Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe, Rebecca Whiteley, δημοσίευση στο The Public Domain Review [8/3/2023]

Detail of The Figure of the Child Turning Itself to the Birth, an engraving from James Cooke’s Mellificium Chirurgiae (1693), which bears a striking resemble to the birth figures pictured in works by Eucharius Rösslin and Jakob Rüff more than a century earlier — Source.

Showing two nested bodies, the pregnant and the gestated, the birth figure is an image of something that, to the early modern viewer, was not just invisible but saturated with secrecy, mystery, and power. It shows the hidden world of the bodily interior, the secrets of life before birth, and the unfathomable powers, both human and divine, of generation. The first birth figures to be printed — illustrations by Martin Caldenbach for Eucharius Rösslin’s 1513 midwifery manual, Der Swangern Frawen und Hebammen Roszengarten (The Pregnant Women’s and Midwives’ Rose Garden) — contributed to a project that had already been ongoing for centuries, of exploring, defining, controlling, and making safe the pregnant body.

In the Rösslin depictions, the womb is represented simply and schematically, as a transparent, flask-shaped container. By rendering the organ exposed, and see-through, the images promise knowledge of the mysterious body, a peek into the still-living interior. The fetus is represented as a cherubic toddler, with curly hair, big eyes, chubby cheeks, and a self-conscious expression. With his head slightly inclined toward us, he seems to acknowledge our presence, our looking at what, by rights, shouldn’t be seen. The images might be understood as an attempt to make known the mysterious generative womb; certainly they formed part of a text that had the aim of spreading knowledge about the body and regulating midwifery practice. But the simplicity of these compositions — the human figure encircled — gives them the capacity to mean in many ways. They point to the universal importance of generation to early modern culture, drawing a link between the fetus in utero and the human in the world, and they neatly encapsulate the origins of human life. From this starting point, the birth figure as an iconographic form could be read for significance within a multitude of different spheres of culture and knowledge: anatomy, alchemy, mechanical physiology, medical professionalism, prayer, magic, midwifery practice, haptic knowledge, and portraiture, to name but a few.

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Picturing Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe, Rebecca Whiteley, δημοσίευση στο The Public Domain Review [8/3/2023]