Background and Objectives: The first inquisitorial processes were developed against Muslims and Jews. Then, they focused on women, especially those dedicated to care. Progressively, they were linked to witchcraft and sorcery due to their great assistance, generational and empirical knowledge. The health historiography of the 15th–18th centuries still has important bibliographic and interpretive gaps in the care provided by women. The main objective was to analyse the care provided by midwives in the legislative and socio-sanitary context of New Castile, in the inquisitorial Spain of the 15th–18th centuries. Materials and Methods: A historical review was conducted, following the Dialectical Structural Model of Care. Historical manuals, articles and databases were analysed. Results: The Catholic Monarchs established health profession regulations in 1477, including midwives. However, all legislations were annulled by Felipe II in 1576. These were not resumed until 1750. Midwives assume...

Summary: At the turn of the sixteenth century in Paris, midwifery was an emergent profession regulated by the church. This article analyzes fourteen entries in the Registre de causes from the archdeaconry of Brie, 1499–1504, within the context of midwives’ relationship with the church. It suggests that midwives were important appendages of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy. Midwife regulation was one aspect of the French church’s attempts to maintain its autonomy against secular powers. Regulation by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy provided midwives with professional advantages and disadvantages. The ecclesiastical bureaucracy played a vital role in creating and sustaining midwifery as a profession, but also circumscribed midwives’ practices. Overall, however, bureaucratic control was unsystematically applied, and midwives were often left to negotiate their own professional and social positions. Authors: Tiffany D. Vann Sprecher and Ruth Mazo Karras

This article focuses on a chapter in a manual on circumcision written in Worms in the thirteenth century by Jacob and Gershom haGozrim (the circumcisers). The third chapter of the manual contains medical instruction on how to attend to women in labour and other gynaecological conditions. Whereas the first two chapters of the manual were published in the late nineteenth century, the midwifery chapter has only been recently examined. This article is comprised of a translation of the midwifery text(s) along with an introduction to the text and the community practices it reflects. It outlines the cooperation between medical practitioners, male and female, Jewish and Christian, and discusses the medical remedies recommended and some practices current in thirteenth-century Germany.

In his eighteenth-century treatise on why midwives were more suited to attending women in childbirth than accoucheurs, or male surgeons who specialized in childbirth, the physician Phillipe Hecquet explained, “A midwife certainly does not know more than an accoucheur... but she senses her weakness; and her lack of capacity makes her wise and circumspect, or her modesty makes her take the counsel of those that Providence established as her judges and masters.” As Hecquet knew, this explanation on the “nature” of women – that they were “wise” enough to know when to submit to their “judges and masters” – would have great resonance with his audience. Indeed, this notion of woman had become prevalent in the latter part of the seventeenth century, when men and women were debating women’s social worth and capacities, debates known as the querelle des femmes. This paper explores the importance of the rhetoric of the seventeenth-century querelle des femmes in providing a framework for men to...