Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England

Patricia Crawford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317876854
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This collection of essays contains a wealth of information on the nature of the family in the early modern period. This is a core topic within economic and social history courses which is taught at most universities.  This text gives readers an overview of how feminist historians have been interpreting the history of the family, ever since Laurence Stone's seminal work FAMILY, SEX AND MARRIAGE IN ENGLAND 1500-1800 was published in 1977. The text is divided into three coherent parts on the following themes: bodies and reproduction; maternity from a feminist perspective; and family relationships. Each part is prefaced by a short introduction commenting on new work in the area. This book will appeal to a wide variety of students because of its sociological, historical and economic foci.

CHAPTER 1

Attitudes to menstruation in seventeenth-century England

I

Menstruation is an important aspect of being female. It is also one of the biological differences between the sexes to which different cultures have given different meaning. Social roles and relations between the sexes are sustained by ideas and beliefs about menstruation. Psychologists and anthropologists have long been interested in beliefs about menstruation, which they have interpreted variously in terms, for example, of male anxieties about castration and of taboos that function to protect men from the dangers that menstruating women represent. But until relatively recently historians have preferred to write about women and their place in society without reference to this physiological process and its social meaning. Menstruation has been seen as a purely female matter of no historical importance. In addition, historians’ own repugnance and the taboo of silence may explain their lack of interest. But historians are now becoming aware that a study of apparently irrational fears and superstitions may be as illuminating for our understanding of how past societies functioned as the more conventional areas of historical investigation.

A study of beliefs about menstruation is neither a mere feminist redressing of historians’ balance of interest nor a mere revelation of the superstitions of the past. It is essential for an understanding of the position of women in the society. There is no single determinant of the position of women in seventeenth-century English society – birth, wealth, ability, all played a part as well as biology – but the fact that ideally women were assigned inferior roles, which in practice they generally accepted, can be partly explained in terms of ideas about the nature of women.¹ In this chapter I wish to explore the beliefs about menstruation, showing both how the explanations of menstruation were constructed in terms of female inferiority and how these explanations in turn were used to justify women’s inferior position in the society. Physicians who explained the functioning of the human body, the process of reproduction and with it menstruation, believed that women were inferior. They then argued that women’s physiology led them into many weaknesses and errors. Medical explanations of menstruation influenced popular understanding of the process. Unfortunately any study of the beliefs about menstruation and the associated language must be largely about the ideas and words used by men. Because male culture was dominant, these are the most important, but they are not necessarily shared by women, and women’s ideas need to be considered separately.²

Since the sources for this study relate chiefly to the literate levels of society, the experiences of the vast majority of women are unrecorded. But there is a range of source material. Medical practitioners discussed the menstrual experiences of women in general, and were curious about unusual case histories, although as their services were only for those who could afford them,³ their knowledge of country women and poor women was limited and frequently second-hand. Nevertheless medical works of one kind or another provide an account of the physiology and pathology of menstruation. Some of these were published internationally in Latin, some were written in English or at least translated. They range from original contributions to rehashes of old ideas, for there is no clear line of progress in medical knowledge during the seventeenth century. It took time for important discoveries to be accepted, and many physicians still tried to fit the new ideas into the framework of the ancient classical medical theories.⁴ To announce that they had ‘pressed the footsteps of the best and most approued Authors’ seemed to some writers to be the best way of guaranteeing the soundness of their work.⁵ During the sixteenth century, books were printed to meet a growing demand, and in the seventeenth century, during the Civil Wars, the movement for freeing medical knowledge from the monopoly control of the medical profession led to an increase in the translation of medical works and the publication of many more ‘popular’ handbooks.⁶ Writers of these popular works culled their ideas uncritically from a variety of traditional texts, popular customs and folklore. In considering attitudes to menstruation the source material is more diverse. There is the work of biblical commentators and preachers who explained the social implications of the biblical texts. There are also the casebooks of physicians and astrologers whom women consulted, and the diaries of some men who commented on their wives’ menstrual experiences. While the sources for women’s own attitudes are extremely limited, they do merit investigation.

The major influence upon ideas about menstruation at the beginning of the seventeenth century was religious. The Bible was interpreted as an explanation of female inferiority and subordination, and in particular, the texts in Leviticus that defined menstruating women as polluted and polluting were taken very seriously. Medical theories explained and justified the biblical view of women as inferior, but it remains to be seen how both the religious and medical beliefs were influenced by the scientific discoveries of the seventeenth century.

II

During the seventeenth century a wide range of language was used to refer to menstruation. The terminology ranges from the apparently poetic, ‘the flowers’, through the neutral, ‘the terms’, ‘the courses’ and ‘the months’, to expressions which emphasized aspects of female weakness, ‘sickness’, ‘monthly disease’ and ‘monthly infirmity’.⁷ Medical writers might use Latin or Greek terms such as menstris, menses or catamenia, but they also used general ones such as ‘monthly evacuations’ or ‘natural purgations’. Various circumlocutions were employed: ‘the time of your wonted grief’ or ‘those Evacuations of the weaker Sex’.⁸ In the privacy of their diaries, women and men refer simply to ‘them’ or ‘those’.⁹ Menstrual blood was referred to as an excrement, and the process itself as a ‘Monthly flux of Excrementitious and Unprofitable Blood’.¹⁰ Because many of the popular medical works were reprinted many times during the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, changes in language are hard to document, but the phrase ‘at those monthly periods’ was used for the time of menstruation as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century.¹¹ What this language meant will be better understood by a consideration of contemporary medical explanations of menstruation, which are but part of a wider understanding of human reproduction.

Investigations of the physiology and pathology of menstruation were numerous during the seventeenth century, but the variety of ideas and the generally agreed tenets are of more use in revealing the general climate of opinion than are the accounts of medical discoveries that had real scientific importance.¹² The two main although conflicting ideas about the purpose of menstruation were either that it purified the blood of females, or removed from their bodies an excess of blood. The idea of a purification came from Hippocrates, who had argued that women were of a colder and less active disposition than men, so that while men could sweat in order to remove the impurities from their blood, the colder dispositions of women did not allow them to be purified in that way. Females menstruated to rid their bodies of impurities: ‘Some call them purgations, because that by this fluxe all a womans body is purged of superfluous humours’.¹³ Menstruation was precipitated by a fermentation in the blood. Physicians likened the fermentation to that of wine or malt liquors, in the process of which the liquid ‘flings up to the Surface a sort of Scum abounding with Air, which is call’d the Flowers’.¹⁴ The menstrual blood which a woman shed was ‘the flower’ of her fermented blood. While ‘flower’ may refer to the best and choicest (as in political discussion of royal prerogative as ‘flowers of the Crown’), no writer refers to the menstrual blood shed by a woman as the choicest part of her blood. Rather it is impure, and thought to have a noisome smell.¹⁵ But although the term ‘the flowers’ may have its origin in the idea of the purification of a woman’s blood by fermentation, words also take on meanings of their own, so that some thought menstruation was named ‘the flowers’ because fruit followed.¹⁶ By the early eighteenth century the idea of purification by fermentation or purgation had come to be questioned among learned writers.¹⁷

The other view of menstruation contradicted that of purification of the blood. This idea was that menstruation was the shedding of a plethora. Women’s bodies were inferior to men’s. They could not use all the blood they ‘concocted’ from the food they digested. Women who ate rich, moist foods concocted even more blood than those ‘among the ranke of meane people, where euerie one must worke for a liuing, and are not pampered with full and daintie fare’.¹⁸ The excess of blood might be used to nourish a child in the womb, or be converted into milk, for ‘milke is none other thing than blood made white’.¹⁹ If a woman were neither pregnant nor breastfeeding, the excess of blood gradually built up in her body until it was discharged through one of the ‘Natural passages’.²⁰ This idea of a plethora had been expounded by Galen in the second century, and was still accepted by the most important of the eighteenth-century writers on women’s diseases, Jean Astruc.²¹ Nevertheless it had its critics: Drake in 1707, for example, argued that menstruation could not be the discharge of a plethora, since if blood increased daily women would not be surprised by the onset of menstruation.²²

Menstrual blood also had a part to play in the conception and nourishment of a child. Aristotle claimed that a woman excrete...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Publisher’s acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Attitudes to menstruation in seventeenth-century England
• 2 Sexual knowledge in England, 1500–1750
• 3 The construction and experience of maternity in seventeenth-century England
• 4 Blood and paternity
• 5 ‘The sucking child’: adult attitudes to child care in the first year of life in seventeenth-century England
• 6 Katharine and Philip Henry and their children: a case study in family ideology
• 7 Sibling relationships
• Further reading
• Index