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Historical Perspective
I'm reading Antonia Frasier's fascinating book Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, and was extremely intrigued by what his mother, Anne of Austria endured.
In the first place, she married Louis XIII when she was 14 years old and didn't get knocked up until she was 37. (There are various mystical accounts about this miracle though it could also have had something to do with the King finally showing up at the right moment). It is heartening, in a way, that she wasn't kicked to the curb after 23 years without producing an heir. (With her son, Anne also achieved a powerful career, when she became Regent upon the death of her husband.)
The royal birthing bed sounds like a dream: "this was three feet wide, and consisted of two planks between two mattresses, a double bolster for use under the shoulders and two long wooden pegs on either side for the Queen to clutch during her ordeal."
But to me, the really charming aspect of seventeenth century birth practices is found in the following passage:
"The labor took place in public, or at an rate in the presence of the court, as was the royal custom of the time, so as to prevent the possible substitution of a libing baby for a dead one- or a son for a daughter... In view of this attendance, courtiers had to work out a private signal for indicating the vital sex of the child without vulgarly shouting it out. Whatever her use later in dynastic matrimonial stakes, the birth of a girl was always a sourtce of vivid disappointment at the time; one royal princess of this period, whose husband wanted an heir, volunteered crossly to throw her newborn daughter in the river. Thus arms were to be kept folded for a girl, hats to be hurled in the air for a Dauphin."
Yes, because hats thrown in the air is so much less rude and ostentatious when you've just had a kid under the scrutiny of dozens of sets of staring eyes then anything anyone might actually speak out loud.
Anyway, say what you want about hospital beds, at least they're more than three feet wide.
posted by Elise at 10:33 AM
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