Not of Woman Born

Not of Woman Born Not of WomanBorn Representations of CaesareanBirth in Medieval and Renaissance Culture Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program. Copyright © 1990 by Cornell University First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1991 Second paperback printing 2019 The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. To use this book, or parts of this book, in any way not covered by the license, please contact Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu. Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-0-8014-2292-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4047-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-4048-0 (pdf) ISBN 978-1-5017-4049-7 (epub/mobi) Librarians: A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress For my husband CONTENTS Acknowledgments IX Introduction I I Caesarean Birth in Medical Thought 7 2 Caesarean Birth in the Artistic Imagination 48 3 The Marginalization of Women in Obstetrics 9I 4 Saintly and Satanic Obstetricians I20 Appendix Creative Etymology: "Caesarean Section"from I43 Pliny to Rousset Annotated Listof!Uustrations I55 Notes I59 Bibliography I83 I� I99 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book took shape over many years, and along the way many people and institutions helped see it to its completion. I am grateful to Danielle J acquart for encouraging me to tum an iconographic study of Caesarean birth into a cultural history of the operation. My special thanks go to George Saliba, who translated Arabic medical treatises for me far beyond the call of duty; the discussions we had on their interpretation made me see things in a new light. Luke Demaitre generously supplied as yet unpublished material on Bernard of Gordon's Practica sive lilium medicinae-on extremely short notice and at a crucial point in my re search. Adelaide Bennett kindly shared her vast knowledge of medieval manuscript illuminations with me. Antoni Kosinski contributed some bibliographical detective work on medieval block books, the results of which are evident in Chapter +· Kevin Brownlee and David Damrosch not only discussed the ramifications of my topic over several years, they also read the manuscript in an earlier version and made valuable sugges tions that helped me reshape the entire work. The readers for Cornell University Press, as well, were generous with detailed suggestions. I thank all of them for the hard work they put into my manuscript. My thanks also go to Jean-Claude Schmitt, Dwayne Carpenter, and Margaret Schleissner, who were always alert for material relating to my study; to Richard Palmer from the Wellcome Library for tracking down elusive in formation; to Peter Jones from King's College Library in Cambridge for identifying an uncaptioned illustration from a medical "picture book"; and to the staffof the Interlibrary Loan Office at Columbia University, X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS whose persistence and ingenuity made some strange and rare books available to me. Several summer grants from the Columbia University Council fo r Research in the Humanities as well as a summer stipend from the Na tional Endowment fo r the Humanities enabled me to do the necessary research in European libraries. I thank the staff of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the Bibliotheque de 1'Arsenal in Paris, the Musee Conde in Chantilly, the British Library and the Wellcome Library fo r the History of Medicine in London, the Princeton University Library, the New York Public Library, the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York, and the Wiirttembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, as well as the many libraries and collectors who supplied photographs and granted me per mission to reproduce them. Part of Chapter + has appeared in a slightly different version as "Illus tration as Commentaryin Late Medieval Images of Antichrist's Birth," in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschriftfor Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 63:+ (1989). BernhardKendler from CornellUniversity Press believed in this book fromthe beginning and saw it through the many steps fromfirst draft to published book-my deep thanks go to him. To my husband, Antoni Kosinski, I dedicate this book. Without him and the countless ways in which he showed his support and enthusiasm it would never have seen the light of day. RENATE BLUMENFELD-KosiNSKI NewYork, N.Y. Not of Woman Born INTRODUCTION "Not of woman born,""the Fortunate,""the Unborn" -theterms designating those born by Caesarean section in medieval and Renais sance Europe were mysterious and ambiguous. In antiquity, children fortunate enough to have survived a Caesarean birth were believed to be marked for a special destiny. Virgil describes one of them in theAeneid: "Aeneas next kills Lichas, who had been cut out of his dead mother's womb and then made sacred, Phoebus unto you, because you let his infant life escape the knife."1 Because he lived through his earliest en counter with the knife, Lichas was consecrated to Apollo; but he was fated to lose his life by this same instrument. By linking the moments of Lichas's birth and death, Virgil dramatizes the profound ambiguity sur rounding both Caesarean birth itself and those born by it: their birth involves both mutilation and salvation. This twofold vision also informs medieval and Renaissance thought on Caesarean birth. At a time when a Caesarean was performed only if the mother died during labor, the child could indeed be considered as "not of woman born," or even ''unborn," as signaled by the name "Nonnatus" or "Ingenito," given to a child born by Caesarean in tenth-century Germany. 2 Cut out of the womb, or ''untimely ripp'd" as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth (acts, scene 8}, the newborn was the child not of a living woman but of a corpse. 3 Was an unnatural coming into the world to be interpreted as a stigma or a good omen? According to Pliny's Natural History (7.9), birth by Caesarean was an auspicious omen for the child's future. This opinion was shared by a father in 1601 who gave the surname "Fortunatus" to his 2 INTRODUCTION son born by Caesarean. 4 But fo r the mothers of these "fortunate" chil dren Caesarean birth meant death and not life. Over the centuries, attitudes toward Caesarean birth have been ambig uous because of its dual nature: meant to be life-giving, it was also life threatening. With their mothers dead, not many newborns survived a delivery by Caesarean section fo r more than the moment it took to baptize them. Caesarean section was always an act of desperation. Given the dramatic circumstances of most Caesarean births, it is not surprising that the operation was invested with many mythicalbelief s and superstitions. Like some diseases the Middle Ages considered mysterious and incurable (leprosy comes to mind here),5 Caesarean birth transcends the purely medical sphere and therefore becomes an ideal fo cal point fo r an exploration of important areas of medieval and Renaissance mentality. To reflect its multifaceted nature, not only must Caesarean birth be analyzed from a medical perspective, but it must also be linked to a theological and symbolic dimension. No other medical procedure was so direcdy linked to spiritual salva tion or damnation: as we will see, midwives were required by the church authorities to perform Caesareans if they believed a fe tus may have been still alive after the mother's death; the goal was baptism and thus the salvation of the child. At the same time, Caesarean birth fo rmed part of the controversy over which medical procedures midwives were allowed to perform. Thus the two crucial issues that distinguished Caesarean birth from normal childbirth, and that brought to a head questions of competency not at issue in regular obstetrics, were the frequentnecessity fo r midwives to perform emergency baptism and the midwives' use of surgical instruments. The Caesarean operation was seen as partaking simultaneously of the natural, the unnatural, and even the supernatural.This view of Caesarean birth determined many of its symbolic aspects; thus, in the Middle Ages, saints as well as devils were believed to have performed Caesareans. Questions relating to the operation seldom have clear-cut answers. In the past, as today, Caesarean birth was caught in a tangle of ideological, political, and legal issues. 6 Who, fo r example, would decide that the mother was dead so that a Caesarean could be performed? Who was allowed to perform the operation? What were the consequences of hesi tating too long or of a precipitous decision? How could the mother's or the child's spiritual salvation be assured? Were there any texts that could provide answers to such questions? And what can we know altogether INTRODUCTION 3 aboutthe performanceof Caesarean sections in an age for which evidence even about normal childbirth is very scarce? These are some of the questions I seek to answer in this book. In order to give the most comprehensive picture possible of Caesarean birth, I have centered the chapters of this book on the major types of sources that describe and depict the operation: medical, religious, and historical texts and documents as well as manuscript illuminations (for Caesar's birth) and woodcuts (for the Antichrist's birth by Caesarean). Thus the evi dence concerning Caesarean birth comes from many disparate areas. Literature and mythology can give us some insight into medieval and Renaissance ideas and representations of Caesarean birth. 7 Medical and legal texts offer additional information. But the most fruitful source proves to be the iconography of Caesarean birth.

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