Being Well, Looking Ill: Childbirth and the Return to Health in Seventeenth-century England

For a month after childbirth, the authors of medical and religious prescriptive literature instructed new mothers to keep to their beds. During this time they were expected to bleed away the bodily remnants of pregnancy. At the end of this month writers considered women ‘well’. Bleeding, in this definition, was commensurate with recovery. This article shows that although in prescriptive material, maternal health was measured according to this process of purging, for early modern middling and upper sort women and their families, the bodily effects of childbearing continued to impede their ability to return to normal household tasks and behaviours long after the ritual month of ‘lying-in’ had ended. Using life-writing, casebooks and vernacular medical literature, this article challenges prevailing notions of what it meant to recover in early modern England, arguing that women’s ‘childing’ or ‘childebed’ narratives only ended when they perceived their bodies to be unaffected by pregnancy and labour.