At intersections between modern literature and modern history, Shakespeare explores women's studies, the mid-midwives' themes, how contemporary drama, Shakespearean medical, religious, and popularism have made the midwife a central producer of cultural signs of the body. In addition to attending most of the births and testimony of English women about their confessions about fatherhood, the midwife was said to have controlled the size of the tongue and reproductive organs at birth and was obliged to perform virginity tests, disability tests and emergency baptisms.

The signs of purity, masculinity, paternity and salvation were open to interpretation, but the early modern culture allowed midwives to generate and advertise them. Later, the subjects of midwives challenge the recent studies that the midwife has read as a woman whose power is limited to the marginal and uncommon society, revealing instead the aesthetic role of the midwife, not only in the rituals of reproduction, but in the process of cultural production itself.

. As a result of recent changes in managed health care and increased attention to uncovering the history of women's experiences, midwives - past and present - have become a major concern at the moment.

This book will appeal to readers interested in Shakespeare as well as the history of women and medicine.