Imagine that you’re a 16th-century person flicking through the pages of Alessio Piemontese’s best-selling book, which contained everything from how to make invisible ink to how to make strawberries preserve. And then you come across this most interesting ‘secret’:
When I was around four years old, I was terrified of the tale of Hansel and Gretel. How could a mother just abandon her children in the woods, even if the family had nothing to eat? Somehow that seemed even worse than the fact that a grandmotherly figure would trap those same children and try to eat them.
What to do, what to buy, what to organise, what to cook, what to read… I made so many lists when I was pregnant that it would take a new list to organise them all! Expectant parents are bombarded today with information about how to prepare for the arrival of a baby. Yet childbirth itself has never been more medicalised and arguably out of families’ control. But what about the past, before social media, Amazon wish lists, and insipid hospital food? Here’s a list of how to prepare for a new baby in 17th-century England.
After her husband was assassinated and she and her children were taken prisoners by their political enemies, Caterina Sforza (1463-1509) found herself in a precarious position. The conspirators wanted to take control of the castle in Forlì, yet the people inside, loyal to Caterina, did not want to surrender.
From the mid-16th century to the early 20th century, young girls described as suffering from bodily weakness, dietary disorders, heart palpitations, fainting spells, paleness, and an absence of menstruation (amenorrhoea), were often given the diagnosis of ‘green sickness’, the ‘disease of virgins’.
When discussing divisive subjects such as abortion, it is common for people to reference ‘historical reasons’ to justify their appalling politics. There are two problems with this kind of argument. Firstly, this ‘history’ is often an oversimplified version of the past, in which facts are not only bent to serve a political agenda but completely rewritten.
Some persistent myths haunt historians. One of my personal pet peeves is the idea that Julius Caesar was born through a caesarean section. The name Caesar supposedly came from the cut maternal uterus: caeso matris utero, in Latin. Which doesn’t make any sense.
According to the United Nations (UNFPA-UNICEF), there are 4.2 million girls around the world at risk of being subjected to female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in 2022. FGM consists of cutting or removing the external female genitals, and it is often performed without anaesthesia by untrained people, resulting in life-long physical and emotional problems for the person who undergoes it. FGM is a human rights violation and ending it is a deeply feminist fight.
In the 16th and 17th centuries, a delivery room could be a noisy place. Childbirth was a social event, and birthing chambers were often full of women (friends, relatives, servants, midwives…), celebrating and helping the one giving birth. However, whenever I picture this scene, I remember how important it was to me that my birthing environment be calm and quiet.
It is estimated that between 1 and 2% of people have some kind of intersex variation and fall under the umbrella term of ‘sex variant’. (That’s around the same number of people who have red hair!) Yet, it is only in recent decades that intersex people have gained space in mainstream debates about equality and human rights. However, they have figured prominently in medical, religious, and legal arguments for centuries, serving as examples of competing ways of understanding gender and sex.
