Lying-In
In the title, Pulter situates this poem’s composition within her lying-in, a communal childbirth ritual that began with labor and continued for up to a month after delivery. During this period, the mother would be confined to a warm, dark room known as “the lying-in chamber” and joined by other women, including her midwife and gossips (friends and neighbors who attend upon the mother during childbirth). Although some exceptions exist, men typically were not allowed to enter the chamber. This collective female space offered mothers time for both recuperation and celebration and was practiced in some fashion by women of all classes.
According to Adrian Wilson, lying-in generally progressed in three stages, each of variable length. First, the mother would be confined to her bed for anywhere between three to fourteen days. The second stage begins with the “upsitting,” after which the mother was allowed to sit up and eventually move about the room. This typically lasted for one to two weeks. In the final stage, the mother could move about her house, but not outside, for ten to fourteen days. The event culminated in a churching ceremony, which marked the mother’s return to her full domestic and marital responsibilities. Progression through these stages depended upon a woman’s health, and the full title (“This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John. This being my 15th child; I being so weak, that in ten days and nights I never moved my head one jot from my pillow, out of which great weakness, my gracious God restored me, that I still live to magnify his mercy.”) reveals that Pulter spent at least ten days confined to bed in the first lying-in stage.
Jacobus Rueff, Frontispiece illustration showing birth scene from De conceptu et generatione hominis, 1554. Wellcome Collection, London. Credit: Wellcome Collection, London. CC BY.
At this point in her lying-in, Pulter was likely lying in a bloody, dirty bed. The bed linen used during delivery would not be changed until after the first stage, and Jane Sharp describes, in The Midwives Book, a midwife’s initial ministrations in detail:
… swathe the woman with a napkin about nine inches broad, but anoint her belly with oil of St. John’s wort, and then raise up the womb with a linen cloth many times folded. Cover her flanks with a little pillow about a quarter of a yard long. Then swathe her, beginning a little above the haunches, rather higher than lower, winding it even. Lay warm cloths to her breasts, forbearing those that repulse the milk till longer time, and the body be settled, lest repercussives should do her hurt. Let then her blood be first settled ten or twelve hours, and that the blood which was cast upon the lungs by violent labor may return to its own place … Let her not sleep till about four hours after she is delivered, but first give her some nourishing broth or caudle to comfort her. Let her eat no flesh till two days at least be over … if the child be a boy she must lay in thirty days; if a girl, forty days, and remember that it is the time of her purification that her husband must abstain from her.
Pulter bookends her poem with brief images of the lying-in, opening with a speaker “sad, sick, and lame, as in my bed I lay” (1) and concluding with maids drawing open the curtains (65).* These images also span the temporal duration of lying-in, beginning with the first stage and concluding with the appearance of natural light and fresh air, signs of the lying-in’s close. *The verb “draw” can denote both the opening and closing of curtains. Given that Pulter situates the speaker within her lying-in, the curtains would have been closed when preparing the room for her delivery and kept shut throughout the earlier phases of lying-in. The maids’ act in line 65, then, is to open the curtains.
Indeed, Pulter’s poem depicts an unusual lying-in, one characterized by physical discomfort and isolation with only her maids as companions. Many contemporary representations, however, emphasize the ritual’s luxury and communal revelry. Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, for example, stages a well-supplied and lively lying-in, while also revealing how the event could incite misogynist disdain. In the following two excerpts, Mr. Allwit critiques the excessive display of material goods and the company’s consumption of expensive sweets and wine, despite the fact that Mrs. Allwit’s lover, not her husband, financially supports the Allwit family.
- A lady lies not in like her. There’s her embossings [embossed textiles],
- Embroid’rings, spanglings [textiles decorated with metal], and I know not what,
- As if she lay with all the gaudy-shops [shops for finery]
- In Gresham’s Burse [the Royal Exchange] about her; then her restoratives,
- Able to set up a young pothecary,
- And richly stock the foreman of a drug-shop;
- Her sugar by whole loaves, her wine by runlets [little streams].
- (1.2.32-38)
…
Had this been all my cost now, I had been beggared; these women have no consciences at sweetmeats, where’er they come. See an they have not culled out all the long plums too; they have left nothing here but short wriggle-tail comfits [sweetmeats made of fruit and preserved with sugar], not worth mouthing! No mar’l I heard a citizen complain once that his wife’s belly only broke his back. Mine had been all in fitters [fragments] seven years since but for this worthy knight, that with a prop upholds my wife and me and all my estate buried in Bucklersbury.
(3.2.63-71)
Although Pulter does not mention her husband and appears most interested in commanding her own mind, other interpretations of the lying-in emphasize inverted gender roles, with women obtaining temporary power over their husbands during pregnancy and lying-in.
Girls were brought up to believe that they ought to obey their husbands; and boys were brought up to believe that they had the power of correction over their wives. In actual marriage, subjection might be moderated by the common causes of economic support, to which they both contributed, of sexual need, of childrearing, or of shared religious interest. It might be reversed temporarily during the lying-in period, when the new mother could boss her husband around with impunity.
Besides the charge of the midwife, she must have her nurse to attend and keep her, who must make for her warm broths and costly caudles, enough both for herself and her mistress, being of the mind to fare no worse then she. If her mistress be fed with partridge, plover, woodcocks, quails, or any such like, the nurse must be partner with her in all these dainties. Neither yet will that suffice, but during the whole month she privily pilfers away the sugar, the nutmegs, and ginger, with all other spices that comes under her keeping, putting the poor man to such expense that in a whole year he can scarcely recover that one month’s charges. Then every day after her lying down will sundry dames visit her, which are her neighbours, her kinswomen, and other her special acquaintance, whom the goodman must welcome with all cheerfulness, and be sure there be some dainties in store to set before them where they about some three or four hours (or possible half a day) will sit chatting with the childwife, and by that time the cups of wine have merrily trolled about and half a dozen times moistened their lips with the sweet juice of the purple grape. They begin thus one with another to discourse: (14)
… “by this gold on my finger, let him do what he can. I will be sure to have the last word. So that in very deed, if that women be made underlings by their husbands, the fault is their own. For there is not any man alive (be he never so churlish), but his wife may make him quiet and gentle enough, if she have any wit. And therefore your goodman serves you but well enough, sith you will take it so.
“Believe me gossip (saith another), were I in your case, I would give him such welcome at his coming home and ring such a peal of bad words in his ears that he should have small joy to stay the hearing.”
Thus is the poor man handled behind his back, whiles they make no spare to help away with his good wine and sugar (which he hath prepared), whom they for his kindness thus ingratefully requite. Yea and now and then having their brains well-heated, they will not stick to taunt him to his face, accusing him of little love and great unkindness to his wife. (17)
While lying-in was intended to be restorative, communal, and even joyful, Poem 45 suggests that Pulter experienced the event differently. Her lying-in is marked by isolation and human frailty, as well as her ability to mentally transcend confinement, and it is no surprise that after fifteen lyings-in such themes also characterize her larger corpus.