23rd April 2015
I've just read The Red Queen for the umpteenth time and I can't understand why the midwives would have had to toss Margaret in the air to help bring on delivery. Any insight?
Thank you for this question. Medieval and Renaissance midwifery was not well recorded, but there were books on the subject. The most influential book of women's medicine in medieval Europe was The Trotula, a collection of three texts originating in southern Italy in the 12th century. 'Trotula' was thought to be the female author, but the book is in fact a compendium of three works, one of which is associated with a female physician named Trota. The Trotula recommended rolling a woman on a sheet to encourage birth when labour had lasted too long and the foetus was thought to be dead. Like walking the woman up and down, it was thought to help shift the foetus (walking can actually be helpful). Tossing may have been used in Britain to try to speed up long labours, at least as late as Henry VII's birth.
Giving birth before strong understanding of anatomy and medicine must have often been terrifying, and extremely painful. Margaret Beaufort was unusual even for her times in having a baby at just thirteen, but I tried to capture the experience of many women and girls then and today of trying to give birth when no one present has sufficient expertise for it to be safe. Significantly, her experience was so awful that she spoke of it to her confessor when she was an old woman, advised against early marriage for her granddaughter, and seems to have thought that her subsequent childlessness was the result of internal damage. When we are nostalgic for the past it is worth remembering that some things were fatally awful.