Acknowledgements

This book has taken a long time and I have accrued many debts.

I am eternally grateful to Lauren Kassell whose exemplary scholarship and mentorship have been from the beginning, and will continue to be, a model of academic practice to me. This book grew out of my PhD thesis, which Lauren supervised, and Laura Gowing and Mary E. Fissell examined. Both Mary and Laura have provided ongoing guidance and comments that have shaped this book and my research career more broadly. Elizabeth Foyster was an important source of moral and intellectual encouragement in my journey to become a historian. I am very grateful to Sasha Handley for allowing me the time to finish parts of the manuscript whilst working as a postdoc at the University of Manchester.

I have been fortunate to have received several grants over my research career that have given me the luxury of time to write and research, and in particular, have allowed me to travel to collect the rich manuscript paperwork that is the backbone of this book. Thank you to the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Society of Renaissance Studies. The 2017/18 Molina Fellowship at the Huntington Library provided invaluable space to gestate this book. I am particularly grateful to the group of long-term fellows at the Huntington, especially Allison Margaret Bigelow, Andrew Lipman, Mary E. Mendoza, Catherine Roach and Amanda Vickery. Thanks to Steve Hindle, Joel L. Klein and Vanessa Wilkie for their comments on papers that eventually became chapters, directing me to sources and providing me with the opportunity to be part of the southern Californian academic community.

I am extremely grateful to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) at the University of Cambridge. It was the ideal home in which to grow, flourish and be challenged as a scholar, especially as part of the Generation to Reproduction project. For memorable conversations at HPS I thank Salim Al-Gailani, Jenny Bangham, Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Christina Benninghaus, Riana Betzler, Boyd Brogan, Sarah Bull, Margaret Carlyle, Pippa Carter, Silvia De Renzi, Jo Edge, Seb Falk, Rebecca Flemming, Susannah Gibson, Meira Gold, Jessica Hamel-Akré, Nick Hopwood, Peter Murray Jones, Natalie Kaoukji, Elaine Leong, Dániel Margócsy, Katrina Maydom, Richard McKay, Dmitriy Myelnikov, Lea T. Olsan, Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, Carolin Schmitz, Tillmann Taape, John Young and Gabriella Zuccolin. For administrative support, thank you to Toby Bryant, Tamara Hug, Agnieska Lanucha, Louisa Russell and David Thompson. During Covid and beyond, Andrew Clarke and Dmitriy Myelnikov provided much solace and kinship through joint writing sessions.

I would like to extend my sincere gratitude to new colleagues at the University of Bristol in particular Kenneth Austin, Victoria Bates, Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, Mark Hailwood, Stephen Mawdsley, Zahra Shah, Kate Skinner and James Thompson.

At conferences, seminars and through fellowships I have been fortunate to have met and had formative conversations with David Cressy, Isabel Davis, Catherine Evans, Lisa Forman Cody, Sarah Fox, Kate Gibson, Stefan Hanss, Karen Harvey, Stephanie Howard-Smith, Emily May Vine, Lisa Smith, Rebecca Whiteley and Amanda Vickery. Olivia Weisser has been tremendously generous to me in her guidance both in writing this book as well as in navigating academia more generally. Special thanks to Elaine Leong and Hannah Murphy who have at different points provided the encouragement and advice necessary to finish this project.

Parts of Chapter 4 were published in ‘“Ordering the Infant”: Caring for Newborns in Early Modern England’ in Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Storey (eds.), Conserving Health in Early Modern Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published in Social History of Medicine as ‘Being Well, Looking Ill: Childbirth and the Return to Health in Seventeenth-century England’, 30, no. 3 (2017): 500–519.

The Wellcome Trust generously funded this research [088708 and 205358/Z/16/Z]. At Wellcome, I thank Tom Bray, Chris Hassan, Sophie Hutchinson and Dan O’Connor for all of their support.

It has been a privilege and an honour to work with Lucy Rhymer and the editorial team at Cambridge University Press. I am indebted to the anonymous reviewers for carefully reading the entire book and for their advice. Any remaining errors or deficiencies are my responsibility.

My utmost gratitude to the archivists at the Cheshire Archives and Local Studies Centre, the Huntington Library and the University of Glasgow for allowing me to reproduce images of items in their collections.

Thank you to my parents for always encouraging my intellectual and creative pursuits. Their support and love have been the greatest asset. The final stages of writing this book were quite different from the early stages. It was completed despite the best efforts of Juno the Pup, and as I learnt afresh the importance of neighbourhood, family and kinship. Thank you to John for swiping right and making me happier than I ever could have imagined.