Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England

by Mary E. Fissell

Overview

Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199202706
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/18/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	9.15(w) x 6.42(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

The Johns Hopkins University

Table of Contents

1. Reforming the Body2. The Womb Goes Bad3. Protesting and Preaching4. Henry Jessy, Sarah Wight, and the Struggle to Make Women's Bodies into Knowledge5. Culpeper's Radical Book6. Reforming the Family and Refiguring the Body in the English Revolution7. The Restoration Crisis in PaternityConclusionBibliography