Evenden also offers an informed depiction of the midwives in their socioeconomic context by examining a wide range of seventeenth-century sources."--BOOK JACKET

This book is the first comprehensive and detailed study of early modern midwives in seventeenth-century London. Midwives, as a group, have been dismissed by his

The Gynaeciorum libri, the 'Books on [the diseases of] women,' a compendium of ancient and contemporary texts on gynaecology, is the inspiration for this intens

The period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment constitutes a vital phase in the history of European medicine. Elements of continuity with the classical an

In England in the seventeenth century, childbirth was the province of women. The midwife ran the birth, helped by female "gossips"; men, including the doctors o