Baudoin, Marie. The Art of Childbirth: A Seventeenth-Century Midwife’s Epistolary Treatise to Doctor Vallant: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans. Cathy McClive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Thirty years ago, in her edited volume The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London: Routledge, 1993), Hilary Marland called for historical scholarship on midwives that saw them "as birth attendants, as women workers, as active members of their communities, as 'missionary' and political figures, and as defenders of their status and occupation against the invasions of male practice" (1).Cathy McClive answers this call.The Art of Childbirth tracks Marie Gosse Baudoin, a seventeenth-century French midwife, as a robust individual and active community member.Too often historians, when discussing early modern midwives, focus exclusively on their medical practice and conflicts with male practitioners.McClive, however, provides a penetrating glimpse into the world of an average-yet-extraordinary midwife in seventeenth-century Claremont-Ferrand.The Art of Childbirth centres on an epistolary treatise on childbirth sent by Baudoin in 1671 to Noël Vallant, physician and secretary to the famous salonnière Madam de Sable.Baudoin trained in Paris but worked for most of her career as head midwife and, eventually, as governess of the Hôtel-Dieu in Claremont-Ferrand.McClive opens The Art of Childbirth with a meticulous introduction that scrutinizes the treatise and Baudoin herself from various perspectives, covering expected topics such as early modern French midwives and their training but also religious communities, credit networks, material culture, translation studies, and critical approaches to the archive.A translation and transcription of Baudoin's letter follow this kaleidoscoping introduction.Both preserve the materiality of the document and marginalia through layers of notations, font changes, and formatting.Extensive footnotes provide further context.Many aspects of Baudoin's life are congruent with what we know about seventeenth-century elite midwives.She began life in the artisanal class and possessed some education.She trained in midwifery at the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris, as many before her had.She was a well-respected member of her community who engaged in conflicts and collaborations with medical men.But Baudoin
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".