In pain you shall bring forth children. Humble Acceptance of the Pain of Childbirth? A Brief Overview from the Middle Ages to the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

While the Bible, and later the exegesis of theologians, gave meaning to childbirth pain, the acceptance and alleviation, if not the total elimination, of such pain is still a topical issue in the current age of increasingly safe medical intervention. Some historians have stated that suffering was long taken for granted in the West as God’s will, and therefore passively accepted without any possibility of change. But is this true? Can we apply such an assumption to the past generally, or would greater historical contextualisation lead to different considerations, particularly if coupled with an evaluation of individual texts, above all in the medical field? The aim of this article is to show that the idea of abandoning women in labour to their painful fate seems at times to have been unacceptable, particularly in the Middle Ages.