Midwives in the neighbourhood in Rome circa 1600

Although we know little of Italian midwifery before the later seventeenth century, for Rome circa 1600, archival sources let us glimpse an earlier moment when midwives nevertheless stood out among informal urban healthcare workers. This chapter uses baptismal registers, Easter censuses, and criminal trial transcripts to reconstruct how locally prominent practitioners fashioned occupational credit. While lacking formalized training, professional organization, or systematic licensing, these Roman midwives cultivated social relationships with women clients, their families, and, more broadly, their neighbours. Some midwives also collaborated, ad hoc, with men – priests, medical professionals, and sometimes agents of the judicial courts. Such local alliances demonstrated midwives’ value to male authorities and conferred on their work implicit public recognition accessible to few laywomen.