A nun who ruled in delivery rooms: Mariana de Jesús and the midwife Inés de Ayala

IV The passage into the world

In Golden Age Spain, birth is a matter for older women, and, surprisingly, also for nuns. Inés de Ayala (1590-1663), midwife of two Spanish queens, learned her craft from her own mother. Both women were close friends of Mariana de Jesús (1565-1624), today one of the patron saints of Madrid. Mariana belonged to the Mercedarian Order and enjoyed a reputation of a saintly life in the Madrid of Philipp III and Philipp IV. Her popularity, which lasted on after her death, to a great degree was due to the comfort and hope she brought to delivery rooms and to those difficult births where «human remedies» failed.

There, the holy woman prayed that God might guide the midwives –Inés de Ayala and her mother– to do the right thing, she places sacred objects on the parturient woman’s womb, and even disallowed the use of dangerous cures.

This was precisely the case when, on one occasion, doctors intended to bring about the expulsion of a dead foetus by means of a potion which, according to the nun, would also have caused the death of the mother. Inés de Ayala, the above-mentioned royal midwife, later testified to this event. She herself was assisted by beata Mariana when her life was in danger after a miscarriage. 

Inés for her part was present when her own daughter and her daughter-in-law gave birth. In 1645, in a house of the parish of San Justo y Pastor, she administered emergency baptism to her granddaughter Gerónima Francisca. Already in 1638, she had obtained the post of a court midwife. She first served queen Isabel de Borbón, ten years her junior, and then Mariana de Austria, who was 44 years younger than she. [Wolfram Aichinger]