Infertility in Early Modern England by Daphna Oren-Magidor

Author:Daphna Oren-Magidor
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Fig. 4.2The Lady and her 365 babies, by permission of the Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge

The story of the 365 babies was meant as a moral tale, an obvious legend with a good lesson at its side. Monstrous births, however, were not relegated only to the realm of the fantastical, but were used in real cases in order to criticize and even ostracize real women. Nowhere is this more evident than in the trials of Anne Hutchinson and her followers in Massachusetts in the 1630s, in which reproductive tragedy was used in order to attempt to put women back in their ‘proper’ place. There are some obvious differences between the society of the New England colonies and English society, but in the 1630s most of the residents of New England were born and educated in England and the majority of their cultural values and ideas came from England, specifically from the ‘godly’ or ‘Puritan’ subculture. Because migrants to New England typically arrived as families, rather than single men looking for work, the composition of New England society more closely replicated English society than other immigrant communities in the British colonies.37 Therefore, evidence from the early days of English settlement in New England can be revealing of cultural beliefs in England itself.

Hutchinson first gained attention by hosting Bible meetings which went against the teachings of the organized Church in Massachusetts. These meetings were initially attended only by women, but later began attracting men as well. Hutchinson and her followers were tried for blasphemy and accused of being heretics as well as for sexual depravity, and the colony’s leaders ultimately excommunicated them and banished them to what would become the colony of Rhode Island. John Winthrop, governor and one of the founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as well as a staunch Puritan, took great pains to discredit Hutchinson and her followers in the strictest possible terms.38 Winthrop’s propaganda included a description of several cases of monstrous birth which had supposedly occurred within Hutchinson’s circle and which he saw as evidence that Hutchinson and other women from her group were acting in a diabolical manner. These ‘monster births’ were most likely based on actual cases of miscarriage or stillbirth, but Winthrop described them in frightening terms, seeing them as proof that Hutchinson and her followers had sinned to such a degree that their very bodies had rejected the natural order. When Winthrop said that Hutchinson and her followers gave birth to monsters, he was making a claim about their religious heresy, but also about their transgression of gendered norms. According to Winthrop, Hutchinson’s theological ‘errors’ were linked with her transgression of the proper roles of women. Therefore, she and her followers were punished by God in the form of a subversion of their reproductive powers, the most feminine aspect of their being.

Winthrop recorded his struggle against Hutchinson’s heresy in his journal, which he wrote as a history of New England and was first published in the eighteenth century, as well as in

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