Among midwives, we find “many ties and knots, more than those of a fishing net,” states Francisco Santo in his novel Día y noche de Madrid. The thread metaphor employed by the 17th-century author prompts an examination of the signs and symbols that compose ambivalent images of the midwife—a necessary agent with a firm grip on the birth process and bodily knowledge, a crafter of the life text who is yet vulnerable to social sanction, exposure, entrapment, and a paradox confinement by the same myths that empower her figure. A fabricator of social webs, she finds herself entangled in the nets taut by the texts of her time. Keywords: childbirth, craft, early modern Spain, Francisco Santos, midwives, techné