History of childbirth and midwifery

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), de Laurence Sterne, constituye un hito en la memoria literaria universal. Uno de los motivos de la relevancia de la obra reside en que el narrador no nace hasta el libro III, por lo que es la voz del feto no nacido la que hasta ese momento refiere acontecimientos y opiniones desde el vientre materno. No obstante, esa pirueta narrativa se había producido ya en la España Moderna, más de un siglo antes: Antonio Enríquez Gómez publica en 1644 El siglo pitagórico y vida de don Gregorio Guadaña donde introduce de forma explícita la voz en primera persona del niño no nacido en el capítulo segundo.

En el breve relato de don Gregorio hallamos diversos matices relativos a la vida in utero que entroncan, como se verá, con diversas concepciones seculares que hallaremos en las voces de otros autores áureos. Así, se abordan brevemente en este trabajo tópicos como el del augurio del carácter del niño, su futuro oficio o su manera misma de desencadenar el parto.

This book presents the contemporary history and dynamics of Mexican midwifery - professional, (post)modern or autonomous, traditional and Indigenous - as profoundly political and embedded in differing societal stratifications.

By situated politics, the authors refer to various networks, spaces and territories, which are also constructed by the midwives. By politically situated, the authors refer to various intersections, unsettled relations and contexts in which Mexican midwives are positioned. Examining Mexican midwiferies in depth, the volume sharpens the focus on the worlds in which midwives are profoundly immersed as agents in generating and participating in movements, alliances, health professions, communities, homes, territories and knowledges. The chapters provide a complex panorama of midwives in Mexico with an array of insights into their professional and political autonomy, (post)coloniality, body-territoriality, the challenges of defining midwifery, and above all, into the ways in which contemporary Mexican midwiferies relate to a complex set of human rights.

The book will be of interest to a range of scholars from anthropology, sociology, politics, global health, gender studies, development studies, and Latin American studies, as well as to midwives and other professionals involved in childbirth policy and practice.

Hospital de Todos-os-Santos [All Saints Hospital] received since 1504 - the year the Regimento [rules of procedure] were approved - the abandoned or orphaned children of the city. Minors were placed in the Hospital wheel so this institution would foster, support, and educate them. Since 1564 the Hospital administration was entrusted to the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa. Some years later, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake on November 1, 1755, that Confraternity took on the direct responsibility for assisting unprotected children, creating the Hospital dos Expostos [Foundling Hospital].
Therefore, a considerable collection of documents (almost 200 linear metres) relating to the assistance of foundlings, covering a period dating back to the 17th century, is preserved in the Historical Archive of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa (AHSCML). This collection includes different archival series, with common and complementary information.
Some of these series are rare, such as the foundling tokens, which consist in handwritten notes that were left with some children when they were placed on the wheel. Sometimes these documents were accompanied by other pieces of various types.

"This dossier emerges from the workshop “Childbirth and Women's Health in Pre-Modern Societies” that took place in Heidelberg in November 4-5, 2011, and which aimed to offer different perspectives on how birth and the health problems related to it were conceptualized and practically dealt with in pre-modern times. The “pre-modern” here refers to that expanded set of multiple spatial, chronological and cultural conditions in which, through a variety of media, the human agents had learnt, transmitted and practiced medicine before (or in parallel to) the implementation of the historical scientific discourses that were to make a base for the present Western modes of interpretation. The role played by writing and the production of cultural knowledge in the whole process of conceptualizing, understanding, learning, and managing the complex experience of birth, therefore, represent the key element in the articulation of the whole thematic line of this monographic issue.

We intend to present a picture of the medical spheres on pregnancy and birth in the ancient Near East and East-Asian systems, through addressing the same set of questions to the diverse sources available for each case study. This approach will serve the purpose of bringing to light how different disciplines, fields, and materials, have given answer to them."

Planning for a Baby:  https://youtu.be/2iwLh6XCnq8

Pregnancy with IBD: https://youtu.be/br0kciD8xJk

Motherhood with IBD: https://youtu.be/TQjt8pnMv4I


Our aim is to provide an understanding of the experience of women with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) who have made the transition to motherhood. A total of 22 mothers with IBD were recruited from around the United Kingdom. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and analyzed using thematic analysis. The central concept—Blurred Lines—offers a novel frame for understanding the transition to motherhood with IBD through identifying parallels between having IBD and becoming, and being, a mother. Parallels clustered into three main themes: Need for Readiness, Lifestyle Changes, and Monitoring Personal and Physical Development. Hence, women with IBD are in some ways well prepared for the challenges of motherhood even though, as a group, they tend to restrict their reproductive choices. We recommend health professionals initiate conversations about reproduction early and provide a multidisciplinary approach to pregnancy and IBD in which women have confidence that their ongoing treatment will be integrated successfully with their maternity care.

Background
True informed consent and refusal cannot be offered to maternity patients without a clear understanding of the risks and benefits of childbirth options. Unassisted Childbirth, often abbreviated “UC” is a growing trend among birthers in the United States and other nations with similar maternity systems. In some areas the practice has increased more than 10% since 20041. Many professional maternity organizations have come out to strongly discourage this choice, even though very little research has been done into UC safety and outcomes. Some assumptions have been made about the motivation for families seeking to birth unassisted, but very little is known about what is currently driving these families away from the system to birth on their own. The focus of the data collection here presented was prompted by a two-fold inquiry: 1) What are the risk rates for various complications? Are they consistent with expected increased risk? And 2) Why are women leaving the maternity health system?

Beginning in the early 1980s, medical experts and birthing women increasingly voiced criticism of what had long been the technocratic, depersonalized nature of obstetric treatment in Czechoslovakia, despite the limited opportunities for them to do so publicly. A few maternity hospitals responded to the complaints by introducing radically different regimens of care. This article examines the history of one reformist project that took place in the small town of Ostrov nad Ohří. Ostrov means "island" in Czech and, during the last decade of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia, the Ostrov hospital became an island of alternative obstetric care, embracing Leboyer's method of "gentle birthing," acupuncture, fathers in delivery rooms, and assorted technological innovations that aimed to spark fundamental change in familial and social relationships, and humanize childbirth. While many medical professionals decried these reforms as nonsensical and dangerous, a number of p...

Outcaste women, cast-out birth knowledge This paper examines the women who traditionally handled childbirth in the Indian subcontinent—their body knowledge, hand-on skills, rituals and the epistemological framework that informs their lives and work. Needless to say this episteme differs radically from that of the dominant biomedical, public health and English-educated civil society establishments. We at the JEEVA project have turned to dais or, in public health parlance TBAs (Traditional Birth Attendants), themselves in an attempt to hear their voices and comprehend their meanings within their own contexts, communities and homes…. and epistemes. JEEVA research methodologies have inverted various hierarchies by listening carefully to dais themselves and foregrounding their midwifery skills, worldviews, body knowledge and cosmology. JEEVA is a collective of concerned health professionals who came together motivated by a concern to document the best of the dai tradition. We conducted a rapid intensive qualitative study with in-depth interviews of 10 to 12 experienced dais in an area where the traditional practices of dais are still the norm. The research team's attitudes of friendliness, respect and genuine interest in the topic were essential for creating an environment conducive to dais sharing information with us. Our methodology of open-ended questions allowed dais to determine the direction of their responses. We had the additional advantage of being helped and housed by a local NGO, Jan Chetna Manch. The primary data on

"Surrounded by both joys and anxieties, childbirth united women and
men across classes, regions, and religions in medieval Europe even as differences of class, region, and religion produced divergent practices and concerns. The history of childbirth and the postpartum period in medieval Europe is inherently difficult to reconstruct as it was embedded in the lives of women and the household, neither of which normally generated public documents. Nevertheless, creative uses of a variety of source materials have considerably expanded our understanding of the practices and attitudes related to childbirth and the care of the mother and neonate."

This two-part series examines an often-overlooked aspect of Buddhist practice that was ubiquitous in late medieval and early modern China and Japan: cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra. According to the logic of this indigenous Chinese sutra, women are destined for a special hell composed of uterine blood, where they are to be punished for the pollution they produce during childbirth and/or menstruation. While cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra have mostly disappeared in modern times-and despite the fact that they have been largely forgotten, even by historians of East Asia-they were, by the 16th and 17th centuries, a common part of women's religious lives in both China and Japan. Cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra comprised a diverse set of practices that engaged concerns about female bodies, motherhood , filial piety, and suffering in hell. Part I focuses on the development of such cults in China, and Part II focuses on the cults' spread in Japan.

Picking up from where John F. Benton left off in his 1985 study announcing the discovery of the *Practica* of Trota of Salerno, the present investigation brings together all known evidence for the writings and precepts of this early 12th-century Salernitan healer, for whom we have no other contemporary evidence beyond these writings themselves.  Using the evidence of the *Practica secundum Trotam* (“Practical Medicine According to Trota”) as well as the compendium *De egritudinum curatione* (a collection of excerpts from the works of seven Salernitan “masters,” including Trota) and the *De curis mulierum* (“On Treatments for Women”) and even an Anglo-Norman text which purports to record the teachings of Trota, I argue that collation of this evidence shows that Trota's oeuvre was probably much larger than previously suspected. Trota’s historicity was already established by Benton, and she can now be clearly distinguished from the textual fiction “Trotula,” which is in reality just the title of an ensemble of the *De curis mulierum* and two other, unrelated texts of likely male authorship. The present study offers further circumstantial evidence about the historic Trota, suggesting that it is possible to place her in the early 12th century. She was to some extent aware of and in dialogue with fellow male practitioners in Salerno, but she remained peripheral to the general trends toward theory and sophisticated pharmacopeia that characterized the work of her male contemporaries. The study includes editions and translations of excerpts of Trota’s authentic works and other *testimonia*.

Louise Bourgeois (midwife to Queen Marie de Medici) and Jean Héroard (royal doctor) recorded  competing accounts of their roles in 1601 at the birth of the future Louis XIII. As the first French midwife to be published, Bourgeois emphasises the theatricality of the event.

This paper reconstructs the history of the reception across the Italian Catholic world of the first sex education film ever screened in Italy, the documentary “Helga” (Erich F. Bender, 1967). Most Catholics were initially fearful and skeptical about the film and its pedagogical potential, and condemned in particular the decision by the national censorship board that the film was “suitable for all”. However, as the weeks went on, and while the film surprisingly topped the box office, their position became less hostile, and more and more nuanced, to the point that some Catholic teachers started testing “Helga” with teenage classes on sex education.

Cette contribution propose un recensement bibliographique commenté des publications en histoire de l'enfance et des enfants parues depuis 2001. Il s'agit de présenter les principaux thèmes traités, de souligner les nouvelles pistes de recherches en histoire tout en faisant une place à des travaux dans les autres sciences sociales. Après des études prioritairement centrées sur un concept, et les représentations d'une catégorie sociale, l'enfance, les historiens produisent des travaux sur les enfants dans toute leur diversité. Ils prennent en compte la multiplicité des expériences des enfants et des familles, les trajectoires personnelles des individus. Cette approche à la fois plurielle et individuelle de l'enfance se manifeste d'abord par la prise en compte de tous les enfants dans leur diversité d'âge, de sexe et de filiation, ensuite, par une attention particulière portée aux espaces et à la culture matérielle ; enfin, on s'intéresse à tous les acteurs familiaux présents autour des enfants et pas seulement aux père et mère.

From Childhood to children: writing the history of children at the beginning of the XXIth century

This article proposes a commented bibliographical review of the publications in history of childhood and children appeared since 2001. This should be a presentation of the main themes, and the new lines of research in history as well as some works in the other social sciences. After many studies focused on the concept and representation of a social category, childhood, historians work now on children in all their diversity. Account shall be taken in this context of diversity of experiences for children and families, and of individual trajectories. In this approach, children are studied in all the diversity of age, gender and filiation; attention is payed to the study of spaces dedicated to children and the material culture of childhood; last there is increasing interest in learning more about all the relatives around the children and not only the father and the mother.

This article explores the treatment of unmarried mothers by the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) at the Cape of Good Hope during the VOC period (1652-1795) in the belief that by concentrating on this exceptional group of people much is revealed of normative practices. For most of its history at the Cape during this period the DRC was not overly biased against unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children, continuing to baptise such children and never acting against the mothers. This changed in the 1780s when the Church started to deny access to its two sacraments – baptism and Holy Communion – to illegitimate children and their parents. Through a detailed exploration of baptismal petitions for illegitimate children and censure cases involving unmarried mothers, this article reveals the growing obsession with regulating the conduct of single women. It is suggested that the origins of this movement lie both in local Cape developments, viz. the socio-economic upheavals caused by the Revolutionary wars, and – perhaps primarily – in changing attitudes towards motherhood created by Enlightenment ideas and Pietistic religion. At the Cape this new ideology was disseminated by the DRC minister H.R. van Lier who used existing Reformed dogma about the sacraments to regulate the morals of unmarried mothers.

Dans le contexte de l'Antiquité, où l'avortement est envisagé sous l'angle de sa fonctionnalité, à savoir celui de la satisfaction des besoins privés d'une femme et de sa famille, comment se situaient les médecins de l'époque vis-à-vis de l'avortement? C'est la question que nous allons mettre à l'ouvrage dans cet article. La lecture des textes médicaux anciens, notamment les textes gynécologiques et embryologiques, nous apprend que contrairement aux représentations de l'époque, les médecins de l'Antiquité envisageaient l'avortement sous l'angle de la dangerosité de ladite pratique, autrement dit en se focalisant essentiellement sur les conséquences potentiellement néfastes de l'avortement sur la santé des femmes. Ainsi, en s'orientant à partir d'une approche essentiellement technique de leur position, nous essaierons de mettre en lumière que : a) la détermination du temps et des méthodes d'avortement constitue pour les médecins de l'Antiquité une question intimement liée aux stades de la conception et de la gestation et b) le degré de dangerosité de l'avortement est intimement lié à l'état de l'embryon à chacun de ces stades.

L’exploration de l’histoire de l'accouchement relève d’un travail d’audace nécessaire et utile pour accompagner les contemporains qui doivent pouvoir bénéficier de savoirs susceptibles d’éclairer leurs décisions. Des savoirs exacts, consistants, inscrits dans des récits qui leur procurent sens et cohérence. Je plaiderai que les expériences des femmes doivent être historicisées en gardant à l’esprit que ce qu’elles nous apprennent directement ne suffit pas à nous éclairer et qu’une analyse des modalités de leur production est indispensable. « [I]l faut nous intéresser aux processus historiques qui, à travers le discours, positionnent les sujets et produisent leur expérience », nous invitait avec lucidité Joan Scott.
Parties :
1) L’accouchement serait-il un non-sujet?
2) L’ambiance de lassitude et d’anxiété
3) Attention! L’histoire de l’accouchement est subversive! Féminisme, tabou médical et histoire engagée

The emerging area of the Philosophy of Birth is invaluable, first, to diagnose fallacious assumptions about the relation between the womb and reason, and, ultimately, to challenge potentially damaging narratives with major impact on birth care. With its analysis of eighteenth century epistemic and medical discussions about the role of the uterus in women's reasoning (or lack of reasoning), this article supports two arguments: first, that women's "flawed thinking" was a premise drawn by many modern intellectual men, one that was presented as based upon empirical evidence; and second, that the pervasive construction of the uterus as an element that renders women wild, uncontrollable, and irrational continues to influence contemporary obstetrics (and maybe even to nurture obstetric violence), even as today's medicine and science consider themselves to be free of any such prejudices.
    This article shows the role that Giacomo Casanova played in debunking these prejudices and presents his short manuscript on the issue as an important contribution to the literature of the Enlightenment, with its argument against women's supposed "natural" inferiority and for the idea that differences in education (rather than anatomical differences) were to blame for women's subordinate position in society.
    Detailed analysis of the "thinking uterus" debate illuminates the different ways in which various arguments from/by the "anti-uterine" lobby were used to justify the subordination of women: sometimes emphasizing the connection between the uterus and thought and sometimes negating it, but always concluding that women's inferiority is to be found in some known or yet-to-be-discovered anatomical, and mainly sexual, deficiency or problem.

This list, published as an Appendix to my 2000 book, *Women's Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts*, provides a summary list of all texts on women's medicine that are known from medieval western Europe. All languages are surveyed: Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, English, French (including Anglo-Norman), German, Hebrew, Irish, Italian, Latin. Many of these texts have never been published; in those cases, all manuscript witnesses known are listed. Some new information has come to light since this was first published in 2000; please direct any queries to me at: monica.h.green@gmail.com.

This essay critiques the idea--common in feminist historiography--that throughout the Middle Ages "women's health was women's business."  Using the evidence of women as medical practitioners (which is minimal) and that of texts on women's medicine, I argue that the gendering of knowledge production and practice in the fields of women's healthcare was complicated.  Women had no monopoly in the field.  Indeed, it is questionable whether much of the written work on women's medicine was written for female readers.

The present file includes the corrigenda and addenda, updated up through 2010, to Monica H. Green, “Women’s Medical Practice and Health Care in Medieval Europe,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14 (1988-1989), 434-73. This review essay, summarizing the state of the field in the late 1980s, was first reprinted with minor corrections in Sisters and Workers in the Middle Ages, ed. J. Bennett, E. Clark, J. O’Barr, B. Vilen, and S. Westphal-Wihl (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 39-78. It was reprinted a second time (here from the Sisters and Workers version) in Women’s Healthcare in the Medieval West: Texts and Contexts, Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS680 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).  In the last reprint, Corrigenda and Addenda were included. I have here updated the Corrigenda and Addenda by including references to works published between 1988 (when it was sent to press) and 2010.

This essay was meant to capture the state of the field in the late 1980s. A lot has happened in the history of women and medicine since then. (Note that ALL the statements regarding the Middle English tradition of gynecological writings were superseded by my later work; see especially my publications in 1992, 2003, 2006, and 2008.)  Readers are encouraged to refer both to my subsequent writings (especially my 2008 book, *Making Women's Medicine Masculine*) and to the 82-page bibliography, Monica H. Green, “Bibliography on Medieval Women, Gender, and Medicine (1980-2009),” available gratis at http://www.sciencia.cat/biblioteca/publicacionssc.htm, and here on my Academia.edu page.

The original article can be found on JStor at this URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3174557, or by writing to me directly:  monica.h.green@gmail.com.

La maternidad, situada en un cruce de caminos disciplinar, se ha convertido en un tema historiográfico por derecho propio y ha dejado de leerse como una circunstancia exclusivamente biológica para verse también como un hecho social clave en la construcción de la identidad histórica de las reinas de España.

De Carlos reconstruye en estas páginas la cultura de los nacimientos de los Austrias españoles a través de diversas fuentes, pues no se centra exclusivamente en los tratados morales y científicos, sino que toma como punto de partida las representaciones visuales relacionadas con los embarazos y partos regios.

Original y escrupulosamente documentado, este libro es el primer estudio en el ámbito hispano que combina las dimensiones biológica, simbólica y social de la maternidad y por lo tanto supone un paso importante para reconstruir este fenómeno con todas sus derivadas en la corte española de los Austrias.

Por María Cruz de Carlos Varona
Prólogo de María José del Río
296 pp., 44 ils. en color
30 euros
ISBN 978-84-15245-76-6

Motherhood, which stands at a disciplinary crossroads, has become a historiographic subject in its own right. It has gone from being viewed as an exclusively biological circumstance to being considered a key social factor in shaping the historical identity of the queens of Spain.

In her book De Carlos carries out an original and well-documented reconstruction of the culture of the births of the Spanish Habsburgs  basing her study on very different sources, as she does not focus exclusively on moral and scientific treatises but takes as her starting point visual depictions related to royal pregnancies and births.

This book marks an important step towards reconstructing the phenomenon of motherhood and all its derivatives at the Spanish court of the Habsburgs and fills a gap in our historiography.

Por María Cruz de Carlos Varona
Preface by María José del Río
296 pages, 44 color illustrations
30 euros
ISBN 978-84-15245-76-6

The treatise on gynecology and obstetrics composed in the 5th or 6th century by an otherwise unknown North African writer called Muscio (or Mustio) was surprisingly influential in medieval Europe. The original work was accompanied by a diagram of the uterus and a series of images meant to show the various ways the fetus could malpresent at birth. Advocating what was known as the "Methodist" system of medicine (which he drew from his main Greek source, Soranus of Ephesus), Muscio's Gynecology was no longer fully comprehensible when it was retrieved for new scrutiny in the later 11th century. Abbreviated versions of the text eliminated most of what was distinctive about the Methodist approach, leaving only simplified instructions for birth attendance, etc. The images, in turn, were extracted from the text and began to circulate separately in the 13th century, first being attached to the Surgery of al-Zahrawi (Albucasis) and then, in the 15th century, absorbed several times into new Latin or vernacular compendia on fertility and women's medicine.

These brief notes summarize the general trajectories of the text and images of Muscio over a 1000+ year period. Also included are links to those manuscripts of Muscio (including the fetal images) that have thus far been digitized and made publicly available.

With reference to the works of Charles Darwin, legal commentators and psychiatrists, this article explores the meaning of maternity in the Victorian and Edwardian periods with particular reference to puerperal mania, puerperal melancholia and infanticide (‘puerperal’ relating to childbirth or the period immediately following) . It illustrates how parturition was regarded as the fulcrum of women’s instability. ‘Puerperal insanity’ was a ‘catch-all’ phase used to describe a wide variety of reactions to pregnancy and childbirth. These ranged from the understandable despair of a young girl experiencing an illegitimate pregnancy, to the mother of ten infants who hallucinated because she breastfed whilst malnourished. The essay illustrates that some women clearly suffering from postpartum microbial infections were defined as having puerperal mania ; their feverish delirium was mistaken for maniacal insanity. The sanctions for maniacal behaviour, or understandable chagrin if vigorously expressed, were often very harsh and included institutionalisation, the use of restraints (chains or straitjackets) and seclusion. Puerperal melancholia was particularly associated with exhaustion, the mental cruelty of husbands and poverty. As Bucknill and Tuke’s remarks will make clear, parturition was a time when women were particularly at risk of being defined as insane.

The paper deals with the intent of re-reading some works of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Froebel concerning the early childhood education, in order to emphasize the central figure of the mother, recognized as the first educator – and not only nurturer – of her children. This issue represented a sort of “springboard” to a new look on mother-child relationship, family and education, in order to promote  a «pedagogy of mother».

Edited and translated by Margaret L. King. In 1415, twenty-five years old and as yet unmarried, fresh from his humanist and legal studies, Francesco Barbaro produced a remarkable book: a marriage manual intended at once for his friend, a scion of the Florentine Medici family, and for the whole set of his peers, the young nobility of Venice. It was remarkable in countering the trends of the day toward dowry chasing and dowry inflation. Instead, Barbaro insisted that the true wealth of wives was not the cash they brought to a marriage, but their capacity to conceive, birth, and rear worthy children. The long-term success of the male elite depended, ironically, on females: for they alone could ensure the biological, moral, and intellectual reproduction of their marital lineage. A work little noted by modern scholars of humanism, The Wealth of Wives circulated from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries in more than 100 manuscript versions, five Latin editions, and several translations into German, Italian, French, and English, by those measures far outstripping in influence the work better known today: Leon Battista Alberti’s On the Family (1434).

Part II turns to Japan, the other major East Asian region where beliefs and practices related to blood hells became commonplace, especially in the early modern period. This article traces Japanese reception of cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra, examining the particular ways in which blood hell cults developed there. As was the case in China, Japanese cults to the Blood Bowl Sutra often emphasized postmortem care for women and were disseminated largely through entertaining storytelling traditions. The cult also came to be associated, as it had been in China, with rites for safe childbirth. After examining the cults' historical development in Japan, this article will consider some of the larger insights made possible through a broadly conceived comparison of Chinese and Japanese cults to the blood hells.

In the earliest concrete examples of magic squares from Chinese, Indian, and Arabic literature, the squares are valued not simply as mathematical curiosities but as objects of wondrous powers. Recent research on early Arabic awfāq (magic squares) literature has identified a large corpus with several known authors, but studies of this corpus tend to focus on mathematical analyses. This article sketches a cultural history of awfāq, which contextualizes them within wider Islamicate culture, situating awfāq literature within the oeuvres of the scholars who produced it, and locating those scholars within networks of patrons, colleagues, and institutions. Beginning with magic squares in pre-Islamic cultures and the continuation of those traditions, this article explores Islamicate legends of the origins and transmission of the awfāq and surveys the corpus of Arabic awfāq literature from the mid-third/ninth to the late sixth/twelfth centuries in an attempt to grasp the background, context, and significance of the great popularity of awfāq in talismanic practices associated with the Science of Letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf).