Maggie Vinter

Contributor

Maggie Vinter is an Associate Professor of English Literature at Case Western Reserve University. Her book, Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage (Fordham University Press, 2019), explores how the sixteenth and seventeenth century theater engages with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly.

The Deathbed

What to Expect When You’re Expiring: Pregnancy and Death in Seventeenth-Century England

By Maggie Vinter • May 14, 2020

On October 12, 1622, a 26-year-old English woman named Elizabeth Jocelin gave birth to her first child, a baby girl. Nine days later, she died of puerperal fever, an infection of the genital tract — most likely from bacteria accidentally introduced by a birthing attendant during labor — that can cause fatal sepsis in postpartum… Read more →