Recently I came across the Beautiful Cervix Project, which asks people with a cervix to photograph it and upload it so that it is possible to see the variations and changes in this part of the body. That sent me back to Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book (1671) where the cervix is described like this:
Between the neck and the Womb there is a skinny fleshy substance within, quick of feeling, hollow in the middle, that will open and shut, called the Mouth of the Womb and it is like the head of a Tench, or of a young Kitten.
It can be difficult to match up the terminology of the past with the words we use today: here, the ‘neck’ is the ‘neck of the womb’, what we could call the vagina. That makes this ‘skinny fleshy substance’ the cervix. It isn’t the hymen: that comes later in the same chapter, Chapter 11, ‘Of the womb’.
The Midwives Book remains something of an enigma. It’s hailed as the first book on the topic by a woman; as a female voice in a male field of medicine; as a proto-feminist text. But nobody has found Jane Sharp in the archives, nor been able to verify the statements she makes about herself – in particular, that she had practised midwifery for more than thirty years. No birth or death records; no evidence of her presence at any births. As even the section on the birthing process – where you’d expect at least some comments on births at which she’d assisted – relies on earlier publications by men rather than personal experience, Katharine Phelps Walsh has recently suggested that Jane Sharp was a man, or an educated woman posing as a midwife.
Sharp, whoever she or he was, states that much of the book is based on existing publications, announcing in the dedication to “the midwives of England” that “I have been at Great Cost in Translations for all Books, either French, Dutch, or Italian of this kind”. By the way, even that dedication isn’t as radical as it may sound: one of the male authors whose work underpins Sharp’s text, Nicholas Culpeper, also dedicated his book, Directory for Midwives (1651), to “the Midwives of England”. Culpeper made an interesting comment on midwives owning books: it wasn’t that midwives didn’t need them but that a midwife’s “wits must be in her Head, for her Books are at home”. Sharp also relies on Culpeper’s translations of Daniel Sennert’s Practical Physick (1664) and on Thomas Bartholin’s Anatomy (1668).
I think we were all desperate to hear a woman’s voice on the subject of midwifery, so the consensus over the last twenty years or so has been that Sharp must have had a different slant on the body, by virtue of being a woman. Elaine Hobby, whose 1999 edition of The Midwives Book brought the text to the attention of early modern historians, thinks Sharp is “more succinct and therefore drier and more witty” than her male sources, and notes how she turns stories around so that men rather than women are the butt of her jokes. Reviewing that book, Mary Fissell commented “Sharp can transform her sources, finding new morals in the old tales”.
I challenged assumptions like these – tempting as they are – in something I published in 2011: there, I argued that while Sharp found the scrotum and penis “comical and sickly organs”, her male sources also showed some of the same reactions.
But what about that kitten image? In a 2007 article, Caroline Bicks looked at Sharp’s presentation of the cervix, writing that “Sharp echoes the popular simile likening it to the Mouth of a Tench (Bartholin 71), or fish, but weakens its figurative link to the gaping vagina by turning this Mouth into the head of a Tench, or of a young Kitten (33). The shift is subtle, yet powerful: it eliminates the dark hole that men from Saint Augustine forward had described as the space between the excrements and the urine from which men are freed at birth; at the same time, it replaces this foul and confining mouth (shadow of the devouring vagina dentata) with an especially disarming image of a kitten. The female anatomy is no longer imagined in relation to the male’s anatomy or to man’s original state of entrapment, but rather in relation to the new life it brings forth.” This was repeated in an article by Catherine Morphis published in 2014 (p.169).
This is making a lot of assumptions. There’s the one about a uniformly negative image of the womb from the fourth century CE to 1671, and that really doesn’t work, although I can’t go into that here. There’s the one about kittens always being seen as cute. But the assumption which most strikes me at the moment is that Sharp is adding something here which not only wasn’t in Bartholin, but wasn’t anywhere else either.
However, the ‘kitten-cervix’ wasn’t a new image in 1671. It can be found in the early sixteenth century, in Berengario da Carpi’s Isagoge Breves. In the English translation of this, by L.R. Lind, the relevant passage reads as follows:
Between the cervix and the inner receptacle is a certain substance of pellicular flesh which is quite sensitive, perforated in the middle, capable of dilation and constriction, called the mouth of the uterus and having the form of the head of a mullet, or of a cephalus or tench, or of a newborn kitten.
This in turn is based on Mundinus – Mondino de’ Liuzzi – whose Anatomia was written in 1316 and first printed in the 1470s. The relevant passage translates as:
The os is very nervous made like the mouth of a new-born kitten or, to speak more properly, like the mouth of an old tench. In virgins this surface is covered with a thin veil which in the violated is broken and so doth bleed.
I’m not claiming this is the earliest use – my capacity for checking is limited by the UK lockdown – but it certainly stops us thinking Sharp has created a new image here.
The Isagoge Breves existed in English translation when Sharp was writing; translated in 1660 by Henry Jackson as Microcosmographia or A Description of the Little World or Body of Man … which was long since composed in Latine, by that famous Jacobus Berengarius of Carpus… and reprinted in 1664 (discussed by Larkey and tum Suden). I have only been able to see the 1664 reprint and this gives:
Between the Neck and the Receptacle within, is a certain pellicular substance, fleshy, sensible enough, perforated in the middle, that may be dilated and constringed, called Os Matricis, the Mouth of the Matrix, having the form of a Mullet’s head, otherwise of Cephalus, or of the Tench fish, or of a new bred Puppy (p.101).
Curiouser and curiouser. Sharp could have seen the puppy reference, but made it into a kitten??
Works cited:
Caroline Bicks, ‘Stones like women’s paps: revising gender in Jane Sharp’s Midwives Book’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7.2 (2007).
Mary Fissell, review of Hobby 1999 in NWSA Journal 13.1 (2001), 199-200.
Helen King, ‘Inside and outside, cavities and containers: the organs of generation in seventeenth-century English medicine’ in Patricia A. Baker, Han Nijdam, Karine van ‘t Land (eds.), Medicine and Space: Body, Surroundings and Borders in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Visualising the Middle Ages (4). Leiden: Brill, 2011, 37–60.
Elaine Hobby, ‘“Secrets of the female sex”: Jane Sharp, the reproductive female body, and early modern midwifery manuals’, Women’s Writing 8.2 (2001), 201-212.
Sanford V. Larkey and Linda tum Suden, ‘Jackson’s English translation of Berengarius of Carpis “Isagogae Breves”, 1660 and 1664’; Isis 21.1 (1934) 57-70.
L.R. Lind, translation of Berengario da Carpi, 1523 and 1535: A Short Introduction to Anatomy, University of Chicago Press, 1959 (the passage cited is from p.78).
Catherine Morphis, ‘Swaddling England: how Jane Sharp’s Midwives Book shaped the body of early modern reproductive tradition’, Early Modern Studies Journal 6 (2014), 166-194 (online, https://earlymodernstudiesjournal.org/review_articles/swaddling-england-jane-sharps-midwives-book-shaped-body-early-modern-reproductive-tradition/).
Mundinus: see Charles Singer, The Fasciculo di Medicina: Venice 1493, 2 vols, Florence: R. Lier & Co, 1925.
Katharine Phelps Walsh, ‘Marketing midwives in seventeenth‐century London: A re‐examination of Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book’, Gender & History 26.2 (2014), 223-241.
Mistaking histories 