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

The treatise on the art of childbirth by Marie Baudoin (1625–1700), head midwife and governor of the Hôtel-Dieu, Clermont-Ferrand, sent to her powerful Parisian patron, Dr. Vallant, illuminates the knowledge-making practices of a provincial midwife. The story of how her voice came to be expressed, recorded, and archived begs the question: was she exceptional because she was herself extraordinary, or because her voice has reached us through Vallant’s careful archival thinking and practices? Either way, her voice invites us to reconsider the limits of what we thought we knew midwives “could be and do” in seventeenth-century France.

Cathy 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

CATHY McCLIVE, Ben Weider Chair in French Revolutionary Studies and Associate Professor in History at Florida State University is author of Menstruation and Procreation in Early Modern France (Ashgate, 2015), and co-editor, with Nicole Pellegrin, of Femmes en fleurs, femmes en corps: sang, santé, sexualités du Moyen Âge aux Lumières (Presses Universitaires de Saint-Étienne, 2010).

INTERVIEW
"The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife's Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant," December 5, 2022, New Books Network, New Books in Early Modern History. Interviewed by Jana Byars, podcast, 51:42, https://newbooksnetwork.com/the-art-of-childbirth. 

REVIEW
Renaissance & Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme 46.3-4 (2023): 537–539. Reviewed by Scottie Hale Buehler.