Rebecca Whiteley (UCL) - 2014-15 Students
rebecca.whiteley.12@ucl.ac.uk

Early modern midwifery illustration in England and France

My project is based on the illustrative traditions of midwifery manuals and other obstetrical texts published in England and France between 1545 and the late 1700s. I argue that these images have a history and iconography distinct from other body image traditions, such as anatomical illustration. I suggest that these images have much to say about the ways in which people, both practitioners and laypeople, understood and visualised the pregnant body and the fetus in utero in this period.