Not of woman born: representations of Caesarean birth in medieval and Renaissance culture

"Fertility control has always been a culturally dependent category. Accordingly it is impossible to write 'the' history of the patterning of fertility, since the experience of each society has been unique" (p. 5). McLaren offers little on medical aspects of birth control such as the technology and pharmacology of abortion, or the medical havoc of bungled and septic abortions as a factor in its own right, which women might have taken into consideration in fertility decisions. He also pays little attention to the quantitative findings of the historical demographers, whose ignorance of the cultural matrix of childbearing McLaren deplores. Yet he might have displayed a bit more interest in such work, for in the end McLaren does not satisfactorily account for the gulf between the average family size of six in traditional society and that of one and a half in our own days. In view of such a vast gap, arguments pertaining to technological innovation or the diffusion of information might be of some relevance after all, in addition to the "societal views" with which McLaren clearly feels more comfortable. Some readers may find jarring McLaren's obsequious attentiveness to current dogma about women's oppression and his self-righteous flagellation of males for the beastliness of their gender. This book is presented as a cultural history of Caesarean section, based on a wide range of source materials encompassing not only medical, religious and historical texts but also, most importantly, the early iconography of the operation. However, in the course of this study, Caesarean birth comes to be seen as a test case for "the history of gender roles", permitting us to detect changes in the roles of women both as patients and as healers. Caesarean section is discussed in medical texts only after the early fourteenth century, when it was normally performed after the death of the mother in labour. By the late sixteenth century there was some debate concerning the possibility of both mother and child surviving such an operation. Children whose life came, literally, out of death were, in a sense, "unborn" and thus anomalous. By a process of "creative etymology", largely based on Latin words for "cut" and "thick hair", Julius Caesar came to be associated with such a birth, but so was a world leader yet to come: the Antichrist. The strongest chapters of this book are those in which the author carries out detailed studies of …