This book reveals the cultural significance of the pregnant woman by examining major eighteenth-century debates concerning separate spheres, man-midwifery, performance, marriage, the body, education, and creative imagination. Exploring medical, economic, moral, and literary ramifications, this book engages critically with the notion that a pregnant woman could alter the development of her foetus with the power of her thoughts and feelings. Eighteenth-century authors sought urgently to define, understand and control the concept of maternal imagination as they responded to and provoked fundamental questions about female intellect and the relationship between mind and body. Interrogating the multiple models of maternal imagination both separately and as a holistic set of socio-cultural components, the author uncovers the discourse of maternal imagination across eighteenth-century drama, popular print, medical texts, poetry and novels. This overdue rehabilitation of the pregnant woman in literature is essential reading for scholars of the eighteenth century, gender and literary history.

"Collection of incunabula and early medical prints in the library of the Surgeon-general's office, U.S. Army": Ser. 3, v. 10, p. 1415-1436.

Why marry? The personal question is timeless. Yet the highly emotional desires of men and women during the period between 1450 and 1650 were also circumscribed by external forces that operated within a complex arena of sweeping economic, demographic, political, and religious changes. The period witnessed dramatic religious reforms in the Catholic confession and the introduction of multiple Protestant denominations; the advent of the printing press; European encounters and exchange with the Americas, North Africa, and southwestern and eastern Asia; the growth of state bureaucracies; and a resurgence of ecclesiastical authority in private life. These developments, together with social, religious, and cultural attitudes, including the constructed norms of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, impinged upon the possibility of marrying. The nine scholars in this volume aim to provide a comprehensive picture of current research on the cultural history of marriage for the years between 1450 and 1650 by identifying both the ideal templates for nuptial unions in prescriptive writings and artistic representation and actual practices in the spheres of courtship and marriage rites, sexual relationships, the formation of family networks, marital dissolution, and the overriding choices of individuals over the structural and cultural constraints of the time. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Renaissance and Early Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.