La scena del parto. Nascita del corpo e salvezza dell'anima tra religione, medicina e “magia” nell'altomedioevo

In the Early Middle Ages, assistance during childbirth, a dramatic event for the society of the ancien régime since it often resulted in the death or disability of the mother or child, was almost exclusively provided by women. It was only in the late Middle Ages that Western European physicians began to include references to obstetrics in their texts, thereby demonstrating that unlike in the classical world and with the advent of Christianity, men were not involved in medical interventions related to sexuality for many centuries. Mulieres, female relatives and neighbors, who had by now lost the midwifery skills of antiquity, were able to assist the labouring woman because of the accumulated knowledge and experience they had garnered from a variety of oral traditions from the spheres of science, religion and “magic”. Invoking saints for help was very common. It was necessary to save mothers from the risk of death, but it was indispensable that children emerge from the maternal womb and survive for enough time for them to be baptized, in order to ensure salvation for their souls, burdened by original sin, and to avoid eternal damnation. Thus for the rebirth of the soul, the birth of the body was necessary, if even only for a brief time. Saving a fetus’s soul was so important that Caesarean operations were performed on dead mothers, at the insistence of the religious authorities, even before that of the medical community. The sectio in mortua was the only type of Caesarean operation that existed until the Early Modern Period, in spite of some classical fabulae which speak of heroes born from living mothers’ opened wombs. By comparing different sources, particularly medical and hagiographical the present article aims to describe what happened during the childbirth.