The Natural Mother: Motherhood, Patriarchy, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England by Ashley Erin Wiedenbeck A Dissertation Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Approved April 2015 by the Graduate Supervisory Committee: Retha Warnicke, Chair Catherine O'Donnell Johnson Wright ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY May 2015 ABSTRACT This dissertation explores the relationship between motherhood and power in seventeenth-century England. While historians have traditionally researched the role of mothers within the family unit, this study explores the more public and discursive roles of motherhood. It argues that the various threads of discourse surrounding maternity betray a common desire to circumscribe and condemn maternal authority, as this authority was threatening to masculinity and patriarchal rule. It finds that maternity was frequently cited as harmful and dangerous; household conduct books condemned the passionate and irrational nature of maternal love and its deleterious effects upon both mother and child. Furthermore, various images of ‘unnatural motherhood’ reveal larger concerns over social disorder. Sensationalistic infanticide and monstrous birth stories in cheap print display contemporary fears of lascivious, scolding, and unregulated women who were subversive to patriarchal authority and thus threatened the social status quo. The female reproductive body similarly threatened masculinity; an analysis of midwifery manuals show that contemporary authors had to reconcile women’s reproductive power with what they believed to be an inferior corporeal body. This study ends with a discussion of the representation of mothers in published funeral sermons as these mothers were textually crafted to serve as examples of ‘good mothering,’ offering a striking comparison to the ‘unnatural mothers’ presented in other sources. Motherhood in seventeenth-century England, then, involved a great deal more than the relationship between mother and child. It was a cultural site in which power was contested, and a site in which authors expressed anxiety over the irrational female mind and the unregulated, sexual female body. i DEDICATION For my children. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I began this project on early modern motherhood while I was pregnant with my first child, and I completed it with a rambunctious preschooler and toddler in tow. I often found the balance between my personal motherhood and my academic study of it difficult, and I credit the completion of this study to the encouragement of my advisor, Retha Warnicke. Dr. Warnicke not only supported this project in the years it took to come to fruition, but she gently encouraged my progress when I had become overwhelmed in my duties as a mother. For that, and for the many years of patient and kind mentorship, I thank her. I am also grateful for the support of my committee members, Catherine O’Donnell and Kent Wright. Both Dr. O’Donnell and Dr. Wright have encouraged this project from its inception, and my years as a graduate student at Arizona State University have greatly benefitted from their mentorship. I spent many enjoyable hours in their seminars and conferences, and learned from them a great deal about what it means to be an academic and an educator. This project has also benefited from financial awards from the ASU Department of History, including a Wallace E. Adams Memorial Travel Award for European History and a Summer Research Fellowship. I owe a special thanks to my colleague and friend, Rebecca Baird, who judiciously read this manuscript in nearly its entirety. Rebecca’s comments and editing have been extremely valuable, and her support and humor during this process have been priceless. iii Lastly I thank my family. My husband, Troy, has been a constant source of support and encouragement and has celebrated each accomplishment with me along the way. My young children, Camden and James, have little clue what I have completed, but are extremely impressed with the towers of books that litter my office and the pages of notes they cannot yet read. For them I am extremely grateful. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER Page 1 INTRODUCTION: MOTHERHOOD, GENDER, AND POWER...................1 2 SETTING THE PATRIARCHAL STAGE: HUSBANDS, FATHERS, WIVES, AND MOTHERS ……………………………………………….....24 3 THE NATURAL MOTHER: POWER, NEGOTIATION, AND THE CULTURE OF MATERNITY………………………………………………..55 4 THE UNNATURAL MOTHER: INFANTICIDE, GENDER, AND SOCIETY………………………………………………..………………….. 88 5 REPRODUCTIVE POWER: CONCEPTION, PARTURITION AND PATRIARCHY ………………………………………………….…………..121 6 THE PRAISE OF A GODLY WOMAN: GENDER, DEATH, AND MOTHERHOOD …………………………...………………………..…..….160 7 CONCLUSION…………………………………….………………..…..…...197 REFERENCES……………………………………………….………………..……..207 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: MOTHERHOOD, GENDER, AND POWER In 1647 Margaret Moore of Sutton, Cambridgeshire confessed to witchcraft. Her apprehension was part of a relatively large sweep of the area: between 1646 and 1647, twenty individuals- mostly women- were prosecuted for witchcraft. 1 As Malcolm Gaskill has claimed, this particular witch-hunt was likely political. The parish in which Margaret Moore lived was fraught with tension as individuals were in dispute over the drainage and enclosure of the commons. During a time of national political discord and Civil War, drainage was associated with Parliamentary allegiance, and consequently some individuals accused were likely royalist supporters whose arrests prevented them from joining the king’s army. 2 Margaret, a relatively poor, married woman, was swept up in this political upheaval. She was accused of killing a man, Thomas Nix, to whom she owed money for the purchase of a pig, as well as killing the cattle of two other men. Margaret confessed to committing these crimes through maleficium. As Gaskill explained, she could have very well believed herself to be a witch, although the torture tactic of exhaustion may have led to delusions and fantasies of witchcraft. 3 What was also very likely in the case of 1 The tale of Margaret Moore is recounted here from Malcolm Gaskill’s “Witchcraft and Power in EarlyModern England: the Case of Margaret Moore” in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England , ed. By Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: University College London Press, 1994), 125-145. 2 Ibid., 132. 3 Ibid., 133. 1 Margaret Moore, however, was that she was experiencing severe grief over the loss of her children. Margaret had had four children, three of whom died in infancy. One night she had a dream, or a fantasy, that her deceased children returned to her. As the court records describe: She herd a voice Calling to hir after this Manner, Mother Mother to which the said Margaret answered sweet Children where are you what would you have with me & thay demanded of hir drincke w[hi]che the said Margaret Answered that she had noe drincke then theire Came a voice which the said Margeret Conveaved to to be hir third Child & demanded of hir hir soule, otherwise she would take a-way the life of hir 4 th Child which was the only Child she had left to which voyce the said Margeret made answer that rather then shee would lose hir last Child she would Consent unto the giving a-way of hir soule & then a spirit in the liknes of a naked Child appeared unto hir & suckt upon hir Body. 4 Margaret Moore sold her soul to the devil to save her last child. As she claimed, she breastfed a spirit, or familiar, which then went on to kill Thomas Nix. Margaret’s story, then, is not just one of the horrors of the early modern witch craze: it is one of maternity and power. As Gaskill noted, the case of Margaret Moore was ultimately about a grieving mother who wished to feel a sense of power in the wake of devastating losses. Selling her soul for her child was ultimately “a metaphysical extension of the principle of laying down life for love, and therefore represents an extension of power, whereby the soul is reified in an imaginary sphere as something with which she is able to bargain.” 5 Margaret’s case, then, contains several threads: while it foremost concerns maternal love and grief, it also offers an inverted view of the ‘good mother’ in early modern England. Margaret loved her children, but she also loved them too much, forsaking God for the 4 Ibid., 133. Original record, Camb UL, EDR, E12 1647/14. 5 Ibid., 138. 2 devil (as we will see, an action contemporaries often worried about). Margaret also suckled a naked infant, which to her probably represented her deceased child, but which authorities named as a dangerous familiar. This action, the suckling of a spirit, likewise represented the inversion of good motherhood; as this study will discuss, breastfeeding was central to notions of good motherhood, and Margaret Moore’s nursing of a spirit thus turned natural motherhood onto its head. The case of Margaret Moore is ultimately emblematic of the tension between motherhood and patriarchal authority, as a tragic personal loss- the loss of children- became associated with ‘bad motherhood’ and thus the inversion of gender norms, eventually even leading to an association with maleficium and murder. The witchcraft case of Margaret Moore, then, offers an interesting example of the relationship between motherhood, patriarchy, and power in early modern England. This dissertation will explore the complex connections among motherhood, authority, and patriarchy in seventeenth-century England. Motherhood was a social role that was inherently political: through maternity women possessed a degree of power and autonomy that was in tension with the comprehensive patriarchy of Post-Reformation England. The avenues for autonomy and authority that maternity offered women necessarily destabilized notions of masculinity- and thus gender hierarchies- that were fundamental to English social order. The regulation of maternity thus proved imperative for the proper ordering of the sexes. While ‘good mothering’ denoted a good woman who fulfilled prescribed gender norms, illicit maternity, from poor mothering to bastardy and infanticide, indicated a subversion of patriarchy.