Vernacular Bodies

Download or read book Vernacular Bodies written by Mary Elizabeth Fissell and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making babies was a mysterious process in seventeenth-century England. Fissell uses popular sources - songs, jokes, witchcraft pamphlets, prayerbooks, popular medical manuals - to recover how ordinary men and women understood the processes of reproduction. Because the human body was so often used as a metaphor for social relations, the grand events of high politics such as the English Civil War reshaped popular ideas about conception and pregnancy. This book is the first account of ordinary people's ideas about reproduction, and offers a new way to understand how common folk experienced the sweeping political changes that characterized early modern England.