Abstract
This essay examines the role of gender in concepts of medical time in early modern Europe. In early modern Europe, there were multiple, overlapping systems of time – astrological, seasonal, liturgical, horological – that guided medical theory and practice. In Renaissance medical scholarship, the microcosm of the human was embedded in a macrocosm of time. This essay shifts the focus to women's concepts of medical time. Drawing on letters and medicinal recipes, it argues that women both reflected broader reckonings of time and drew their own concepts of medical temporality from the female body, including menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and childbirth. Women, it argues, engaged in deliberate attempts to understand and pin down embodied time.
Keywords: medicine; pregnancy; childbirth; temporality; menstruation
In May of 1557, the German countess Dorothea of Mansfeld (1493–1578) waited anxiously for her daughter-in-law to give birth. In a letter to her friend and patron, Electress Anna of Saxony (1532–1585), she apologized that she would not be able to travel to Dresden for the upcoming Pentecost celebration because of the uncertain timing of the birth: ‘She goes around quite heavily, and by twelve strikes of the clock, she is always hot and tired […] with the help of God, she will have lain [given birth] in either eight or fourteen days, but she is not sure of her calculation, and I cannot move from her until God has helped her from her burden.’ In a postscript, Dorothea added,
She began her calculation on the 25th of August in the fifty-sixth year [1556]. Her first calculation was made after the conventions of our women, and according to that, I give her eight days. But one cannot know, as Your Grace is well aware. According to the movement [dem regen nach], she will have lain in eight days, as I have calculated. But if the calculation does not follow the movement, she will not come before six or eight days after Pentecost [June 6].
This statement stands out for several reasons. It suggests that Dorothea felt confident in canceling a trip to visit her most important ally out of her duty to stay by her daughter-in-law in childbed, and it provides an insight into the period of anxious waiting at the end of pregnancy.