Yay, Pillars of the Earth!

Agnes and Tom in the forest is a little different situation from a peasant family in a community, whether they own the house or are (the medieval equivalent of) subletting a room, but you probably guessed that part.

So among other things, a woman in medieval Europe most likely had a roof over their heads and something at least resembling a bed beneath her when she gave birth. But more to your question: the people assisting her were probably almost entirely women.

Midwives, for example, were mostly still women in the Middle Ages. Of course, healers' specialties were overlapping, so it's not like a barber would never serve as a midwife, and there's one awesome case where a woman noted in tax records as a midwife is the sort of 'official' medical practitioner at a men's monastery. (So either she had a broader skillset, or there were some very unmonastic things up in that monastery.)

But it does seem like midwives were mostly women. And formal physicians would only be called in for the most dire emergencies--basically, when it was all but certain that the woman giving birth was going to die, and they wanted a last-ditch, desperate effort to save the baby long enough to baptize her or him. (Midwives were, however, recognized by the Church as having the power to perform baptism if it was the absolute only way for the baby to be baptized before she or he died.)

Second, the other people in the room would probably also be female. In fact, from looking at upper-class Italy, Christine Klapisch-Zuber argued for a pattern of men trying to assert influence and even presence in the room where a woman gave birth/laid-in afterwards. (To which point: men tried to edge in on the midwife profession/midwives' traditional responsibilities towards the end of the Middle Ages into the early modern era.) But women seem to have persevered and kept childbirth a strong female and community experience.

The major thing missing from PotE relates to my main problem with the book (which, let it be said, is my favorite fiction book): religion. Not that everyone in the Middle Ages was super-religious and praying all the time (BUT PHILIP IS A MONK. Yes, he's the prior and had other responsibilities, too. But BENEDICTINE MONKS SPENT MOST OF THEIR TIME PRAYING AS A GROUP.)

But there's plenty of evidence for women keeping religious charms--objects, scraps of parchment/paper with "magic letters" (as we'd say) on them, or saying specific prayers--in the birthing room with them. St. Margaret of Antioch was the patron saint of women giving birth, so in the later Middle Ages, objects associated with her, or letters from her name, were popular.

Tom's family in PotE isn't particularly religious (which does make the book more palatable to people today, I get it; from a modern standpoint, medieval Christianity could get weird AF), and the mid-12th century is a little early for the overwhelming popularity St. Margaret veneration. But there should at least be some kind of reference to a protective prayer or object or what we would see as a spell/charm.

I'm not sure how I feel in terms of historical accuracy with Tom and his family leaving Jonathan behind. On one hand, within medieval Christianity at the time, anyone not baptized was bound for hell. On the other, at least in 15th century Germany, there were definitely religious instruction books whose authors did backflips trying to justify non-baptized babies' entrance into heaven. It's kind of heartbreaking to read, actually.

Those religious, sort of "self-help" books--which were enormously popular among lay readers--also give us a couple of scraps of info into the lives of pregnant women that are harder to see in medical texts (which overwhelmingly focus on the infant). Dietrich Koelde in 15th century Germany writes:

Furthermore, [pregnant women] should not run or ride or dance or do heavy work

The reference to dancing is kind of hilarious because a lot of didactic writers (and city sumptuary codes) frowned on public dancing, but I digress. Information like this couldn't apply very well to women who had to work daily, but the general principle of not being able to do the heaviest labor/heavy labor not being the healthiest idea was well integrated into later medieval culture.

But surely men would have some responsibilities in taking care of their pregnant wives? Let's listen to Koelde again:

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

Oh no, I'm sorry, it's not that men shouldn't abuse their pregnant wives. It's that pregnant women shouldn't make their husbands abuse them.

Obviously, these are all generalized and prescriptive situations. In practice, women were individuals and, if they had the ability, could and did change things up as they wanted. Queen Eleanor [not of Aquitaine] and King Henry III of England insisted that he be able to stay in France with her until she had given birth. Matilda of Saxony, on the other hand, insisted on traveling to the current residence of her father, King Henry II (the famous one), when she was nearing time to give birth to two of her children. Women who had the chance to decide what would help keep them comfortable, did so.

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

One final, brighter note. The mortality rate for a woman giving birth in the Middle Ages was somewhere between 1.5% to 2.5%, to the best of our abilities to figure--and lower in rural parishes than urban ones. So there's at least one part of PotE that isn't wrong, but it's also not very typical for medieval Europe. But wow, would the other outcome change the rest of the story!