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The Art of Childbirth – A Seventeenth–Century Midwife′s Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition

Cathy Mcclive author Marie Baudoin author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Iter Press

Published:11th Apr '23

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The Art of Childbirth – A Seventeenth–Century Midwife′s Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition cover

The extraordinary story of a seventeenth-century French midwife and her treatise on childbirth.
 
In 1671, Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu of Clermont-Ferrand, sent a treatise on the art of childbirth to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant. The story of how Baudoin’s knowledge and expertise as a midwife came to be expressed, recorded, and archived raises the question: Was Baudoin exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival practices? Either way, Baudoin’s treatise invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives “could be and do” in seventeenth-century France. Grounding Marie Baudoin’s text in a microanalysis of her life, work, and the Jansenist network between Paris and Clermont-Ferrand, this book connects historiographies of midwifery, Jansenism, hospital administration, public health, knowledge and record-keeping, and women’s work, underscoring both Baudoin’s capabilities and the archival accidents and intentions behind the preservation of her treatise in a letter.
 

“McClive’s wonderful edition of the midwife Marie Baudoin’s treatise makes available a rare and important piece of early modern women’s writing. She contextualizes the rich Baudoin text with a superb introduction that locates Baudoin’s work in multiple intersecting historiographies: histories of medicine, science, midwives, vernacular knowledge production, women’s work broadly defined, religion, the economy and especially credit networks and microcredit, archives and economies of information, social welfare institutions, and early modern France. This veritable microhistory provides a multi-faceted framework for the text that persuasively conveys the importance of Baudoin’s work and writing for early modern historians.” -- Julie Hardwick, John E. Green Regents Professor of History, University of Texas at Austin

ISBN: 9781649590787

Dimensions: 228mm x 153mm x 20mm

Weight: 414g

254 pages