those who condemned her; her declarations of innocence are upheld by both divine authority and her earthly community (represented by the soldiers who prevent her re-execution). Her accusers, on the other hand, are found guilty of injustice.

Unlike Wonder of Wonders, Newes from the Dead gives very little space or specificity to Greene’s defense of herself during her trial and execution. Watkins reports that she sings a psalm on the scaffold “and something said in justification of herself,” but he does not reproduce her actual words as Burdet does.¹⁰ Critics such as Susan C. Staub and Frances E. Dolan have argued that Watkins strips Greene of physical and discursive self-control by placing her body at the mercy of legal and medical authorities and erasing any record of her voice.¹¹ However, the text does contain traces of her speech, traces that help to shape the revised narrative of her reproductive body. As Greene revives, her ability to speak is frequently noted as a sign of her recovery. At first she seems unable to communicate, but gradually she begins to speak intelligibly and answer questions; Watkins carefully notes that she progresses from “sighing and talking to her selfe” to “laugh[ing] ... merrily” and “talk[ing] cheerfully.”¹² Greene’s physical improvement, demonstrated by her ability to speak and the change in her affect, tracks with the rehabilitation of her reputation.

Moreover, both Greene’s own testimony and that of other women help make sense of her survival, framing it and imbuing it with meaning. Watkins notes the opinion of a midwife that the dead child was so under-developed that it probably had been stillborn. Other servants (most likely women, given their intimate knowledge of Greene’s body) testify that Greene “had certaine Issues for about a month” prior to the birth, beginning after “shee had violently labour’d in skreening of malt.”¹³ Watkins uses these accounts of the appearance of the dead child, Greene’s bodily discharges, and the physical labor she undertook while pregnant as evidence of miscarriage, not infanticide.¹⁴ We also learn that Greene herself had “ingenuously confessed” this information during her trial and at her execution, “and the very first words, after shee came to her selfe againe (which certainly were not spoken with designe, or purpose to deceive) confirmed the same.”¹⁵ Although Watkins does not reproduce Greene’s exact words, he does demonstrate how her own story about her miscarriage, bolstered by the testimony of her fellow servants and the midwife, prevails over narratives of her guilt. The consistency and persuasiveness of her own and other women’s interpretations of her body, as well as her physical resilience, dramatically reverse the social, moral, legal, and medical narratives that male authorities had used to criminalize her.

As Staub points out, Watkins and Burdet differ substantially in how they frame and interpret Greene’s revived body. While Burdet’s pamphlet offers a critique of a “perverted legal system” and a celebration of “divine providence,” Watkins focuses on “the scientific aspect of the miracle” and celebrates the intervention of the physicians more than that of God.¹⁶ In addition to this intertextual competition, Watkins’s pamphlet reveals intratextual uncertainty about Greene’s body. Within the main narrative, Watkins carefully assembles physical evidence to refute the initial verdict and argue for Greene’s innocence, but the prefatory poems composed by Oxford students reveal internal interpretive disagreement. While some of the poems presume Greene’s sexual innocence and even suggest that her revival has restored her virginity, others make sly references to her perceived promiscuity.¹⁷ Still others are baffled by a female body that defies easy categorization: “Mother, or Maid, I pray you whether? / One, or both, or am I neither?”¹⁸ One poet literalizes the difficulty of “reading” female morality by comparing women to a foreign language: “[Women] have mysterious wayes, and their designes / Must be read backward still, like Hebrew lines.”¹⁹ The strange text of the female body evades the efforts of men to read it, and interpretations proliferate among legal, medical, religious, and literary authorities.²⁰ In the face of this uncertainty, men must rely in part on Greene’s words and those of other women to interpret her body.

In the chapters that follow, I examine texts in which, as in Newes from the Dead and Wonder of Wonders, women’s reproductive bodies evade men’s control and understanding, and interpretive authority is heavily contested. I put forward new readings of texts that, like the accounts of Anne Greene, are often interpreted as depicting female bodies as passive objects of male critique and dismissing or erasing female speech. In contrast, I explore the ways women help to construct reproductive knowledge and socio-political identity in the popular print and theater of early modern England. In plays, pamphlets, medical treatises, histories, satires, and ballads, women make reproduction legible through the stories they tell about their bodies and the ways they act these stories out, combining speech and physical performance in what I term “bodily narratives.” By exploiting the interdependence and uncertainty of words and bodies, women produce “truths” about reproduction that are seemingly grounded in concrete corporeal reality, but that are in fact discursively constructed and subject to manipulation, falsification, and change. Moreover, the power of bodily narratives extends beyond stories told about the female body to include the ways that women reshape the patriarchal identities of fathers, husbands, and even kings. In the texts I examine, women’s bodies, women’s speech, and in particular women’s speech about their bodies perform socially constitutive work: constructing legible narratives of lineage and inheritance; making and unmaking political alliances; shaping local economies; and defining/delimiting male socio-political authority in medical, royal, familial, judicial, and economic contexts. My analysis reveals that even seemingly ideologically conservative texts portray women’s bodily narratives as the basis for somatic “truths.” Although they often adopt a punitive, critical stance toward women who challenge male authority, these texts also represent women exercising epistemological control over the reproductive processes and rituals through which this authority is constructed and maintained.

1. SOMATIC UNCERTAINTY AND BODILY NARRATIVES

As Gail Kern Paster has vividly demonstrated, early modern men and women experienced the inner workings of their own bodies and those of others as inaccessible, unstable, and unpredictable. The fluctuating interiori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Reproductive Bodies and Bodily Narratives in Early Modern England, 1603–1660
• 2 Virginity, Politics, and History in The Changeling and the Essex Divorce
• 3 Pregnancy, Interiority, and the Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern Medical Treatises and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
• 4 Birthing Room Gossip and the Construction of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern Satire and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
• 5 (De)Formative Parental Influence in Early Modern Monstrous Birth Pamphlets and The Winter’s Tale
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Index