The ‘Cleansing of the Flowers after the Birth’: Managing Pregnancy and Post-Partum Bleeding

After marriage and the subsequent initiation into womanhood, the assumption in early modern society was that an early birth was desirable to cement the relationship and secure the bloodline. As Laura Gowing has asserted, ‘Fertility mattered enormously to women’s roles and to marriage. Pregnancy marked another stage in the transition from single woman to matron, and the rituals of childbirth brought a woman into the circle of married women and mothers’.1 This chapter will argue that the blood lost after a birth signified the completion of this transition to womanhood in its most full sense. As part of its analysis of lochial and post-partum bleeding, this chapter will also offer a study of bleeding in pregnancy and labour. In the prevailing humoral system the management of a woman’s blood levels carried implications for the success of the pregnancy and the transition to motherhood. Further, post-partum bleeding was considered to be analogous to menstruation and so carried with it assumptions about the ways in which women ought to behave if bleeding was occurring. Antenatal bleeding was also associated with grave implications for the outcome of the pregnancy and the potential disruption this wrought for the transition to motherhood. So the chapter forms an overview of all occasions of bleeding involving pregnancy and birth. Similarly, many of the rituals then associated with childbirth were formed around the blood loss. So the ways in which birth was managed culturally will be examined here as part of the main thematic concern of analysing lochial bleeding.