Around​ the year 1500, in Eisenach, Thuringia, a woman gave birth to a mouse. According to rumour, this ‘beautiful and virtuous’ woman had, during her pregnancy, encountered a dormouse on which a neighbour had tied a little bell to scare away other dormice. This unexpected vision imprinted itself on the foetus in her womb. In the days after the birth, news spread through the community, reaching a young Martin Luther, then studying in the town. Decades later, writing his commentary on Genesis 30:39, Luther recalled the story and noted it as evidence of the risks facing pregnant women: ‘miscarriages, monsters and various deformities’.

At almost the same moment that the unnamed Eisenach woman was delivered of her gliriform offspring, someone in England was making a parchment scroll designed to guard against the dangers of childbirth. This scroll, Wellcome Collection MS 632, is an exceptionally rare survival from a once common genre. It forms the centrepiece of Expecting: Birth, Belief and Protection (until 19 April), which juxtaposes contemporary artworks and historical artefacts to illustrate the protective practices surrounding pregnancy, childbirth and infertility, past and present.

The scroll itself is more than three metres long and just ten centimetres wide, constructed from four strips of parchment stitched together. It contains a series of prayers invoking St Cyricus and his mother, St Julitta – early Christian martyrs associated with childbirth. Its images, drawn in red and black ink, relate to the Passion of Christ: holy nails with drops of blood; the Arma Christi (instruments of Christ’s torture); a crucifix; the five wounds. The reader is encouraged to meditate on the number of drops of blood that fell from Christ’s body (547,500), glossed here as ‘a devotional and calming technique’ akin to mindfulness. An inscription on the reverse of the scroll explains the way it should be used: ‘Yf a woman travell [travailing] wyth chylde gyrdes thys mesure abowte hyr wombe … she shall be safe delyvyrd wythowte parelle [peril] and the chylde shall have crystendome and the mother puryfycatyon’ (i.e. both will survive long enough for salvific rituals to take place). The text emphasises physical contact with the parchment for greatest effectiveness. The scroll could be wrapped around the stomach and perhaps also between the legs in a cross-like formation, literally ‘girding the loins’, and bringing the inscriptions and images into direct contact with the woman’s skin.

Demonstrating that surviving birth scrolls were actually deployed in labour has proved difficult. Until now, this scroll’s worn surface and suggestive staining constituted the main evidence for its use in childbirth. However, new research by Sarah Fiddyment, presented in the exhibition, reveals that human proteins found on the scroll’s surface indicate the presence of cervico-vaginal fluid. This is an important breakthrough in the burgeoning field of biocodicology, which seeks out the invisible traces left behind by users of manuscripts, as they held, rubbed or kissed a parchment. Previously, such analyses required invasive sampling methods, removing physical fragments from the page. For this investigation, however, Fiddyment deployed an innovative technique called triboelectric extraction: a PVC eraser is wiped across the surface, transferring substances through static electricity from the parchment to the eraser rubbings, from where they can be analysed.

Other artefacts in the exhibition help the visitor to imagine the medieval birthing scene. An English adaptation of Eucharius Rösslin’s advice manual for pregnant women, The Birth of Mankynde: Otherwyse Named the Womans Booke (1540), is open at a page showing a woodcut image of a birthing chair and two illustrations of the foetus as it was imagined to lie inside the womb. In one of them, the child is depicted in a breech position, ready to emerge feet-first. A 15th-century recipe collection, open at a drawing of a swaddled baby in a rocking cradle, provides a wider context for the other proteins found on the birth scroll’s surface: honey, milk, egg and legumes. All were common in medieval medical recipes, both consumed and applied to the body during pregnancy and labour.

An anonymous Italian painting from the 15th century offers a more comprehensive view of the lying-in chamber, where the pregnant woman would retreat for weeks before and after giving birth. A new mother sits in a four-poster bed, listening to a seated woman who has just cast the baby’s horoscope on a table. A nun holds up a warning hand to the astrologer, but another woman leans in eagerly. The other women busy themselves with washing the baby and warming cloths by the fire for drying and swaddling. A man, presumably the father, pauses on the threshold at the back of the scene, hesitating to enter this female space.

The four-poster bed, magnificent fireplace and high coffered ceiling, and the use of real gold pigment throughout the image, suggest a high-status setting. But the walls and bed hangings are plain: the only patterns are on the ceiling and floor tiles. For fear of the same mechanism that caused the woman in Eisenach to give birth to a mouse (the theory of ‘maternal impressions’), the decoration of confinement chambers was often strictly regulated. In 1489, when Elizabeth of York retired for the birth of her second child to King Henry VII, ordinances required that the chamber should be hung with ‘rich cloth of blue arras [tapestry incorporating gold and silver threads] with fleurs-de-lys of gold, without any other cloth of arras of imagery, which is not convenient about women in such cases’. During Elizabeth’s seventh, and fatal, pregnancy in 1502, the privy purse paid out six shillings and eight pence ‘to a monke that brought our Lady gyrdelle to the Quene’.

The exhibition also considers the medicinal and protective use of scrolls in other cultures. Two Ethiopian scrolls, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, are on display, though the use of protective scrolls in the region can be traced back to at least the 12th century. The Ethiopian scrolls are much like their English equivalents: strips of parchment adorned with texts and images – an angel with a sword and a cross surrounded by eyes, a seraph-like entity with five faces and four wings – designed to ward off malicious demons and the evil eye in one case, and to protect against vaginal haemorrhage and miscarriage in the other. The former is displayed alongside its leather pouch; such objects could be carried, discreetly rolled, for protection on the move.

Common to the Ethiopian and English scrolls is a belief in the protective power of significant dimensions. The inscriptions on the Wellcome scroll include the line ‘Thys moetyn [measure] ys oure lady seynt mary length,’ suggesting that the span of the scroll – a startling ten foot nine – corresponds to the height of the Virgin Mary. Elsewhere the text refers to the legend that its dimensions were sent from the Virgin Mary to (an unnumbered) Pope Leo via an angel, with the promise of protection to anyone ‘who so beryth thys mesure uppon hym’. The length of some Ethiopian scrolls was determined by the height of the person they were made for, guaranteeing protection from head to foot.

The meaning embedded in the scrolls’ dimensions tells us something about the interplay between religion, science and folklore. But it also points to a particular notion of touch. At the time the Wellcome birth girdle was created, sight itself was conceived as a form of touch, involving contact between the viewed object and beams emitted from the eyes (extramission) or – theorists weren’t decided – between the eyes and particles emitted by the object (intromission). It was the tactile power of sight that made pregnant women, such as the one in Eisenach, vulnerable to monstrous births.

The exhibition also includes works by contemporary artists that address themes of protection and childbearing. The Senegalese artist Seyni Awa Camara’s two terracotta figures emphasise the collaborative nature of parenthood. Each has a discernible head, feet and arms, but the pair’s elongated torsos are made up of many smaller heads and hands – whole families, or dynasties, in a single body. The anxiety and isolation of fertility treatment is evoked by Tabitha Moses’s hospital gown, which is embroidered with a version of the female reproductive system (the uterus looks like lacy knickers) surrounded by apotropaic symbols, pill bottles, syringes and a drop of blood. The accompanying photograph, ‘Melanie’, shows a woman on a hospital ward wearing the gown: the embroidered section falls across her stomach in a modern version of the birth scroll.

The curators make the point that, even in wealthy countries, childbirth continues to be dangerous, and many of the contemporary pieces underscore this effectively. But the parallels between the world of the 15th-century birth scroll and our own are a little too quickly drawn. There is much room for improvement in today’s maternity care, but few in Britain would choose to give birth in 1506 rather than 2026, and an ultrasound, though magical in its way, is more useful than a crucifix pressed to the stomach. What remains unchanged is our desire to ensure the success of conception, pregnancy and birth, and our need to find ways of managing the fact that we cannot.