(Mis)Conceptions: A Cultural History of Pregnancy Indeterminacy

(Mis)Conceptions is a cultural history of the uncertainty before pregnancy outcomes are known. Reproductive uncertainty, often a preliminary or side-topic in reproductive historical research, is here centrally defining. Diagnostic ambiguity affects pregnancy; failed pregnancy, faked, denied or hidden pregnancy; or conditions that resemble pregnancy.

Uncertain states could be extended, recurrent, or chronic before foetal imaging and modern diagnostic technologies. This project shows that pregnancy indeterminacy was widely lived, afforded extensive space and explicitly discussed in historical writing. At the same time, (Mis)Conceptions raises awareness of the fact that, although it is now encountered differently, pregnancy uncertainty isn't only a thing of the past. Can historical insight make that experience more culturally visible or better understood?

(Mis)Conceptions resists a teleological approach to reproduction by de-emphasizing outcomes. Instead, the project foregrounds ontology and epistemology as problems shared by medical and historical writers, drawing a productive analogy between the historical archive and the body. Thinking about diagnosis and history writing together brings new perspectives on the subjective search for proof: the nature of evidence, classifications of signs/symptoms, experimental practice, experience and authority. (Mis)Conceptions particularly addresses pregnancy's negative history.

The proofs of not conceiving are harder to find. This project explores the myths and other fictional forms which emerge in the absence of knowledge.

Through the culturally overdetermined case of Mary Tudor (1516-58), who suffered two non-reproductive pregnancy events, I will focus on myths and fictions generated at the intersection of historiographical and medical writing. How have historians and medical writers, at different historical junctures, conspired to engender twin gothic monsters: Mary and ambiguous non-reproductive experiences? (Mis)Conceptions takes a cultural historical, feminist approach, asking not only about how reproductive indeterminacy and non-reproduction were understood in the medieval world in which Mary was socialised, but also how Mary's case shaped later medical or fictional ideas about reproductive indeterminacy which have, in turn, fed back into accounts of her reign and its colonial and sectarian politics.

These investigations consider how different historical moments gathered in, synthesized, and interpreted prior texts and ideas to create new pictures of both the body and the past. How does pregnancy ambiguity inform us about cultures of history making, and how does a study of historical practice alter our understandings of pregnancy ambiguity?

An imaginative leadership agenda in public engagement will marshal conceptual pre-modern materials from the rich hinterland of this single example - e.g. future forecasting, theories of mind and body, diagnostic tools and techniques, and experimental practice - to contribute to debates about contemporary fertility health. An interdisciplinary engagement team - including a visual artist - will work with two focus groups (1. fertility counsellors and counselling students; 2. people with experience of trying to conceive) to develop public resources which use historical ideas and aesthetics to research the psychology of pregnancy indeterminacy today.

How did people negotiate, ameliorate and tolerate the reproductive unknown in the past, and can history and art help understand modern fertility experience? This engagement agenda uses history and art to create a 'space apart', beyond the self, establishing an alternative vantage point on the experience of reproductive uncertainty. The team will carry public engagement learning back into academic conversations about using history to challenge unexamined assumptions and historical legacies that shape current experience, and to articulate the pleasure and value of investigating the past.