Events

I gave a guest lecture on Fertility and Infertility in early modern Europe at the Centre de la Renaissance (Université de Tours). The lecture, part of a series organised by Professor Concetta Pennuta on Fertility, Infertility and Abortion in this period, was attended by academics, Masters and doctoral students. Among the questions from the audience was the issue of how far advice in medical works on avoiding miscarriages might in fact have served as information on procuring abortions.    

Ethel Burns, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at Oxford Brookes, invited me to give a seminar to her midwifery students, to discuss the value and interpretation of historical images of childbirth. The trainee midwives were particularly interested in the depictions of births attended by a midwife and female assistants (in the sixteenth century), and the cultural significance of religious attitudes in different societies.

The Library of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists  has a particularly rich collection - over 2,000 books-  of some of the earliest printed works on obstetrics and women’s healthcare from across Europe. They date back some 500 years, to the early decades of printing in Europe, and complement the twentieth-century written and photographic archival records of the Royal College of Midwives, housed in the shared Library.

I gave a research talk, in Paris,  to the French Society for the History of Childbirth (Société d’Histoire de la Naissance) on the subject of the perception of infertility in the seventeenth century. Drawing on writings by both doctors and midwives, especially Louis de Serres (1625) and Louise Bourgeois (1609-1617-1626), I showed how practitioners moved between compassion for women unable to conceive or carry to term a living child, and harsher views that infertility might have a moral cause.