First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

While many scholars have considered the complexities of sex and sexuality in literary texts, childbirth is a central experience that has been overlooked in literary scholarship. Drawing together social and medical history and literary studies, The Reproductive Unconscious in Late Medieval and Early Modern England shows that medieval and early modern men and women had to negotiate a conflict between the ideological and material need of the culture for them to procreate, and an ideological injunction that they remain virginal and non-procreative. It also demonstrates the effects of these negotiations on textual productions.