What can a sonnet teach us about the history of women’s reproductive bodies? For the early modern world, notions about pregnancy and childbirth have been well documented by historians, who have combed through archival and print materials composed by the period’s medical, religious, and humanist authorities. Literary texts, however, have been consulted less, including lyric poetry; short, emotional poems are not normally among the historian’s go-to objects. Yet lyric is rife with representations of motherhood. Examples appear in verse written in vernacular and in Latin, in poems of Marian worship and of autobiographic account, such as the prolific poet Francesca Turina (1553–1641), who composed numerous poems on miscarriage, childbirth, and early motherhood.

The details captured in her descriptions both complicate standard historical narratives and flesh out our understanding of family practices in this period, shading in scholarly models with affective dimensions. This paper expands our understanding of the history of women’s reproductive autonomy by tracing depictions of pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, birth, and nursing in Renaissance Italian lyric poetry. Unlike texts by medical and theological authorities, lyric provides access to personal experience and can do so on a wider scale: it was the most democratic of literary genres, practiced by men of various social stripes, and, in early modern Italy, by numerous women.