For centuries, midwives stood at the centre of birth, care, and women’s knowledge of their own bodies. They delivered generations into the world and passing wisdom from woman to woman long before medicine claimed authority over childbirth.

As Europe entered an age of fear and religious control, midwives were accused of crimes that mirrored their expertise, blamed for tragedy, and cast as threats to divine and medical order.

This bonus episode traces how women’s authority over birth was dismantled, how fear replaced trust, and how history rewrote care as crime.

CITATIONS:

• Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch, https://academic.oup.com/shm/article-abstract/3/1/1/1689119
• Healers and midwives accused of witchcraft (1563–1736), https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0260691723003209
• The Midwife-Witch on Trial: Historical Fact or Myth?, https://www.cjmrp.com/index.php/cjmrp/article/view/125
• Midwives in Health Sciences as a Sociocultural Phenomenon, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9502592/
• Midwives and Healers in the European Witch Trials, https://imss.org/2019/12/a-note-from-the-collections-midwives-and-healers-in-the-european-witch-trials/

Anne of Cleves is remembered as Henry VIII’s least wanted wife, mocked for her appearance and dismissed as a mistake. But this episode looks beyond the insult to uncover the woman history misunderstood.

From her quiet upbringing in the Duchy of Cleves to her short and perilous marriage at the Tudor court, Anne navigated power, ego, and danger with extraordinary restraint. While other queens were destroyed, Anne survived, secured her independence, and outlived the king who rejected her.

CITATIONS:

• 
  The Six Wives of Henry VIII, https://archive.org/details/sixwivesofhenryv0000load_x6n7
• The Marrying of Anne of Cleves, https://archive.org/details/marryingofanneof0000warn
• Monarchy and Matrimony: The Courtships of Henry VIII, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-229X.00113
• Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, https://archive.org/details/letterspapersfor12greauoft
• Anne of Cleves: Sociologically, Psychologically, and Reality, https://retrospectjournal.com/2023/11/19/anne-of-cleves-sociologically-pyschologically-and-reality/