Let's say I'm an upper class woman in high middle ages Europe who has just become pregnant for the first time. How would my life change over the next several months?

Medieval people didn't talk about their lives in the way that modern people do, or even in the sense of early modern diaries. So even though some of the most important medieval women authors--Dhuoda, Christine de Pisan, Margery Kempe--were mothers, we don't have access to firsthand accounts of the experience of pregnancy. Nevertheless, by looking at textual evidence of medieval attitudes towards pregnancy, we can dance around the edges of what it might have been like for women themselves.

Medieval medical texts treat women as little more than babycarriers--and dangerous ones, at that. There is no clearer illustration of this than the very popular De secretis mulierum falsely attributed to Albert the Great (to make its teachings seem more authoritative). It does not have a chapter on "giving birth" or "childbirth" but rather "the exit of the fetus from the uterus." Pseudo-Albert doesn't even see a woman; he sees an organ with a divine mission.

This attitude towards the supremacy of the fetus at the cost of 'seeing' the woman is reflected in high and late medieval law. It's important to remember that medieval laws, especially from the 12th and 13th centuries, were more likely one person's or one group's opinion of what was or what should be happening, than an actual description of regulations. Nevertheless, in some cases we can connect law to praxis. And even where we cannot, they're a great guide to medieval mindsets concerning pregnancy and pregnant women.

The principle of missing the woman for the fetus is clearly illustrated in regulations on the punishment of female criminals. The French Leis Willelme and customs of Beauvais, as well as the English Bracton and Bretton, all mandate deferment of corporal punishment for women assumed to be pregnant either until after childbirth or until it's clear that she is not actually pregnant. Don't worry, social order, the woman will still get mutilated, tortured, and/or executed. Just, once the baby is safe and baptized.

Protecting the fetus at all costs, as a legal principle, could have significant short-term material consequences for pregnant women, good or bad. I'll discuss one example with lower-class women first, because it sheds some light on the experience of pregnancy overall, then talk about one that pertains exclusively to elite women.

In that time-honored tradition, pregnant poor women were targets of significant civic charity acts--but only as long as they were pregnant. In 14C London, the mayor funded a special room at St. Thomas' Hospital (think a home for the indigent and disabled, not "come sick, leave healthy or dead") with:

eight beds for young women that had done amiss, in trust of a good amendment. And he commanded that all the things that were done in that chamber should be kept secret

Richard Whittington, essentially, had founded a medieval Crisis Pregnancy Center. It's unknown what happened to any temporary residents or their infants afterwards, although Whittington hoped they would clean up their lives and get married.

Most temporary benefits for poor pregnant women, however, related to food. This could be as patronizing as declining to prosecute and punish pregnant women who stole fruit, or as dedicated as organized distribution of meat, wine, bread, and lard. This example isn't medieval, but I love it: in 1674 Constance, even a foreign woman couldn't be denied "wine and everything else needed by women who lie in." Medieval pregnant women, in other words, ate. I have yet to come across a reference to "pickles and strawberry juice...blend" in gynecological treatises, but some things don't change.

For aristocratic women, the stakes of pregnancy were enormous. The need to carry on the paternal family legacy placed immense scrutiny and suspicion on women before and during pregnancy. Just as legal codes saw women's bodies as duplicitous towards the fetuses they were meant to protect, ready to miscarry at the faintest thunderclap; they viewed women as almost certainly plotting to deceive their husbands into believing they were pregnant. (Presumably to keep their husband out of their, er, bedchamber for a time, or perhaps for temporary favor.)

As a result, texts like the Bracton and Bretton mandated a two step procedure. First, an embarrassing physical examination in which multiple women prodded the breasts and stomach of a pregnant women and questioned her intensely about her sex life with her husband. Second, confinement to a castle or even a set of rooms for elite women who claimed to be pregnant. What's worse, we know from court records and chronicles that these restrictions were actually enforced. This was the fate of Agnes de Turs, who faced examination by eight women before confinement; this was the fate of Johanna de San Martino, who was even locked away from her friends and servants of childbearing age. In case she might, I dunno, steal their baby? And it was the fate of Muriel de Meautona, who turned out not to be pregnant at all.

Agnes, Johanna, and Muriel had one important thing in common: they were all widows. Carrying the heirs of their dead husbands heightened the importance of their pregnancies, making them pawns to the wider, systemic pressures of medieval society. This is important because the Middle Ages were not a monolithic mass of unadulterated hatred of women. In cases where individuals had power and agency, we can see that in some cases, there was real tenderness--between a wife and her husband, between a daughter and her father.

King Henry III, for example, frustrated the snot out of his courtiers back in England when he insisted on remaining with his wife Eleanor (no, not that Henry and Eleanor) in France until she had delivered the child she was carrying. He was determined to remain with her. And Matilda of England/Saxony, King Henry II's daughter (this time, yes, that Henry and Eleanor), returned to her father's care and comfort during two pregnancies--the first understandable for other reasons because her husband was away on pilgrimage at the time, but the second involved her traveling and her giving birth to a potential heir abroad.

And finally, one set of sources where--kind of paradoxically, given their usually reputation in the gender studies realm--we can see a space for pregnant women's agency to emerge are actually later medieval sermons. Friars preaching part of their sermons to the women in their audiences (sermones ad status were very popular) or addressing specifically pregnant women in didactic books is surprisingly common as we move into the better-documented 14th and 15th centuries. Preachers and writers established for woman the role of spiritual guardian of their fetuses, as they would become spiritual guardians (and teachers) of their offspring in childhood.

Dietrich Koelde's 15th century Mirror for Christians, for example, addresses "How Women Who Carry Children Should Protect and Conduct Themselves."

When women carry children, they should serve God at all times by...fervently praying and confessing and going to the sacraments. Women should carry themselves in a state of grace at all times: the children of such people are saved even if they die without baptism (i.e. in utero or right after birth)

Koelde tosses in a nice lesson about the overwhelming power of God to save. But then he has some less spiritual advice:

Furthermore, they should not run or ride or dance or do heavy work

Some nice, practical guidance that aims at protecting the fetus but offers a way for the woman to do it, rather than forcing it on her, right?

But then:

Furthermore, the woman should be meek and she should not anger her husband, because much evil and harm results from this.

Koelde, of course, does not continue on to tell men not to abuse their pregnant wives.