Early modern English people were obsessed with making babies. In this fascinating new history, Leah Astbury traces this preoccupation through manuscript letters, diaries, recipe books and almanacs, revealing its centrality to family life. Information was plentiful in guides on the burgeoning fields of domestic conduct and midwifery, as well as in the many satirical ballads focused on sex, marriage and family. Astbury utilises this broad source base to explore all aspects of early modern childbearing, from conception to the months after delivery. She demonstrates that, while religious and cultural ideals dictated that women carry out all of this work, men were engaged in its practice through directing medical decisions. With the entire household including servants, wetnurses and other unexpected actors included in the project, childbearing can be situated within the histories of gender, medicine, social status, family and record-keeping. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

‘Childbearing was never natural, and motherhood was never simple. Leah Astbury takes on the political and social project of ‘making babies’ and the relationship of motherhood and labour, and patriarchy and family. In so doing she unpicks the broad spectrum of emotion - yearning, grief, joy, anxiety, boredom, frustration, pain and pleasure, love and hatred - which lay behind conception, pregnancy, birth, and the care of children, and reveals the many different practices of men and women which fed into the gendered production of care. A revelatory take on domestic life and an imaginative work of historical engagement.’

Hannah Murphy - King’s College London

‘There is a poignancy to Astbury’s examination of the expectations of delivery and the pain, discomfort, disability and fatigue that often accompanied recovery. ... This engaging, meticulously researched account provides an invaluable study of the process.’

Dannielle Shaw Source: Times Literary Supplement