An Unusual Obstetic Technique

My interest in linen armour lead me to texts from around the year 1000. Chrétien de Troyes died leaving one of his works incomplete, and sometime around 1190 to 1210, someone wrote the first surviving attempt to fill in the missing attempts. In one of these passages, an Arthurian hero is arming. The narrator mentions an unusual way of helping a woman in labour deliver:

Then they girdled a sword
Such that in all the world there was no woman in labour,
Who when struck on the head
With the flat of that naked sword (1048)
Would not immediately give birth,
As she hung between death and life.

My translation. Text after William Roach and R.H. Ivy, eds., The Continuations of the Old French Perceval of Chrétien de Troyes. Volume II. The First Continuation: Redaction of MSS EMQU. Romance Languages and Literatures, Extra Series, No. 10. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Romance Languages, 1950), 32-33, 485-486, 548-549. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000883809 There are complete translations of the continuation in Ross G. Arthur, tr., Three Arthurian Romances: Poems from Medieval France (London: Dent, 1996) and Nigel Bryant, tr., Chrétien de Troyes, The Complete Story of the Grail: Chrétien de Troyes‘ Perceval and its Continuations. Arthurian Studies 82 (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015), 87; my translation is influenced by this one, especially in the last five lines.

A few hundred years earlier, a learned Arab or Ethiopian named Abū ʿUthmān ʿAmr ibn Baḥr al-Jāḥiẓ wrote a debate between the Arabs and the Khorasanis. His debate consists of long monologues for each side, so it reminds me of cuneiform and Egyptian debate poems more than of Socratic dialogues. al-Jahiz died at Basra in 864 CE.

And we have drums that strike terror into the foe and large banners; and we possess coats of mail and bells and epaulettes and long hair and twisted sheaths and curled moustaches and muslin caps and Shihry steeds. And the axe and the battle-axe is on our pack saddles, and the daggers are at our waists. And we know how to hang up our swords and to sit elegantly on our horses’ backs. And we have shouts that make pregnant women deliver prematurely. And there is not in the world any wonderful craft of culture and wisdom and science and engineering and music and workmanship and law and tradition, in which Khorasān has been concerned, but she has beaten the experts and surpassed the savants.

Translation from C. T. Harley Walker, “Jahiz of Basra to Al-Fath Ibn Khaqan on the ‘Exploits of the Turks and the Army of the Khalifate in General,'” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (October 1915), pp. 631-697 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25189369 or https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.282450/page/n655/mode/2up

These two passages are not exactly the same, and its a commonplace that sudden fright can induce labour (although I am the wrong kind of doctor to say whether that is true). But I am still fascinated that when these two writers wanted to describe a mighty warrior, they boasted of the warrior’s ability to induce labour. And I wonder how this old Southwest Asian genre of debate poems reappears in the Middle Ages after the pagan Greeks and Romans had not been interested in it.

Further Reading: Apparently debate poems or Streitgedichte also appear in medieval Latin literature Das Streitgedicht https://www.hsozkult.de/review/id/reb-28743 (review in English)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitgedicht (German Wikipedia article). And who could forget the Epic Rap Battles of History!

(scheduled 15 August 2023, rescheduled 10 March 2024)