New Books in History Leah Astbury, "Making Babies in Early Modern England" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Feb 26, 2026
Leah Astbury, Lecturer in health history at the University of Bristol and author of Making Babies in Early Modern England, explores generation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century households. She discusses how families managed fertility, pregnancy detection, and recovery. Topics include men's roles in childbearing, material culture of birth, legitimacy anxieties, wet nursing, and the rise of male practitioners.
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Generation Reframes Making Babies
- Leah Astbury prefers the term generation because early modern people used capacious words like generation, breeding, and teaming to describe the whole life-phase of making children.
- Using generation lets historians study conception, pregnancy, birth, and recovery as a fluid, overlapping process rather than modern clinical stages.
Childbearing Was A Household Project
- Astbury argues generation was a household project, not just a woman's affair, because men, servants, and extended members actively worked on fertility, material provisioning, and legitimacy.
- Studying elite families shows men were often deeply involved and reproductive success tied to household status and respectability.
Fertility Work Fell To Women Despite Male Blame
- Recipe books and letters show both sexes sought fertility remedies but women often performed or administered treatments, partly because male infertility was shameful.
- Remedies included ointments women applied to men's genitals and treatments aimed at cleansing and stimulating the womb.
