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“Cheap Print” as Method: New Possibilities for the Gender History of Early Modern Japan Susan L. Burns (bio) Mary E. Fissel, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). xi + 296 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-19-926998-2 (cl); 0-19-920270-2 (pb). In eastern Japan in 1826 a crudely printed two-page broadside reported an account of an extraordinary birth: an eight-year-old girl living in the province of Shimôsa had delivered a healthy baby boy.1 This event was not depicted, as we might expect, in sensational or prurient terms, nor was it taken up in alarm as evidence of moral decline or social disorder. Rather, the author of the broadside celebrated the birth as a sign of divine favor, without any hint of irony. According to the text that accompanied an illustration of the young girl bathing her infant while her own mother looked on, “the girl knew nothing of the joining of men and women, so it was no ordinary thing that she gave birth to a child.” How and why then did the virginal child (described, however, as menstruating from the age of five) come to give birth? The answer, at least within the broadside, lay not with the girl herself, but with her parents. Exemplars of the virtues of sincerity and honesty, they were past the age when reproduction was possible, so “heaven” had bestowed them with a male heir through the body of their daughter. If the broadsheet is to be believed, this was the interpretation shared by neighbors and local officials alike, who showered the family with gifts of goods and gold. I discovered this broadside and others that reported on extraordinary instances of childbirth after my reading of Mary E. Fissel’s remarkable work Vernacular Bodies prompted me to delve into early modern Japan’s own version of “cheap print.” In her work, Fissell used “cheap print”—the small books, pamphlets, broadsides, ballads, and the like available to even the poor and the marginally literate—to explore the volatile set of social and political meanings attached to reproduction and the female body in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as England experienced the Reformation, the Civil Wars, and Restoration. The category of “cheap print” allowed her to bring together seemingly disparate sources, including [End Page 185] pamphlets on witchcraft, religious tracts, popular gynecological manuals, ballads mocking cuckolded husbands, and even illustrated playing cards. Fissell describes these materials as “vernacular” rather than “popular,” in order, she states, to avoid speculation about who read what. Her claim is that everyone read “cheap print,” and thus while Vernacular Bodies takes the form of a series of close readings of specific texts or bodies of texts, Fissell argues that these works reveal not just the concerns of the author, but also the social and cultural preoccupations implicated in the transformation of England to a Protestant nation-state. The result of Fissell’s engagement with “cheap print” is an intriguing set of conclusions about the interplay between medical discourse, cultural practices, religious ideas and the process of political change. She argues that over the course of the early modern period attitudes towards reproduction changed dramatically. While before the Reformation, every pregnancy and birth had been viewed as wondrous and mysterious, an “echo” of the Virgin Mary’s miraculous experience, in the sixteenth century the female body was redefined as “problematic and troubling” as pamphlets circulated about witches and murdering mothers and popular gynecological texts made the womb the source of illness, instability, and lasciviousness (73). This rethinking of the female body was intimately connected to concern about the “body politic,” a metaphor that is at the center of Fissell’s work. Within “cheap print,” gender roles within the family were linked, metaphorically and analogically, to notions of social and political order. Thus, Fissell suggests that Nicholas Culpeper’s writing of a midwifery text that inserted the male body into a discussion of childbirth signified a new cultural concern for asserting male authority at a moment when female religious radicalism was challenging the social hierarchy of gender. Similarly, she argues that the comic portrayal of male cuckolds in...
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