Dr. Louis Schwartz, Associate Professor of English, discusses his new book, Milton and Maternal Mortality, which focuses on how childbirth was associated with fear, suffering and death in early modern England.  This landmark study examines John Milton’s life and work, uncovering evidence of the poet’s engagement with maternal mortality and the dilemmas it presented. Drawing on both literary scholarship and up-to-date historical research, Dr. Schwartz provides important new readings of Milton’s poetry, as well as the medical practices and religious beliefs that surrounded the perils of childbirth during the seventeenth century.