A short step from cradle to grave

Between 1300 and 1900 few things were more dangerous than giving birth. For poor and rich, the mortality rate was high. If the birth itself didn’t kill you, then puerperal fever very well might. Privacy was non-existent. If you were Marie de Medici, there was such a press of people in the lying-in chamber that you couldn’t get from the birthing chair to your bed — and that was not counting the 200 more in the ante-room.  Still worse, though, than giving birth was being born. In 16th- and 17th-century England, 20 per cent of children died before the age of five. If you managed to survive your arrival and four months of swaddled immobility, there was still every chance you might be burned, trodden on, eaten by animals in your home or squashed by your mother in bed. Hard to know what Malthus was worried about.

No drily academic treatise, this little book delivers just what the author promises in the introduction: exploring the art and artefacts of birth and infancy, from the later medieval period to the beginning of the 20th century in western Europe and North America. Progressing from conception to birth, lying-in, nurture and the milestones of child development, religious ritual and folklore and the pitfalls of neglect, abandonment and abuse, it reads, and looks, like the distillation of a lifetime’s work.

In her 150 pages of text Sue Laurence has cherry-picked from a huge collection of literary and visual sources — the bibliography is seven pages long — to produce a historical narrative studded with sobering and peculiar facts and anecdotes and a wealth of revealing illustrations. Take the role of the midwife, for instance. Held to account for the lives of mother and baby, the midwife was also expected to perform emergency baptism, testify in cases of rape and infanticide and confirm the child’s paternity.