A Mother’s Manual for the Women of Ferrara: A Fifteenth-Century Guide to Pregnancy and Pediatrics

The first treatise of its kind to be written in a European vernacular.

Around  1460, Michele Savonarola produced the extraordinary Mother’s Manual for  the Women of Ferrara, a gynecological, obstetrical, and pediatric  treatise composed in the vernacular so that it could be read not only by  the learned but also by pregnant and nursing mothers and the midwives  and wet nurses who presided over childbirth. Savonarola’s work is not  merely a trivial set of instructions, but the work of a learned scholar  who drew on, among others, the ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates and  Galen, and Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine. The first of its kind,  Savonarola’s Mother’s Manual helps readers understand both the  development of late-medieval and early-modern obstetrics and gynecology,  as well as the experiences of women who turn to advice books for help  with reproductive issues. This book also provides a key to understanding  why and how a new genre of book—the midwifery manual or advice book for  pregnant women—arose in sixteenth-century Italy and eventually became a  popular genre all over Europe from the early modern period to the  present day.