Notes
Introduction: ‘Those Sweet and Benign Humours That Nature Sends Monthly’: Reading Menstruation and Vaginal Bleeding
1. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 71. 2. Peter Laslett Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 217. 3. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (London: W.W. Norton, 2003), pp. 44–5. 4. Herbert Silvette, Doctor on the Stage: Medicine and Medical Men in Seventeenth- Century England (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1967), p. 2. 5. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, Tales from the Hanging Court (London: Hodder Arnold, 2007), p. xvi. 6. Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 3. 7. Elizabeth Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (London: University of Rochester Press, 2002), pp. 45–6. 8. See Elaine Hobby, ‘Introduction’ in Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. xv–xxxiv (p. xix). 9. Dror Wahrman, ‘Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Gender History: Or, Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?’ Gender & History, 20.3 (2008), 584–602 (p. 585). 10. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 25. 11. Jennifer Evans, ‘ “Gentle Purges Corrected with Hot Spices, Whether They Work of Not, Do Vehemently Provoke Venery”: Menstrual Provocation and Procreation in Early Modern England’, Social History of Medicine, 25.1 (2012), 2–19. 12. Margaret Healy, ‘Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Beliefs in Early Modern England’, in National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Cross-Cultural Context, ed. by Michael Worton and Nana Wilson-Tagoe (London: UCL Press, 2004), pp. 83–94 (pp. 90–2). 13. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 192–3. 14. Jakob Rueff, The Expert Midwife: Or an Excellent and most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man (London: S. Burton [1554] 1637), p. 49.
188 Notes 189
15. Here I refer particularly, but not exclusively, to the works (in alphabetical order) of Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth- Century, England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 47–73 and Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2004); Wendy D. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), particularly Chapter 2 ‘The Treatment of Female-Specific Complaints by Male Hands’, pp. 91–140; Lessel Dawson, ‘Menstruation, Misogyny, and the Cure for Love’, Women’s Studies 34 (2005), 461–84; Jennifer Evans, ‘Gentle Purges Corrected with Hot Spices, Whether they Work of Not, do Vehemently Provoke Venery’ cited above; Monica H. Green, ‘Flowers, Poi- son and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 51–75; Margaret Healy, ‘Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Beliefs in Early Modern England’ cited above; Bethan Hindson, ‘Attitudes Towards Menstruation and Menstrual Blood in Elizabethan England’, Journal of Social History, 43.1 (2009), 89–114; Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and The Prob- lems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2003); Jenijoy Labelle, ‘“A Strange Infirmity”: Lady Macbeth’s Amenorrhea’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 381–6; Alexandra Lord, ‘“The Great Arcana of the Deity”: Menstruation and Menstrual Disorders in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, Bul- letin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 38–63; Cathy McClive, ‘Medical Knowledge and Medical Practice in Early Modern France, c. 1555–1761’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 76–89; Gianna Pomata, ‘Men- struating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine’, in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early Modern Europe, ed. by Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 109–52; Sara Read, ‘“Thy Righteousness is but a Menstrual Clout”: Sanitary Protec- tion and Prejudice in Early Modern England’, Early Modern Woman: An Inter- disciplinary Journal, 3 (2008), 1–26 and ‘ “Only Kept up by the Credulous and Ignorant”: Eighteenth-Century Responses to the “Poisonous” Nature of Menstrual Blood’, in Great Expectations: Futurity in the Long Eighteenth Century, ed. by Mascha Hansen and Jürgen Klein (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 205–22; Elisha P. Renne and Etienne van de Walle Regulat- ing Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Michael Stolberg, ‘Menstruation and Sexual Dif- ference in Early Modern Medicine’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 90–101; Etienne van de Walle, ‘Flowers and Fruit: Two Thousand Years of Menstrual Regulation’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (1997), 183–202. 16. Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern England, p. 92. 17. Séverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, ‘The Intimate Experience of the Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and Exteriority’, Medical History, 47.4 (2003), 451–72 (p. 452). 18. Healy, ‘Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Beliefs’, p. 84. 190 Notes
19. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth- Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 114. 20. Elizabeth Thompson, The Diary of a Kendal Midwife, 1669–1675, ed. by Loraine Ashcroft (Kendal: Curwen Archives Trust, 2001), p. viii. 21. Helen Wilcox, ‘Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance English Women’ in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Pub- lic and Private in the English Renaissance, ed. by S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall, 1992), pp. 47–62 (p. 57). 22. Ibid. 23. Charles Jackson, ‘Introduction’ in The Autobiography of Alice Thornton,ed. by Charles Jackson (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1875), p. xii. 24. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox, eds., Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 148. 25. Jackson, ‘Introduction’ in The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. xii. 26. Graham et al., Her Own Life, p. 148. 27. Gary Schneider has commented that ‘early modern notions of what con- stituted a public or private epistolary discourse were quite confused, even arbitrary’, sometimes containing a mixture of private news and political opinion and with private sometimes signifying a private circle of letter readers, for example. See The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2005), pp. 68–70. 28. Raymond A. Anselment, ‘Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 45 (2005), 135–55 (p. 149). Susanna’s story is one of the apocryphal stories. 29. Alice Thornton, ‘From A Book of Remembrance, c. 1668’, in Her Own Life, pp. 145–62 (pp. 148–9). 30. Anne Lear, ‘Thank God for Haemorrhoids! Illness and Identity in a Seventeenth-Century Woman’s Autobiography’, Women’s Writing, 12 (2005), 337–45 (p. 337). 31. Isaac Stephens, ed., ‘ “My Booke of Rememenberance” [sic]: The Autobiog- raphy of Elizabeth Isham,inDepartment of History: University of California Riverside
38. Margaret Ezell, ‘Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefin- ing Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women’, in English Manuscript Stud- ies 1100–1700, vol. 3 (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 216–37 (p. 224). 39. Ezell, ‘Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine’, p. 234. 40. Felicity Nussbaum,TheAutobiographicalSubject:GenderandIdeologyin Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 155. 41. Germaine Greer, ‘Introduction’, in Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of 17th Cen- tury Women’s Verse, ed. by Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone, and Susan Hastings (London: Virago, 1988), pp. 1–31 (p. 4). 42. Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 36. 43. Elsimar M. Cortinho and Sheldon J. Seyal, Is Menstruation Obsolete? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 2–3. Additionally, this comment is one made to me in person regularly in forums where I discuss the topic of this book. 44. Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 184. 45. Alexandra Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity”: Menstruation and Men- strual Disorders in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 38–63 (p. 43). Emphasis in original. William Forster also made this point in the mid-eighteenth century when he identified another of the ‘non-naturals’ (environment) as the cause of amenorrhoea when he commented that ‘nothing is more common then for the poorer sort of Women to have these Suppressions from walking barefooted upon cold Pavements’. William Forster, A Treatise on the Causes of Most Diseases (Leeds: James Lister, 1745), p. 150. 46. Adrian Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretation’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by Valerie A. Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 68–107 (p. 68). 47. E. A. Wrigley, English Population History from Family Reconstitution, 1580–1837 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 141. 48. Ibid, p. 145. 49. Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500–1700: A Social History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), p. 62. 50. Thomas Crofton Crocker, ed., The Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick (London: Percy Society, 1848; Kessinger facsimile reprint, 2009), pp. 32–3. 51. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froid have stated that ‘[i]n Europe between 1250–1800, lifelong single women were quite common, usually account- ing for 10 to 20 per cent of all adult women.’ See ‘A Singular Past’, in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froid (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999), pp. 1–37 (p. 2). 52. Amy M. Froid, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 2. 53. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, p. 60. 192 Notes
54. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta, eds., Medical Writing in Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 3. 55. Taavitsainen and Pahta, Medical Writing in Early Modern English,p.3. 56. The College of Physicians built its first chemical laboratory in 1648 in response to a growing interest in pharmaceutical cures. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 356. 57. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 356. 58. Porter, FleshintheAgeofReason, p. 54. 59. Peter Elmer, ‘Chemical Medicine and the Challenge to Galenism: the Legacy of Paracelsus 1560–1700’, in The Healing Arts: Health, Disease and Society in Europe 1500–1800, ed. by Peter Elmer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 108–35 (pp. 132–3). 60. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 359. 61. Porter, FleshintheAgeofReason, p. 46. 62. Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages, trans. by Matthew Adamson (Oxford: Polity Press, 1985), p. 49. 63. Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Grounds of Natural Philosophy (London: A. Maxwell, 1668), p. 181. 64. Hobby, ‘Introduction’, The Midwives Book, p. xxxiii. 65. Gail Kern Paster, Humouring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), pp. 78–9. 66. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 141. 67. Wear, Knowledge and Practice, p. 141. Wear’s hypothesis is founded in the early modern idea that women who had regular menstrual periods were less likely to suffer from illnesses than women who had irregular menstrual periods. 68. Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity” ’, p. 57. Emphasis in original. 69. An Collins, ‘Another Song’, in Divine Songs and Meditacions (London: R. Bishop, 1653), pp. 56–8. 70. Collins, ‘Another Song’, lines 2–3. 71. Ibid, lines 11–15. 72. For further discussion see Sarah Skwire, ‘Women, Writers, Sufferers: Anne Conway and An Collins’, Literature and Medicine, 18 (1999), 1–23. 73. Lazare Rivière, Practice of Physick, Book Fifteen, trans. by Nicholas Culpeper, Abdiah Cole, and William Rowland (London: Peter Cole, 1655), p. 400. 74. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 87. 75. Stolberg, ‘Menstruation and Sexual Difference’, p. 91. 76. Ibid, pp. 91–4. 77. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), pp. 2–4. 78. Ibid, p. 4. 79. Ibid, p. 9. 80. Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity” ’, p. 44. 81. John Cook, An Anatomical and Mechanical Essay On the Whole Animal Oeconomy (London: W. Meadows, 1730), p. 310. 82. Freind, Emmenologia,p.9. Notes 193
83. Louise Hill Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine, 1550–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 231. 84. Hill Curth, English Almanacs, Astrology and Popular Medicine,p.1. 85. Freind, Emmenologia,p.2. 86. Stolberg, ‘Menstruation and Sexual Difference’, pp. 91–4. 87. Freind, Emmenologia, p. 11. 88. Ibid,p.13. 89. [Anon.], The Ladies Physical Directory; or, A Treatise of all the Weaknesses, Indispositions and Diseases Peculiar to the Female Sex from Eleven Years of Age to Fifty or Upwards (London: [n. pub.], 1727), p. 3. 90. Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity” ’, p. 44. 91. Ibid,p.44. 92. See Read, ‘ “Only Kept up by the Credulous and Ignorant”: Eighteenth- Century Responses to the Poisonous Nature of Menstrual Blood’. These ancient beliefs include claims made by Pliny in the first century CE that menstrual blood could cause wine to sour, crops to wither, mirrors to fog, metal to rust, horses to miscarry, bees to die, and dogs to go mad upon tasting it. 93. Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 72. 94. Rivière, Practice of Physick, p. 405. 95. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature in Four Books, trans. Anon. (London: John Streeter, 1658), p. 27. This text was an English translation of a mid-sixteenth century text of this name. 96. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 51. 97. Oxford English Dictionary (OED): ‘Originally: a solvent, esp. one for dissolv- ing metal in the attempt to convert base metals into gold’. 98. Julie Hirst, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (Aldershort: Ashgate, 2005), p. 48. 99. John Oliver, Present for Teeming Women, or, Scripture-Directions for Women with Child how to Prepare for the Houre of Travel (London: Mary Rothwell, 1663), pp. 53–4. 100. M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 164. 101. Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Human Bodies Epitomised (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1703), p. 188.
1 ‘What a Small Excess Is Called Flooding’: The Language of Menstruation and Transitional Bleeding
1. Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth-Century, England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 47–73, p. 49 and p. 51. 2. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, the Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 215. 3. Monica H. Green, ed., The Trotula: A Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), p. 21. 4. Green, The Trotula, p. 21. 194 Notes
5. Monica H. Green, ‘Flowers, Poison and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 51–64 (p. 52). 6. Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England, 1580–1720: A Source Book (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 15. 7. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 51. 8. John Bickerton Williams and William Jay, eds., Memoirs of the Life and Charac- ter of Mrs Sarah Savage (London: Holdsworth and Hall, 1829; Kessinger repr., 2008), p. 124. 9. Thomas Wilson, A Complete Christian Dictionary wherein the Significations and Several Acceptations of all the Words Mentioned in the Holy Scrip- tures of the Old and New Testament are Fully Opened (London: E Cotes, 1661), p. 135. 10. Rachel Adcock, ‘Daughters of Zion and Mothers in Israel: The Writings of Separatist and Particular Baptist Women, 1632–1675’, unpublished PhD thesis, Loughborough University, 2011, pp. 65–6. 11. Alethes Noctroff [pseud. for Zachary Crofton], Perjury the Proof of Forgery; or, Mr Crofton’s Civility Justified by Cadman’s Falsity (London: James Nuthal, 1657), p. 9. 12. Francis Kirkman, The Presbyterian Lash: Or, Noctroff’s Maid Whipt (London: Printed for the use of Mr. Noctroffs friends, 1661) and [Anon.], Bo-Peep, or the Jerking Parson Catechising his Maid (London: Belman, 1661). 13. [Anon.], Bo-Peep, or the Jerking Parson,p.1. 14. Thomas Cooper, Thesaurus Linguae Romanae & Britannicae (London: Henry Denham, 1578), unpaginated. 15. Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 57. This edition, taken from the 1560 version of this best-selling treatise, is the one which will be used throughout this book. The text has a long publication his- tory, coming to Raynalde through both Eucharius Rösslin’s The Rose Garden, which was originally written in German as a textbook for trainee mid- wives, and Richard Jonas’s 1540 English-language edition, which was itself based on a Latin translation of Rose Garden. Raynalde’s edition (originally in 1545) represented a major updating of his source text, including the use of anatomical images copied from Andreas Vesalius’s 1543 book On the Fabric of the Human Body, and from the 1560 edition onwards remained in a stable form, reprinted until 1654. The 1560 version, then, is the way in which most early modern readers would have encountered the text. 16. Green, ‘Flowers, Poison and Men’, p. 52. 17. Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, p. 57. 18. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 215. 19. Katherine Sutton, A Christian Womans Experiences of the Glorious Working of Gods Free Grace (Rotterdam: Henry Goddaeus, 1663), pp. 33–4. 20. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 215. 21. [Anon.], Practical Physick (London: no pub., 1671), p. 57. This text is a reprinting of Nicholas Culpeper’s A Directory for Midwives and Daniel Sennert’s Practical Physick, Book Four, which Culpeper translated. 22. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 70. Notes 195
23. Tiffany Potter, ‘Reciprocal Regulation: Trans-Atlantic Implications of Colo- nial Accounts of North American Indian Women and Menstruation’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, 29 (2006), 97–114 (97). 24. Potter, ‘Reciprocal Regulation’, p. 97. Potter does not qualify her assertion, although she did note the usage of this phrase in translations of Pliny’s Nat- ural History in the eighteenth century, and has suggested that the phrase is Pliny’s in her endnote. But this is not certain, as other translators offered different interpretations of the original Greek, and so I would argue that the connection is an active cultural transmission rather than an incidental one. 25. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth Cen- tury England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 22. 26. Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly Called, The Naturall His- tory of Plinius Secundus, trans. by Philemon Holland (London: Adam Islip, 1634), p. 163. 27. For examples, see [Anon.], The Phantastick Age; or, The Anatomy of Englands Vanity in Wearing the Fashions of Severall Nations [...] To the Tune of, O Women Monstrous &c. (London: Thomas Lambert, 1634); [Anon.], The Careless Curate and the Bloudy Butcher in a Narrative of Sad News from Chelmsford in Essex [...]: TotheTuneofOhWomen,MonstrousWomen(London: William Gilbertson, 1662). Both make this claim in their titles. 28. Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (London: Continuum, 1994), p. 874. 29. This is a general trend in gynaecology, which sees ‘the whites’, a disease characterised by vaginal discharge, become known as leucorrhoea instead of the early term of fluor albus, both of which mean the same thing, but this simply mirrors the preferring of Greek over Latin. Richard W. Bailey has argued that around 1700 the status of Latin as the elite language of learn- ing had diminished, due in part to a sense that it had been corrupted by its dissemination into the Romance languages. Greek did not carry the same associations. So this change might, in fact, be connected to the move to assert and stabilise the authority of the English language. See ‘Variation and Change in Eighteenth-Century English’, in Eighteenth-Century English: Ideol- ogy and Change, ed. by Raymond Hickey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 182–99 (p. 186). 30. Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory; or, A Storehouse of Armory and Blazon Containing the Several Variety of Created Beings (Chester: [n. pub.], 1688), p. 440. 31. Benjamin Allen, The Natural History of the Chalybeat and Purging Waters of England with their Particular Essays and Uses (London: B. Smith and B. Walford, 1699). 32. James Drake, Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1707), p. 321. 33. Paula Weideger, Menstruation and Menopause (New York: Alfred A. Knopff, 1975), p. 4. Similarly, the term ‘menopause’, which began to be used in the later nineteenth century, is a Latinate version of ‘stopping of the months’, which was, in fact, how early modern physicians wrote about this event. 196 Notes
34. The OED cites this euphemistic usage from 1844 until 1964 when Elizabeth Bowen used it in her book Little Girls. The OED further suggested that the euphemism of ‘unwellness’ to mean a menstrual period was first recorded in Dorothy Osborne’s love letters to Sir William Temple. In letter 33, Osborne complained that Temple did not explain fashionable neologisms to her in his letters. She therefore asks him to explain what was now meant by ‘wellness and unwellnes[sic]’. However, despite the fact that Temple was correspond- ing from Epsom where he was taking the waters for his health, and where he would have encountered women there hoping to cure menstruation-related complaints, it is far from certain in this letter that this is his usage that Osborne now wants explaining. See Dorothy Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. by Kenneth Parker (London: Penguin, 1987), p. 112. 35. Cited in Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth- Century England, 1580–1720: A Source Book (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 273. 36. Pliny the Elder, The Historie of the World: Commonly Called, The Naturall His- tory of Plinius Secundus, trans. by Philemon Holland (London: Adam Islip, 1634), p. 163. 37. [Anon.], A Choice Manual of Rare and Select Secrets in Physick and Chyrurgery: Collected, and Practised by the Right Honorable, the Countesse of Kent, Late Deceased (London: W. J. Gent, 1653), p. 90. 38. Elisha P. Renne and Etienne van de Walle, Regulating Menstruation: Beliefs, Practices, Interpretations (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. xix. 39. Renne and van de Walle, Regulating Menstruation, p. xx. Renne and van de Walle go on to show an example from the nineteenth century which sug- gests that women then used the euphemism of having a cold to mean their menstrual period. In the early modern period, I will argue, this was not the case for, in all of the diaries I have seen, women seem to talk about ailments such as headaches, colds and injuries in addition to their references to the mysterious, unnamed illness. 40. Thomas Taylor Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath (London: Camden Society, 1853; Kessinger facsimile reprint, 2008), p. 76. 41. M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 155. 42. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 50. 43. John Sadler, The Sick Woman’s Private Looking Glass (London: Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meridith, 1636), p. 23. 44. Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (London: M. Flesher, 1682), p. 150. 45. Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Human Bodies (London: W. Whitwood, 1694), p. 132. 46. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 165. 47. Archibald Pitcairne, The Works of Dr. Archibald Pitcairn (London: E. Curll, J. Pemberton, and W. Taylor, 1715), p. 233. 48. [Anon.], A New Marriage, Between Mr. KING, and the PARLIAMENT (London: [n. pub.], 1648), pp. 3–4. Notes 197
49. [Anon.], A New Marriage,p.4. 50. Ibid. 51. [Anon.], A New Marriage,p.5. 52. Lysiponius Celer, The Late Censors Deservedly Censured and their Spurious Litter of Libels Against Dr. Greenfield, and Others, Justly Expos’d to Contempt by the Following Answer to All (London: Jan. Groenevelt, 1698), p. 19. 53. Cited in Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 64. 54. Gideon Harvey, The Conclave of Physicians in Two Parts (London: James Partridge, 1686), p. 87. 55. The OED cites John Pringle in 1754 as the first recorded user of the term. 56. James Drake, Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy, 2 vols (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1707), II, p. 325; John Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes, 6th edn (London: S. Crouch, 1708), p. 57. 57. Andrew Wear, ‘Medical Knowledge and Medical Practice in Early Modern France, c. 1555–1761’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, pp. 76–89 (p. 77). 58. William Cockburn, The Symptoms, Nature, Cause, and Cure of Gonorrhoea,2nd edn (London: G. Straghan, 1715), p. 110. This term is not in the 1713 first edition. 59. Etienne van de Walle, ‘Flowers and Fruit: Two Thousand Years of Men- strual Regulation’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (1997), 183–202 (pp. 196–7). 60. Van de Walle, ‘Flowers and Fruit’, p. 201. The use of ‘ordinaries’ for normal menstruation, while not in the OED in this sense, derives from the OED meaning ‘a prescribed or customary course or procedure; a regular custom or habit’. 61. The OED states that ‘the curse’ as a colloquial term for menstruation appeared from 1930. 62. Mary Wortley-Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. by Isobel Grundy (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 166–7. 63. Michael Stolberg, ‘Menstruation and Sexual Difference in Early Modern Medicine’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, pp. 90–101 (p. 95). 64. John Marten, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease (London: John Marten, 1711), pp. 170–1. In the 1664 translation of van Helmont’s Works the relation of menstruation to Eve’s sin is contradicted within the same text. Whereas in discussing virginity the text states that ‘seeing Chastity doth not excuse a Virgin from the Menstrues, it is for a token, that the Menstrues is not from a Curse, nor from the punishment of Sin, but altogether from Natural Causes’, when discussing the moon, the text states,
From whence there is place for conjecture, that Eve did by the Member through which she became subject unto many Miseries, testifie among posterity, a successive fault of her fall, and bloody defilement in Nature: For the part wherein the Image of God ought to be conceived by the holy Spirit, became a sink of filths, and testifies the abuse, and fault of an unobliterable sin, and therefore also suffers: Because, In sorrow shalt thou bring forth thy Sons, in manner of bruit beasts, because henceforward, thou shalt conceive after the manner of bruits: For so that Curse hath entred into Nature, and shall there remain. And by the same Law also, a 198 Notes
necessity of Menstrues: For before sin, the Young going forth the Womb being shut, had not caused pain.
Joan Baptiste van Helmont, Van Helmont’s Works Containing his Most Excel- lent Philosophy, Physick, Chirurgery, Anatomy, trans by John Chandler(London: Lodowick Lloyd, 1664), p. 648 and p. 743. 65. Green, The Trotula, p. 21. 66. Jane Leade, A Fountain of Gardens Watered by the Rivers of Divine Pleasure,2 vols (London: J. Bradford, 1696), I, p. 440. 67. Leade, A Fountain of Gardens, p. 440. 68. Julie Hirst, Jane Leade: Biography of a Seventeenth-Century Mystic (Aldershort: Ashgate, 2005), p. 48. 69. Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrove, The Wise Wound: Menstruation and Everywoman (London: Paladin, 1978), p. 52. 70. Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, p. 154. 71. Ibid. Although Gibson’s immediate source was probably Thomas Bartholin, this is a phrase which had been used from at least as early as Helkiah Crooke in 1615. See Thomas Bartholin, Bartholinus Anatomy Made from the Precepts of his Father, and from the Observations of all Modern Anatomists, Together with his Own (London: John Streater, 1668), p. 72, and Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 223. Here the hymen, rather than the blood lost, is called the flower of virginity. 72. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 51. The other main Bible in contemporary use, the Geneva Bible (1587) uses the same phraseology. 73. Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, p. 124. 74. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 179. 75. The linked entry on this text has the date 1616 preceding 1685 in paren- theses, but this must be an inputting error, for Cooke was born in 1614 (d. 1694). The 1685 edition claims to be the fourth edition, but in fact this text had been published in 1648, 1655, 1662 and 1676, making 1685 the fifth edition; it would go on to further printings from 1693, where the edition was revised by physician Thomas Gibson. 76. Jacques Guillemeau, Child-Birth; or, The Happy Deliverie of Women (London: A. Hatfield, 1612), pp. 227–8. 77. Iain M. Lonie, Hippocratic Treatises: ‘On Generation’, ‘On the Nature of the Child’ and ‘Diseases IV’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), p. 196. Lonie commented that in On the Nature of the Child, ‘Healthy menstrual blood and lochial blood are the same thing for this author, and the lochia are in any case a form of menstruation’ (p. 196). 78. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 110. 79. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, p. 274. 80. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing and Suckling their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 198. 81. Sharp, The Midwives Book,p.12. 82. Sarah Stone, A Complete Practice of Midwifery (London: T. Cooper, 1737), p. 136. Notes 199
83. Jean Riolan, A Sure Guide; or, The Best and Nearest Way to Physick and Chyrurgery, trans. by Nicholas Culpeper and W. R. (London: Peter Cole, 1657), p. 89. This sentence makes it into Randle Holme’s dictionary, where he uses it to gloss loches: ‘Loches, are Child-bed purgations; which is the squeezing out of that blood, which was shut up in the spongy sides of the Womb.’ Holmes includes in a separate entry for lochia: ‘Lochia, are those things that are evacuated by Women in Child-bed, after the birth of the Faetus, and the Secundinae Membranes.’ See Randle Holme, The Academy of Armory; or, A Storehouse of Armory and Blazon Containing the Several Variety of Created Beings, and How Born in Coats of Arms, Both Foreign and Domestick (Chester: Randle Holmes, 1688), p. 443. 84. Charles Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1875), p. 92. 85. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), p. 124. 86. The OED cites ‘ménopause’ as being used as a French word from 1823, but as an English one only from 1872. I have not identified any earlier usage. 87. Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 184.
2 ‘Having the Benefit of Nature’: Menarche and Female Adolescence
1. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 72. 2. Ibid. 3. Edward Phillips, The New World of English Words; or, A General Dictionary (London: Nath. Brooke, 1658), unpaginated. 4. Thomas Blount, Glossographia; or, A Dictionary Interpreting All Such Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now Used in our Refined English Tongue with Etymologies (London: George Sawbridge,1661), unpaginated. 5. Will Greenwood, A Description of the Passion of Love Demonstrating its Original, Causes, Effects, Signes, and Remedies (London: William Place, 1657), pp. 81–2. 6. Greenwood, A Description of the Passions,p.5. 7. Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Greensickness, Chlorosis and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 85. 8. King, The Disease of Virgins, p. 86. 9. John Carmi Parsons, ‘The Medieval Aristocratic Teenaged Female: Adoles- cent or Adult?’, in The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650,ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002), pp. 311–22 (p. 311). 10. George Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God in the Gov- ernment of the World (Oxford: John Lichfield and William Turner, 1627), p. 161. 11. Hakewill, An Apologie,p.164 12. Scipion Dupleix, The Resolver; or, Curiosities of Nature Written in French by Scipio Du Plesis Counseller and Historiographer to the French King. Usefull 200 Notes
& Pleasant for All, trans. by William Marshall (London: N. & I. Okes, 1635), p. 2. 13. Ibid. 14. Dupleix, The Resolver, pp. 8–9. 15. An example is seen in Edward Leigh’s, A Philologicall Commentary; or, An Illus- tration of the Most Obvious and Useful Words in the Law with their Distinctions and Divers Acceptations (London: Charles Adams, 1658), pp. 52–3: ‘Covenant, is an agreement made by Deed in writing, and sealed between two persons. An Infant (by the Common Law) is not of age to bind it self by Covenant, ante annos nubiles, which is twelve years in a woman, and fourteen years in a man-child.’ 16. Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 57. 17. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 215. 18. Sharp, The Midwives Book,p.69. 19. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 1. 20. Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. by Douglas Brooks-Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 134. 21. Antony E. Simpson, ‘Vulnerability and the Age of Female Consent: Legal Innovation and its Effect on Prosecutions for Rape in Eighteenth-century London’, in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), pp. 181–205 (p. 183). 22. Kim M. Phillips, Medieval Maidens: Young Women and Gender in England, 1270–1540 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), pp. 27–8. 23. Benjamin Albyn, An Appeal to God and the King: Together with a True Narrative of Unparallel’d Grievances (London: B Albyn, 1697), p. 7. 24. Albyn, An Appeal to God and the King,p.9. 25. Albyn, An Appeal to God and the King, pp. 12–13. 26. J. B. Post, ‘Ages at Menarche and Menopause: Some Mediaeval Authori- ties’, Population Studies, 25 (1971), 83–7; Darrel W. Amundsen and Carol Jean Diers, ‘The Age of Menarche in Medieval Europe’, Human Biology, 45 (1973), 363–9; Peter Laslett, ‘Age at Sexual Maturity in Europe Since the Middle Ages’, in Family Life and Illicit Love in Earlier Generations: Essays in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 214–32. 27. Monica H. Green, ‘Flowers, Poisons and Men: Menstruation in Medieval Western Europe’, in Menstruation: A Cultural History, ed. by Andrew Shail and Gillian Howe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 51–75 (p. 55). 28. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love, p. 217. 29. Laslett, Family Life and Illicit Love, p. 218. 30. Ibid. 31. Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), p. 89, noted that the mean age of marriage rose from 26 to 26.5 by the later seventeenth century. See also Liza Picard, Restoration London (London: Phoenix Press, 1997), p. 160. Picard pointed out that this is a good 10 years after puberty (p. 160). Notes 201
32. Amy Louise Erikson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 120. 33. Edward Semple Le Compte, The Notorious Lady Essex (London: Robert Hale, 1970), p. 21. 34. Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Unripe Bodies”: Children and Sex in Early Modern England’, in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present,ed. by Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 131–51 (p. 134). Toulalan here rightly pointed out that marriage did not confer adult status upon a child, and that the signs of puberty were desired in both parties before cohabitation was allowed. 35. Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 153. 36. Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 25. 37. Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 4. 38. Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Henry Cripps, 1621), p. 541. 39. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in Their Conception, Bearing and Suckling their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 66. This section in Culpeper is a reprint of Daniel Sennert’s Practical Physick which Culpeper had translated from Latin, and perhaps explains the change of register. 40. [Anon.], Aristotles Master–piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Display’d in all the Parts Thereof (London: J. How, 1684), pp. 5–6. 41. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature in Four Books (London: John Streater, 1658), p. 308. 42. Toulalan, ‘“Unripe Bodies”’, p. 136. 43. Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Human Bodies Epitomised (London: Awnsham and John Churchill, 1703), p. 188. 44. Ursula Potter, ‘Greensickness in Romeo and Juliet:Considerationsona Sixteenth-Century Disease of Virgins’, in The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650, ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Renaissance Studies, 2002), pp. 271–91 (p. 273). 45. King, The Disease of Virgins, p. 41. 46. James Drake, Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy, 2 vols (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1707), II, p. 354. 47. Judith Drake is believed to be the author of An Essay in Defence of the Female Sex (1696), which was for many years ascribed to Mary Astell. Drake was well known for practising medicine on ‘her own sex and little children’. Bridget Hill, ‘Drake, Judith (fl. 1696–1723), Writer and Medical Practitioner’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
49. ‘The Gentleman Dancing-Master’, in The Country Wife and Other Plays,ed. by Michael Cordner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 97–190 (I.1.1–5). 50. Cordner, ‘The Gentleman Dancing-Master’, in The Country Wife and Other Plays, p. 418. 51. Ibid. 52. Wycherley, ‘The Gentleman Dancing-Master’, I.1.285. 53. Wycherley, ‘The Gentleman Dancing-Master’, I.1.261–62. 54. Wycherley, ‘The Gentleman Dancing-Master’, I.1.282. 55. [Anon.], Aristoteles Master–Piece, pp. 5–6. 56. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 195. 57. Thomas Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain and Nervous Stock in which Convulsive Diseases are Treated of Being the Work of Thomas Willis,trans. by Samuel Pordage (London: D. Tring, 1681), p. 21. This is a scholarly text dedicated to Christ, in an attempt to avoid the censure of the Church, for at this time epilepsy was often considered to be a disease caused by supernat- ural forces and therefore under the Church’s jurisdiction rather than that of medicine. 58. Ibid. 59. Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain, p. 22. 60. Ibid. 61. King, The Disease of Virgins, p. 42. 62. Ibid. 63. Linda A. Pollock, With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman Lady Grace Mildmay, 1552–1620 (New York: Collins and Brown, 1993), p. 110. 64. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, p. 112. 65. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, pp. 112–13. 66. Pollock, With Faith and Physic, p.113. 67. Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain, p. 21. 68. Willis, An Essay of the Pathology of the Brain, p. 19. 69. Ibid. 70. Aphorisms 3.28 states that diseases which are not cured by the onset of menstruation usually become chronic. 71. Rawlinson MS D.78 Lady Elizabeth Delaval, ‘Meditations and Prayers’, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. These writings are available in a modern edition from which the quotations used here are taken: Douglas D. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval (Gateshead: Northumberland Press, 1978). 72. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, p. 35. 73. Hakewill, An Apologie of the Power and Providence of God,p.164 74. Margaret J. M. Ezell, ‘Delaval [née Livingston], Lady Elizabeth (1648?–1717), Memoirist and Jacobite Agent’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
79. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, p. 52. 80. Alice Thornton, ‘From A Book Of Remembrance, c. 1668’, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. by Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 145–62 (p. 152). 81. Richard Boulton, An Examination of Mr. John Colbatch His Books (London: A. and J. Churchill, 1698), p. 153. Boulton wrote a treatise because he felt that Colbatch’s publication on acids and alkalis was dangerous in that it promoted laws of science that had long been disproved by Robert Boyle and should not be allowed to go unchallenged. 82. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, p. 84. 83. Ibid. 84. Douglas D. Green, ‘Introduction’, in The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval,p.5. 85. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, p. 109. 86. ‘Elizabeth Delaval’s Spiritual Heroine: Thoughts on Redefining Manuscript Texts by Early Modern Women’, English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, vol 3 (1992), pp. 216–37 (p. 224). 87. Jane Barker, ‘Love Intrigues’, in Popular Fiction by Women 1660–1730: An Anthology, ed. by Paula R. Backscheider and John J. Richetti (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 81–112 (p. 84). 88. Ibid. 89. Post, ‘Ages at Menarche’, p. 84. 90. Post, ‘Ages at Menarche’, p. 87. 91. Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 79. 92. John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 109. 93. B. J. Sokol makes a convincing argument that the masque Comus by John Milton is in fact a celebration of menarche, but even if this is the case it would be very much untypical. See ‘“Tilted Lees”, Dragons, Haemony, Menarche, Spirit, and Matter in Comus’, Review of English Studies, 163 (1990), 309–24. 94. John Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease, in Both Sexes, 6th edn (London: S. Crouch, 1708), p. 172. 95. Alexandra Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity”: Menstruation and Men- strual Disorders in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 38–63 (49–50).
3 ‘Full Sixteen and Never Yet Had Those’: Representations of Early or Delayed Menarche
1. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing and Suckling their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 21. 2. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, p. 67. 204 Notes
3. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 1. 4. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. by Elaine Hobby (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 216. 5. Alexandra Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity”: Menstruation and Men- strual Disorders in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 38–63 (p. 50). 6. Ibid. 7. John Cannon, ‘Sexual Offences: Rape, 12 September, 1733’, in The Proceed- ings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913
27. Ibid. 28. Susanna Centlivre, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (London: E. Curll, 1714), p. 8. 29. Isaac Stephens, ed., ‘ “My Booke of Rememenberance” [sic]: The Autobiography of Elizabeth Isham’, in Department of History: University of California Riverside
54. Helen King has supplied a full transcription of Lange’s letter in The Disease of Virgins, pp. 46–8. See also Ronald McFarland, ‘The Rhetoric of Medicine: Lord Herbert’s and Thomas Carew’s Poems of Green- Sickness’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 30 (1975), 250–8. 55. King, The Disease of Virgins, pp. 46–8. 56. Potter, ‘Greensickness in Romeo and Juliet’, pp. 278–9. 57. John Hall, Select Observations upon English Bodies of Eminent Persons in Desperate Diseases, trans. by James Cook (London: J. D., 1679), p. 176. 58. [Anon.], A Rational Account of the Natural Weaknesses of Women (London: A. Dodd, 1716), pp. 10–1. 59. Hall, Select Observations, p. 174. 60. Paster, Humoring the Body,p.90. 61. Freind, Emmenologia, p. 77. 62. Paster, Humoring the Body,p.89. 63. Potter, ‘Greensickness in Romeo and Juliet’, p. 278. 64. William G. Hall, ed., ‘The Casebook of John Westover of Wedmore, Sur- geon, 1686–1700’, in Wedmore Genealogy Pages
84. Herbert, The Poems of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, p. 99; McFarland ‘The Rhetoric of Medicine’, p. 253. 85. Herbert, The Poems of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, p.101. 86. Ibid. 87. Edith Snook, ‘“The Beautifying Part of Physic”: Women’s Cosmetic Pract- ices in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History, 20 (2008), 10–33 (p. 24). Snook’s essay does much to redress the stereotypes about the sorts of women who might have used beauty preparations, by demonstrating their widespread reproduction in health textbooks. Many recipes were published to prepare products to lighten and whiten the skin in concurrence with the norms of beauty at the time. 88. Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, pp. 197–202. 89. John Maubray, The Female Physician Containing all the Diseases Incident to that Sex in Virgins, Wives and Widows (London: James Holland, 1724), p. 43. 90. Scott Nixon, ‘Thomas Carew (1594/5–1640) poet’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
4 ‘Women’s Monthly Sickness’: Accounting for Menstruation
1. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth Cen- tury England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 4. 2. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970), I, p. 1. Entry for 1 January 1659. 3. Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), p. 38. 4. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing and Suckling their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 156. 208 Notes
5. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 82. 6. Alexandra Lord, ‘“The Great Arcana of the Deity”: Menstruation and Men- strual Disorders in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 38–63 (p. 43). 7. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 218. 8. ‘Flowers and Fruit: Two Thousand Years of Menstrual Regulation’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 28 (1997), 183–202 (p. 194). 9. Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 35. Lady Frances the daughter of a younger son of Sir Thomas Howard and became Lady Frances Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox; she was married to her first husband a London alderman at the time of her consultation. 10. Sharp, The Midwives Book, pp. 81–2. 11. The Expert Midwife: Or an Excellent and most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man (London: S. Burton [1554] 1637), p. 49. 12. Rosemary O’Day, ed., Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735) First Duchess of Chandos: Life and Letters (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), p. 239. 13. O’Day, ed., Cassandra Brydges, p. 247. 14. Linda Pollock ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: the Experience of Preg- nancy in Early-Modern Society’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 39–68 (p. 44). 15. [Anon.], The London Jilt; or, The Politick Whore, ed. by Charles H. Hinnant (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008), p. 90. 16. Ibid., p. 90. 17. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, p. 156. 18. Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 38. 19. Ibid., p. 40. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., p. 38 22. Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), pp. xlv, 194. 23. Judith Cook, Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician (London: Vin- tage, 2002), p. 168. See the Hippocratic text Aphorisms 6.29: G.E.R. Lloyd, ed., Hippocratic Writings (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 229 which states that ‘Gout does not occur in women except after the menopause’. 24. Moody, The Private Life, p. 15. 25. Peter Brain, ed., Galen on Bloodletting: A Study of the Origins, Development, and Validity of His Opinions, with a Translation of the Three Works (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 26. 26. Moody, ‘Introduction’ in The Private Life, p. xliv. 27. Moody, ed., The Private Life, p. 138. 28. Ibid., p. 166. 29. Ibid., p. 3. 30. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 32. King further elaborated on this notion on p. 230. 31. ‘Familiar sympathy’ is how the pseudonymous author of Aristotle’s Master– piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Displayed in All the Part Therof (London: J. How, 1684) expresses the function on p. 116. Notes 209
32. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, p. 38. 33. Moody, ed., The Private Life, p. 181. 34. Perimenopause is the life-stage immediately preceding menopause and is believed to occur between the age of 35 and 50. 35. Thomas Taylor Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, Wife of Sir Robert Harley of Brampton Bryan, Knight of the Bath (London: Camden Society, 1853; Kessinger facsimile reprint, 2008), p. 33. 36. Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, p. 49. 37. Ibid., p. 52. 38. Ibid., p. 50. 39. Ibid., p. 76. 40. Doctor Charles Diodati, son of the London physician Theodore Diodati, was based in Chester during this time so would have travelled some distance for the consultation. See Dorothy Evenden, Popular Medicine in Seventeenth-Century England (Wisconsin, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1988), p. 11. Lady Harley has spelled his name variously as ‘Dayodet’ and ‘Deodate’, indicating that the doctor pronounced his name in an Anglicised way. 41. Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, p. 98. 42. Ibid., p. 169. 43. Ibid., p. 171. 44. Ibid., pp. 177–8. 45. Moody, ed., The Private Life, p. 45. 46. Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, p. 73. 47. Ibid., pp. 78–9. 48. Ibid., p. 80. 49. Richard Ward, ed., The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Wellbeck Abbey (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1894), pp. 58–9. 50. Lewis, ed., Letters of the Lady Brilliana Harley, p. 82. 51. Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Correspondence of Jane Lady Cornwallis Bacon 1613–1644 (London and Cranbury NJ: Associated University Presses, 2003), p. 264. 52. Ward, ed., The Manuscripts of his Grace the Duke of Portland,p.88. 53. Edward Gregg, Queen Anne (New Haven, CT and London: Yale Univer- sity Press, 1980), p. 95. The euphemism was used in several other letters between the two women. 54. Ophelia Field, The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002), p. 427. 55. Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England, 1580–1720: A Source Book (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 16. 56. Field, The Favourite, p. 121. 57. Ibid., p. 128. 58. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 65. 59. Rosemary O’Day, ed., Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735) First Duchess of Chandos: Life and Letters (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007), p. 239. 60. O’Day, ed., Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), p. 239, n. 23. 61. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 25. 62. O’Day, ed., Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), p. 239, n. 23. 210 Notes
63. William Whately, A Bride-Bush (London: William Jaggard, 1617), p. 44. 64. Ibid. 65. William G. Hall, ed., ‘The Casebook of John Westover of Wedmore, Sur- geon, 1686–1700’, in Wedmore Genealogy Pages
93. Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 197. 94. Guy de la Bédoyère, The Letters of Samuel Pepys (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), p. 20. Bédoyère does not say by whom these entries were identified as dysmenorrhoea. 95. Latham and Matthews, eds, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, II, p. 44. 96. Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 31. See ‘9 April 1669’, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. by R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, 11 vols (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1971), IX, p. 514. 97. As the following example makes clear, menstrual periods could, on occa- sion, happen unexpectedly, so perhaps Mrs Marten’s menstrual period began during coition. Almost 100 years later, the memoirist William Hickey recorded an incident where a prostitute he was sleeping with began to men- struate during the sex act. Hickey, only around age 14 at the time, was shocked at the sight of the blood and described how
Upon getting out of bed, however, I was dreadfully alarmed at perceiving the tail of my shirt covered in blood, and screamed out. The poor girl seemed to be in a great agitation and distress, which increased my fright; whereupon she eagerly endeavoured to assuage my fears, assuring me that no sort of injury would arise, that what I saw proceeded from a natural cause, though she had not been aware of it coming on (Memoirs of William Hickey, ed. by Peter Quennell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 23).
98. The King James Bible states in Leviticus 18:19 that ‘You shall not approach a woman to uncover her nakedness as long as she is in her customary impurity.’ 99. William Whately, A Brides-Bush (London: William Jaggard, 1617), p. 44. 100. Pseudo-Albertus Magnus, Women’s Secrets, trans. by Helen Rodnite Lemay (New York: State University of New York, 1992), p. 60. 101. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 62. 102. John Marten, A Treatise of all the Symptoms of the Venereal Disease in Both Sexes, 6th edn (London: S Crouch et al., 1708), pp. 27–8. 103. John Sadler, The Sicke Womans Private Looking-Glasse (London: Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meridith, 1636), p. 135. 104. Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 114. 105. Séverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, ‘The Intimate Experience of the Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and Exteriority’, Medical History, 47.4 (2003), 451–72 (pp. 467–8). 106. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 58. 107. Lord, ‘The Great Arcana of the Deity’, p. 49. 108. O’Day, Cassandra Brydges (1670–1735), Life and Letters, p. 259. Letter dated 6 May 1731.
5 ‘Wearing of the Double Clout’: Dealing with Menstrual Flow in Practice and in Religious Doctrine
1. Liza Picard, Restoration London (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 113. 2. Virginian Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 232. Evidence of the washing of rags used 212 Notes
for bodily functions does not support a daily washing theory. Rags were gathered in a bucket or tub and soaked, and presumably when there was a sufficient quantity to justify the activity they would be washed together. 3. Patricia Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation in Seventeenth Century England’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 47–73 (p. 55). 4. Edward Shorter, Women’s Bodies: A Social History of Women’s Encounter with Health, Ill-Health, and Medicine (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Transaction, 1991), p. 261. 5. Ibid. 6. See Virginia Smith cited above for a history of the changing ideals in personal hygiene. 7. Hence the seventeenth-century proverb ‘Money is welcome, though it come in a shitten clout’. 8. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 55. 9. A. Marsh, The Ten Pleasures of Marriage Relating All the Delights and Contentments that are Mask’d Under the Bands of Matrimony (London: [n. pub.], 1682), p. 128. 10. Christopher Samuel Graff, ‘Sexual Offences: Rape, 6th December 1721’, in The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913
might prevent the menses from flowing’ (p. 55). The evidence from Sermon and others demonstrates that the view that nothing should impede the course of the menses was also a seventeenth-century commonplace. 24. Pierre Dionis, A General Treatise of Midwifery, trans. by Anon. (London: A. Bell, 1719), p. 53. 25. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, stated: ‘Hippocrates saith, They should bleed but a pint and a half, or two pints: this is not alike in all, but differs in respect of age and diet’ (p. 67). Sharp in The Midwives Book makes exactly the same comment (p. 216). The following quotation from the Hippocratic On the Diseases of Women is given by Lesley Ann Dean-Jones: ‘The average amount of menses for any healthy woman is about two Attic Kotyls, or a lit- tle more, or a little less’. See Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon, Press, 1996), p. 88. Two kotyls equate to approximately one pint. It is unclear where the misinterpretation of a pint-and-a-half to two pints first started but it is common to see this amount offered in early modern texts. 26. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 1. A hemina is approximately half an imperial pint measure, so Freind’s quotation from the Hippocratic text is more accurate than that normally seen. 27. Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science, p. 90. 28. Ibid. Dean-Jones further suggested that women had a tendency to over- estimate the amount of blood they have lost. 29. James Drake, Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1707), p. 325. 30. Malcolm Flemyng, An Introduction to Physiology (London: J. Nourse, 1759), p. 351. 31. Dionis, A General Treatise of Midwifery,p.53. 32. Freind, Emmenologia, p. 74. 33. Sermon, The Ladies Companion, pp. 134. 34. Sarah Malcolm Alias, ‘ “Mallcombe”, Defendant Name in Trial of Sarah Malcolm: Killing, Murder’, in The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913
that an apron as an extra layer of sanitary protection might have been used in the past. See
59. Thomas Bentley, The Monument of Matrones Conteining Seven Severall Lamps of Virginitie (London: H. Denham, 1582), p. 921. 60. See, for example, George Downame, A Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer (Cambridge: Nicolas Bourne, 1640), p. 363, ‘polluted clout’; Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Danielem (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1610), p. 143, ‘stained clout’. 61. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 58. 62. Nicholas Billingsley, Treasures of Divine Raptures (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1667), p. 123. 63. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), p. 19. 64. Anthony Gilby, To My Louynge Brethren that is Troublyd abowt the Popishe Aparrell (Emden: E. van der Erve, 1566), sig. Br−v. 65. Crawford, ‘Attitudes to Menstruation’, p. 57. 66. Thomas Gataker, Saint Stevens Last Will and Testament A Funeral Sermon on Acts 7. Ver 59 Preached at the Enterrement of the Remaines of Mris Joice Featly (London: Nicolas Bourne, 1638), pp. 20–1. 67. Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720, p. 17. 68. [Anon.], The Apocrypha at Large: with Notes Explanatory, Critical, and Practical, Selected from the Works of Several Eminent Divines, 5 vols (London: I. Moore, 1774–76), V, p. 236. 69. Johann Tribbeko, A Funeral Sermon on the Death of His Royal Highness Prince George of Denmark (London: Joseph Downing, 1709), p. 30. 70. Douglas G. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, Written Between 1662 and 1671 (Gateshead: Surtees, 1978), p.148. 71. Katharine Hodgkin, Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England: The Autobiographical Writings of Dionys Fitzherbert (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 253. 72. ‘An Collins’, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writing by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, ed. by Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 54–70 (p. 55). 73. An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions, ed. by Sidney Gottlieb (Binghampton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), p. xvii. 74. Graham, et al., Her Own Life, p. 55. 75. Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions (London: R. Bishop, 1653), pp. 56–8. 76. Collins, ‘Another Song’, in Divine Songs and Meditacions, pp. 61–2. 77. Sarah Skwire, ‘Women, Writers, Sufferers: Anne Conway and An Collins’, Literature and Medicine, 18 (1999), 1–23 (p. 13). 78. Collins, Divine Songs and Meditacions, ed. by Sidney Gottlieb, p. 110. 79. [Anon.], Bo-Peep, or the Jerking Parson Catechising his Maid (London: Belman, 1661).
6 ‘The Flower of Virginity’: Hymenal Bleeding and Becoming a Woman
1. Thomas Brown, The Fourth and Last Volume of the Works of Thomas Brown, Serious and Comical, 4 vols (London: Sam Briscoe, 1715), IV, pp. 110–11. 2. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 235. 216 Notes
3. Brown, The Fourth and Last Volume of the Works of Thomas Browne, pp. 110–11. 4. Cited by Tassie Gwilliam, ‘Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6 (1996), 518–47 (pp. 523–4). 5. Brown, The Fourth and Last Volume of the Works of Thomas Browne, pp. 110–11. 6. Ibid. 7. For an example of this usage, see Johannes Riolanus, A Sure Guide; or, The Best and Nearest Way to Physick and Chyrurgery, That is to Say, the Arts of Healing by Medicine and Manual Operation, trans. by Nicholas Culpeper and W. R. (London: Peter Cole 1657) which stated that the ‘Clitoris being the seat of Lasciviousness and Lust in Women that delight in mutual confrictions, is termed Tentigo, or the Womans Yard’ (p. 82). 8. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, p. 235. 9. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 43. 10. Thomas Bartholin, Bartholinus Anatomy Made from the Precepts of his Father, and from the Observations of all Modern Anatomists, Together with his Own (London: John Streater, 1668), p. 72. As Elaine Hobby has explained in the Introduction to Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book, the term ‘womb’ often meant the same in the seventeenth century as it does today, but was dif- ferentiated from its ‘neck’, the vagina, and ‘mouth’, the cervix. However, sometimes the womb was referred to as the ‘bottom’ and when it was then ‘womb’ meant vagina. See Elaine Hobby, ‘Introduction’, in Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, pp. xi–xxxi (p. xxxi). 11. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, p. 315. 12. [Anon.], The Compleat Midwives Practice, in the Most Weighty and High Concernments of the Birth of Man (London: Nathaniel Brooke, 1656), p. 29. The vagina was often, as here, referred to in this era as the ‘neck of the womb’. As in the next quotation, this phrase may refer to the cervix, so care is needed to unpick the exact reference. Occasionally the cervix appeared as the ‘lesser neck’ to eliminate any potential confusion, with the vagina as the ‘greater neck’. See [Anon.], Aristotle’s Master–piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Display’dinallthePartsThereof (London: J. How, 1684), which claims that the ‘secret’ places in women are called ‘the Neck of the Womb’ by the vulgar (p. 93). 13. Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomised (London: M. Flesher, 1682), p. 149. Most medical texts concurred with Thomas Raynalde, who explained that the blood in menstruation comes from the veins of the uterus which ‘do attract from the great vena cava into this part’. See The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 57. Most authors suggested that men- strual blood flowed from veins, so Thomas Gibson was unusual in believing that the uterine arteries supply this blood. 14. [Anon.], Aristotle’s Master–piece, p. 108. 15. G.E.R. Lloyd, ed., Hippocratic Writings (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 225. Apho- rism 5. 51 stated that ‘During pregnancy the mouth of the womb is closed’ (p. 225). 16. Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind, p. 67. 17. Ibid., p. 68. Notes 217
18. Soranus, Soranus’ Gynecology, trans. by Owsei Temkin (Baltimore, MA and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), p.15. 19. Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, p. 154. 20. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 2. 21. Lazare Rivière, The Practice of Physick in Sixteen Several Books,trans.by Nicholas Culpeper, Abdiah Cole, and William Rowland (London: Peter Cole, 1655), p. 403. 22. Isband van Diemerbröeck, The Anatomy of Human Bodies, trans. by William Salmon (London: W. Whitwood, 1694), p. 177. 23. Sharp, The Midwives Book,p.44. 24. Pliny the Elder, Natural History: A Selection, ed. by John Healey (London: Penguin, 2004), p.148. 25. [Nicolas de Venette], The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, trans. by Anon. (London: [n. pub.], 1707), pp. 30–1. 26. Bartholin, Bartholinus Anatomy, p. 74. 27. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 195. 28. [Venette], The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, pp. 262–3. 29. John Maubray, The Female Physician Containing all the Diseases Incident to that Sex in Virgins, Wives and Widows (London: James Holland, 1724), p. 42. 30. Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 55. 31. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 200. 32. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, p. 236. 33. Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, p.155. 34. Linda A. Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: the Experience of Pregnancy in Early-Modern Society’, Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 39–68 (pp. 41–2). And Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Unripe Bod- ies”: Children and Sex in Early Modern England’, in Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 131–51 (p. 144). 35. Toulalan, ‘Unripe Bodies’, pp. 144–5. 36. Charles Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1875), p. 83. 37. John Pechey, A General Treatise of the Diseases of Maids, Bigbellied Women, Child-Bed-Women, and Widows (London: Henry Bonwick, 1696), p. 20. 38. Ira Warren, The Household Physician (Boston, MA: Higgins, Bradley, and Dayton, 1859), p. 353. 39. Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), p. 114. 40. M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 115. 41. In addition to what follows below, see also Marie H. Loughlin, Hymeneutics: Interpreting Virginity on the Early Modern Stage (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell Uni- versity Press, 1997) for an analysis of the medical debate about the existence of the hymen in early modern anatomy treatises. 42. Paul-Gabriel Boucé, Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 34. 218 Notes
43. Gibson, Anatomy of Humane Bodies, p.154. 44. Ibid., p.154. 45. Richard Wilkes, ‘The Journal of Richard Wilkes’, December 1736 to Decem- ber 1738 (Stafford Records Office, 5350), p. 79. 46. Ibid. 47. Alexandra Lord, ‘ “The Great Arcana of the Deity”: Menstruation and Men- strual Disorders in Eighteenth-Century British Medical Thought’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 38–63 (p. 51). 48. Soranus, Gynecology,p.15. 49. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, p. 222. 50. Ambrose Paré, The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey,trans.by T. Johnson (London: Th. Cotes and R. Young, 1634), p. 938. 51. Ibid. 52. [Anon.], The London Jilt; or, The Politick Whore, ed. by Charles H. Hinnant (Peterborough, Ont: Broadview, 2008), p. 74. 53. Gibson, Anatomy of Humane Bodies, p. 154. 54. Ibid. 55. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, pp. 97–8. 56. Denis Vairasse, The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi (London: Henry Brome, 1675), pp. 101–2. 57. [Venette], The Mysteries of Conjugal Love, p. 52. 58. Edward Semple Le Comte, The Notorious Lady Essex (London: Robert Hale, 1970), p. 89. 59. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, p. 98. 60. Bartholin, Bartholinus Anatomy, p. 74. 61. Ibid. 62. Crooke, Mikrokosmographia, p. 235. 63. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, p. 99. 64. N. W. Bawcutt, ‘Introduction’, in The Changeling, ed. by N.W. Bawcutt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 1–31 (p. 3). 65. Le Compte, The Notorious Lady Essex, p. 94. 66. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. by N. W. Bawcutt (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), IV.2. 102–3. 67. William Sermon, The Ladies Companion; or, The English Midwife (London: Edward Thomas, 1671), p. 5. 68. [Venette], The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, p.60. 69. N. W. Bawcutt, ‘Introduction’, in The Changeling, ed by Middleton and Rowley, p. 26. 70. Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, III.4. 38. 71. It should be noted that this character was so named in the source text too, in which ‘Reynold’s De Flores [...] is a nonentity, a handsome young man who willingly murders Alonzo but is satisfied with a kiss’, but who goes on to become Beatrice-Joanna’s lover in the future. N.W. Bawcutt, ‘Introduction’, in The Changeling, p. 3. It should be remembered that ‘a kiss’ is often used as a euphemism for sex in this period. See, for example, [Venette], The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, which consistently used the term ‘kiss’ for intercourse, and also that in this period it was considered possible to deflower a virgin with impure thoughts and actions. 72. Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, V.3. 149–50. Notes 219
73. The Athenian Oracle, 1701. Cited in Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Phoenix, 1984), p. 335. 74. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 89. 75. Ibid. 76. Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, V. 3. 153. 77. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Selected Works, ed. by Frank H. Ellis (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 72, line 20. The same metaphor is seen in the Edmund Spencer’s The Faerie Queene (1590), which read: ‘She poured forth out of her hellish sinke/Her fruitfull cursed spawne of serpents small.’ The Faerie Queene, ed. by Thomas P. Roche and C. Patrick O’Donnell (London: Penguin, 1978) p. 46. 78. Middleton and Rowley, The Changeling, V.3.173–5. 79. Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives, p. 97. 80. Freind, Emmenologia,p.2. 81. Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, p. 154. 82. [Anon.], The London Jilt, p. 74. 83. Wilmot, Selected Works, p. 16, lines 37–8. 84. OED: ‘Most common as a poetical metaphor in the late 16th and 17th cent’. 85. Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion; or, A Guide to the Female Sex (London: Dorman Newman, 1673), p. 101. 86. Woolley, The Gentlewomans Companion, p. 102. 87. ‘The Disappointment’, in The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. by Janet Todd, 7 vols (London: William Pickering, 1992), I, pp. 65–9 (line 70). Behn avoided nar- rating the moment of defloration as Chloris runs away before Lysander has the chance to recover his erection. 88. Paré, The Workes of That Famous Chirurgion Ambrose Parey, p. 938. 89. Julie Peakman, ‘Initiation, Defloration, and Flagellation: Sexual Propensities in the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure’, in Launching Fanny Hill: Essays on the Novel and its Influences, ed. by Patsy S. Fowler and Alan Jackson (New York: AMS Press, 2003), pp. 153–72 (pp. 165–6). Peakman then argued convinc- ingly that the flagellation scenes are a natural extension of this eroticisation of blood. 90. Tassie Gwilliam, ‘Female Fraud: Counterfeit Maidenheads in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 6 (1996), 518–47 (p. 525).
7 The ‘Cleansing of the Flowers after the Birth’: Managing Pregnancy and Post-Partum Bleeding
1. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth- Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 114. 2. Charles Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton (London: Mitchell and Hughes. 1875), p. 84. 3. Both men and women were thought to be susceptible to bouts of quasi- menstrual purges of blood from the nose or anus in the seventeenth century. See Gianna Pomata, ‘Menstruating Men: Similarity and Difference of the Sexes in Early Modern Medicine’, in Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity through Early 220 Notes
Modern Europe, ed. by Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee (London: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 109–52. 4. Iain M. Lonie, Hippocratic Treatises: ‘On Generation’, ‘On the Nature of the Child’ and ‘Diseases IV’ (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1981), p. 3. 5. Helen King, Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 14. 6. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 86. 7. Ibid., p. 87. 8. M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p. 154. 9. Richard Wilkes, ‘The Journal of Richard Wilkes’, December 1736 to Decem- ber 1738 (Stafford Records Office, 5350), pp 23–4. Wilkes paginated his journal in order that he could cross-reference cases. 10. Wilkes, ‘The Journal’, p. 24. 11. Ibid. 12. John Pechey, A General Treatise of the Diseases of Maids, Bigbellied Women, Child-Bed-Women, and Widows Together with the Best Methods of Preventing or Curing the Same (London: Henry Bonwick, 1696), p. 4. For example, this text described some of the illnesses that women might be subject to after giving birth, such as ‘suppression of the Lochia, Floodings, Fevers’. 13. François Mauriceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Childbed, trans. by Hugh Chamberlen (London: R. Clavel et al., 1672), p. 102. This book ran to many editions into the eighteenth century. 14. Mauriceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, p. 102. In the later editions, Chamberlen added a marginal note saying ‘Sometimes’ to the idea of pain The Diseases of Women with Child, and in Childbed (London: Andrew Bell, 1710), p. 87. 15. Sarah Hayes, ‘Killing, Infanticide, 9th April 1746’, in The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674–1913
24. Mauriceau, The Diseases of Women with Child, p. 110. 25. Ibid., p. 111. 26. Ibid., p. 112. 27. M. J. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries 1641–1729: Isaac Archer and William Coe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1994), p.139. 28. Sarah Stone, A Complete Practice of Midwifery (London: T. Cooper, 1737), p. xv. 29. Ibid., p. 55. 30. For further analysis of this, see Isobel Grundy, ‘Sarah Stone: Enlightenment Midwife’, in Medicine in the Enlightenment, ed. by Roy Porter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 128–44. 31. Stone, A Complete Practice, pp. 145–6. 32. Ibid., p. 147. 33. Ibid., p. 148. 34. Ibid., p. 145. 35. Ibid., p. 105. 36. Ibid., p. 105. 37. Grundy, ‘Sarah Stone: Enlightenment Midwife’, p. 136. 38. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 92. 39. The power of the female imagination to affect the unborn baby was widely believed in the early modern era. 40. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 95. This was a common early modern metaphor, and one which Jane Sharp used to describe the pain of a molar pregnancy. See The Midwives Book,p.89. 41. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, pp. 96–7. 42. Ibid., p. 97. 43. Ibid., p. 98. 44. Ibid., p. 123. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., p. 124. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., p. 140. 49. Storey, ed., Two East Anglian Diaries, p.153. 50. Sharp, The Midwives Book,p.92. 51. OliviaWeisser, ‘Grieved and Disordered: Gender and Emotion in Early Mod- ern Patient Narratives’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 43.2 (2013), 247-73(261-2). 52. Stone, A Complete Practice,p.73. 53. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 140. 54. Ibid., p. 92. 55. Anne Lear, ‘Thank God for Haemorrhoids! Illness and Identity in a Seventeenth-Century Woman’s Autobiography’, Women’s Writing, 12 (2005), 337–45 (p. 341). 56. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 92. 57. Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson, 2004), p. 96. 58. Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine 1150–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 13. 222 Notes
59. Sharon Howard, ‘Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an early Modern World’, Social History of Medicine, 16 (2003), 367–82 (p. 369). 60. Linda A. Pollock, ‘Embarking on a Rough Passage: the Experience of Pregnancy in Early-Modern Society’, Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 39–68 (p. 48); Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 96. It is often claimed that larger numbers of women died in childbed than actually did. See, for example, Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 111, which com- mented upon the fact that intercourse was thought to be good for a woman’s health ‘despite the high frequency of death in childbed’ (p. 111). 61. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 145. 62. Charles Sutton’s transcription of ‘Lady Carey’s Meditations and Poetry’, Rawlinson MS D.1308 Bodleian Library, Oxford University, ff 1r–117v (7v). Carey cited Job 18:14 here. 63. Anne Bradstreet, ‘Before the Birth of One of Her Children’, in The Poetry of Anne Bradstreet, ed. by Jeannine Hensley (New York: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 224, lines 7–8. 64. Ibid., lines 21–4. 65. Ralph Houlbrooke, Death, Religion and the Family in England 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 185. 66. Adrian Wilson, ‘The Perils of Early Modern Procreation: Childbirth with or without Fear?’, in British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 16.1 (1993), 1–19 (14). 67. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 148. 68. Thomas Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man (London: Thomas Dring, 1683), p. 124. 69. Guillemeau, Childbirth, p. 221. 70. Ibid. 71. Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man (London: William Jaggard, 1615), p. 274. 72. Guillemeau, Childbirth, p. 221. 73. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 179. 74. Matthew Poole, Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London: Thomas Parkhurst, 1683), p. 600. 75. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 179. 76. Judith Cook, Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 90. Avisa gave birth on 26 June 1596 and Forman recorded having intercourse with her on 16 July. As Cook noted, this behaviour was inexpli- cable by the contemporary standards in which a woman could expect to be left to recover from childbirth for at least a month. 77. William Whately, A Bride-Bush (London: William Jaggard, 1617), p. 44. 78. Ibid. 79. Ralph Houlbrooke, ed., English Family Life, 1576–1716: An Anthology from Diaries (London: Blackwell, 1988), p. 110. Also cited in David Cressy, ‘Purifi- cation, Thanksgiving and the Churching of Women in Post-Reformation England’, Past and Present, 141 (1993), 106–46 (p. 140). 80. Houlbrooke, ed., English Family Life, p. 108. Notes 223
81. Cressy, ‘Churching of Women’, p. 141. Cressy stated that officially churching came to an end in 1645 when ‘the prayer-book was superseded by the Directory of Public Worship’ (p. 141). 82. See Cressy, ‘Churching of Women’, for a full account of churching and its implications. 83. Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families, p. 98. 84. Katherine Chidley, The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ (London: William Larnar, 1641), p. 57. Cressy also cited several exam- ples of people who clashed with the authorities over churching, but the fact remains that many families seemed to enjoy the celebratory aspect of this ritual. See Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life- Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 212–16. 85. Crawford, Blood, Bodies, and Families, p. 98. 86. Cited in Cressy, ‘Churching of Women’, p. 125. 87. Ibid., p. 110. 88. Adrian Wilson, ‘The Ceremony of Childbirth and its Interpretations’, in Women as Mothers in Pre-Industrial England: Essays in Memory of Dorothy McLaren, ed. by Valerie Fildes (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 68–107 (p. 85). Also cited in Cressy, ‘Churching of Women’, p. 110. 89. Sharp, The Midwives Book, p. 179. 90. Cressy, ‘Churching of Women’, p. 144. 91. For example, John White listed the case of an Essex vicar who was sequestered partly for refusing communion to menstruating women in the 1640s. The vicar was also indicted for stirring up the ‘auditory to laughter’ by discussing matters of ‘the secrets of Women’ and for making a number of inflammatory statements about the nature of women. The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (London: George Miller, 1643), p. 50. 92. Cited in Cressy, ‘Churching of Women’, p. 140. 93. Stone, A Complete Practice,p.29andp.32. 94. Ibid., p. 44. 95. [Anon]., The London Jilt; or, The Politick Whore, ed. by Charles H. Hinnant (Peterborough, ON: Boradview, 2008), p. 85. 96. John Loftis, ed., The Memoirs of Anne, Lady Halkett and Ann, Lady Fanshawe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 159. 97. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, ed. by Isobel Grundy (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 167. 98. Wortley Montagu, Selected Letters, pp. 167–8. 99. Ralph Houlbooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 18. 100. Houlbooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, p. 18. 101. Pechey, A General Treatise of the Diseases of Maids, p. 158. 102. Ibid., p. 174. 103. Ibid., p. 160. 104. [Nicolas de Venette], The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d (London: [n. pub.], 1707), p. 99. 105. John Donne, ‘To His Mistress’, in The Complete Poems of John Donne,edby Robin Robbins (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2006), I, 325–31, lines 1–2. 224 Notes
106. Doing Donne: Review of John Stubbs, Donne: The Reformed Soul (London: Penguin, 2006) TLS, 20 September 2006
8 ‘Women Grieve to Thinke They Must Be Old’: Representations of Menopause
1. The perimenopause stage is understood by modern medicine to occur between the ages of 35 and 50. 2. [Anon.], An Account of the Causes of Some Particular Rebellious Distempers viz. the Scurvey, Cancers in Women’s Breasts, &c. Vapours, and Melancholy, &c. Weaknesses in Women (London: [n. pub.], 1670), p. 52. 3. [Anon.], An Account of the Causes, p. 52. ‘Dodging’ in this sense means to change and move about. This usage is not in the OED. 4. Lois W. Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1993), p. 184. 5. James Drake, Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy, 2 vols (London: Sam. Smith and Benj. Walford, 1707), II, p. 354. 6. Lesley Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 107. 7. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth, ed. by Nicholas Brooke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), I.5. 43–5. See Jenijoy Labelle, ‘ “A Strange Infirmity”: Lady Macbeth’s Amenorrhea’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 31 (1980), 381–6. Marilyn Maxwell also explained how, following contem- porary humoral understandings, one of the consequences of amenorrhoea as described by Robert Burton in his Anatomy of Melancholy was a build-up of black bile, which in turn could lead to violent behaviour. So Lady Macbeth’s desire to stop her menses works on more than one level for Shakespeare’s plot. See Marilyn Maxwell, ‘Portraits of Menopausal Women in Selected Works of English and American Literature’ in The Meanings of Menopause: Historical, Medical and Clinical Perspectives, ed. by Ruth Formanek (London: Analytic Press, 1990), pp. 255–80 (p. 264). Notes 225
8. Joannes Groeneveld, The Grounds of Physick (London: J. Dover and others, 1715), p. 48. 9. John Freind, Emmenologia, trans. by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 1. 10. [Anon.], Aristoteles Master–Piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Displayed in All the Parts (London: J. How, 1684), pp. 83–4. 11. Banner, In Full Flower, p. 184. 12. Thomas Crofton Crocker, ed., The Autobiography of Mary Countess of Warwick (London: Percy Society, 1848; Kessinger facsimile reprint, 2009), pp. 32–3. 13. Ophelia Field, The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002), p. 121. 14. Lynn Botelho, ‘Old Age and Menopause in Rural Women of Early Mod- ern Suffolk’, in Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500, ed. by Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), pp. 43–65 (p. 44). 15. Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, A New Way to Please You; or, The Old Law (London: Nick Hern, 2005), p. 6. 16. Middleton and Rowley, ANewWay,p.18. 17. [Anon.], Aristoteles Master–Piece, p. 85. 18. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth- Century England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 78. 19. Ibid., p. 78. 20. Edward Bean Underhill, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ, Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol, 1640–1687 (London: Hanserd Knollys Society, 1847), pp. 396–8. 21. Underhill, The Records of a Church of Christ, p. 398. 22. J. B. Post, ‘Ages at Menarche and Menopause: Some Mediaeval Authorities’, Population Studies, 25 (1977), 83–7 (p. 87). 23. Michael Stolberg, ‘A Woman’s Hell? Medical Perceptions of Menopause in Preindustrial Europe’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 73 (1999), 404–28 (p. 405). 24. John Fothergill, ‘Of the Management Proper at the Cessation of the Menses’, in Medical Observations and Inquiries, ed. by A Society of Physicians, 5 vols (London: William Johnston, 1757–74), V, pp. 160–86 (p. 160). Also cited, in part, in ‘A Woman’s Hell?’ p. 404. 25. Fothergill, ‘Cessation of the Menses’, p. 160. 26. Stolberg, ‘A Woman’s Hell?’, p. 407. 27. Ibid., p. 407. See the Hippocratic text Aphorisms, 6.29: G.E.R. Lloyd, ed., Hippocratic Writings (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 229 which states, as noted in Chapter 4, that ‘Gout does not occur in women except after the menopause’. 28. Judith Cook, Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 168. 29. Botelho, ‘Old Age and Menopause’, p. 53. 30. Joel Wilbush, ‘What’s in a Name? Some Linguistic Aspects of the Climacteric’, Maturitas, 3. 2 (1981), 1–9 . 31. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered,ed. by Elaine Hobby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 134. As he acknowledged, Benjamin Allen was something of a lone voice when he called the climacteric at the age of 49 the ‘grand climacteric’. See The Natural History 226 Notes
of the Chalybeat and Purging Waters of England with their Particular Essays and Uses (London: B. Smith and B. Walford, 1699), sig. A3r. 32. For more on retrospective designation of menopause as the climacteric, see Sara Read, ‘When Menopause is not Climacteric’, Notes and Queries, 59.2 (2012), 224–6. 33. Freind, Emmenologia,p.1. 34. Grand climacteric is glossed in the OED as ‘grand climacteric: a year of life, often reckoned as the 63rd, supposed to be especially critical’. 35. Lady Anne Clifford, The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. by D.J.H. Clifford, (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 116. 36. Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, and William Rowley, The Old Law; or, A New Way to Please You (London: Edward Archer, 1656), p. 4. This line is omitted from the modern edition. 37. In ‘A Woman’s Hell?’, Michael Stolberg’s survey of Latin medical tracts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has produced a different result. 38. Ruth Formanek, The Meanings of Menopause: Historical Medical and Clinical Perspectives (Hove: Analytic Press, 1990), p. 8. 39. [Anon.], An Account of the Causes, p. 52. 40. [Anon.], A Rational Account of the Natural Weaknesses of Women (London: A. Dodd, 1716), p. 31. 41. Banner, In Full Flower, p. 171. 42. Wendy Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 113. 43. Jacqueline Eales, Women in Early Modern England, 1500–1700 (London: University College London, 1998), p. 104. 44. Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 79. The list of physical changes is from Botelho, ‘Old Age’, pp. 54–5. 45. Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 75. 46. Jean Astruc, A Treatise on all the Diseases Incident to Women, trans. Anon (London: M. Cooper, 1743), p. 73. 47. Fothergill, ‘Cessation of the Menses’, p. 160. 48. Cited in Churchill, Female Patients, p. 119. 49. Churchill, Female Patients, p. 122. 50. Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, Selected Letters, ed. by Isobel Grundy (London: Penguin, 1997), pp. 167. 51. Jean Astruc, A Treatise on all the Diseases, p. 73. 52. Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 78.
Conclusion
1. Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in Seventeenth- Century England (London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 205. 2. John Ford, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. by Brian Morris (London: A & C Black, 2000), p. 52. 3. Margaret Healy, ‘Dangerous Blood: Menstruation, Medicine and Beliefs in Early Modern England’, in National Healths: Gender, Sexuality and Health in a Cross-Cultural Context, ed. by Michael Worton and Nana Wilson-Tagoe (London: UCL Press, 2004), pp. 83–94 (p. 90). Notes 227
4. Elisha Cole, An English Dictionary (London: Peter Parker, 1677), unpaginated. 5. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties Eight Treatises (London: William Bladen, 1622), p. 180. 6. John Sadler, The Sicke Womans Private Looking-Glasse (London: Philemon Stephens and Christopher Meridith, 1636), sig. A5r. 7. Wendy Churchill, Female Patients in Early Modern England (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 97. 8. Anna Beer, Bess: The Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter (London: Constable and Richardson, 2005), p. 80. 9. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. by Elaine Hobby (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) p. 139. 10. [Anon.], Aristoteles Master–Piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Display’d in all the Parts Thereof (London: J. How, 1684), p. 14 11. John White, The First Century of Scandalous, Malignant Priests (London: George Miller, 1643), p. 50. 12. Ford, ’Tis Pity, II.1.9–12. 13. R. C. Latham and W. Matthews, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 11 vols (London: Bell and Hyman, 1974), VIII, p. 8. 14. Brendan ÓHehir, Harmony from Discords: A Life of Sir John Denham (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 180 (pp. 203–5). 15. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron Containing an Hundred Pleasant Novels (London: Isaac Jaggard, 1620), p. 150. 16. Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 114. 17. Cinthia Gannett, Gender and the Journal: Diaries and Academic Discourse (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 116–17. 18. Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 155. 19. Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), p. 6. 20. [Anon.], The Parliament of Women: Or a Compleat History of the Proceedings and Debates, of a Particular Junto, of Ladies and Gentlewomen (London: John Holford, 1684), p. 29. 21. Indeed, Adam Fox contends that it is reasonable to assume that by 1700 at least half of the population of England could read (Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700, p. 19). Bibliography
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Note: Letter ‘n’ followed by the locators refer to notes.
Abortifacients, 4 Billingsley, Nicholas (poet and divine, Albyn, Benjamin 1633–1709), 117 (seventeenth-century merchant), Birthing chamber, 152 42–4 Birth rates, 11 Alchemy, 20, 75 falling birth rates, 98 Allen Avisa (patient and mistress of Bloodletting, 13–14, 19, 30, 73, 80, 86, Simon Forman), 162, 222 n75 88, 96, 140, 146 Allen, Benjamin (Essex physician, Blount, Thomas (author, 1618–1679), 1663–1738), 28 39 Almanacs, 17–18 Bradstreet, Anne (poet, 1612–1672), 2, Amenorrhea, see menstruation 159 (absent) Breasts Andrews, Joseph (Henry Fielding), 42 at menopause, 172 Anne, Queen (1665–1714), 92–3, 96, in puberty, 40, 44, 47, 172 183 Breast-feeding, 58, 103, 155, 164, 166 Antenatal bleeding, 145, 154, Breast milk, 14, 36, 136–7, 160 156 Brown, Thomas (satirist, 1662–1704), Apothecary, 13, 72, 94, 95, 96 123 Archer, Isaac (clergyman and diarist, Brydges, Cassandra, first duchess of 1641–1700), 20–1, 29–30, 132, Chandos (family historian, 146–7, 151–2, 156 1670–1735), 84, 93, 104 Aristotle/ Aristotelianism (4th century BCE Greek philosopher), 13, 19, 36 Cacochymy (humoral imbalance), 16, Aristotle, Pseudo–, 98, 108, 174 64, 129 Aristotle’s Masterpiece, 46, 49, 98, 108, Calamy, Edward (Presbyterian 125, 172 minister, 1600–1666), 115 Astruc, Jean (French professor of Carew, Thomas (poet, 1595–1640), medicine, 1684–1766), 32, 61, 76–7 178, 180 Carey, Lady Mary (b. 1609), 159 Catamina, see menstruation Barker, Jane (novelist, 1652–1732), Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of 55–6 Newcastle (author, 1623–1673), Barrenness, see infertility 14 Bartholin, Thomas (Dutch physician Centlivre, Susanna (playwright, 1616–1680), 124, 136, 198 n71 d.1723), 66 Behn, Aphra (Restoration writer, Cervix, 124–6, 151, 153, 216 n10 c.1640–1689), 143 Chalybeate, 74 Bentley, Thomas (religious writer, fl. Charles I (1600–1649), 31 1582), 117 Charles II (1630–1685), 52, 107, 163
243 244 Index
Chidley, Katherine (pamphleteer, fl. Culpeper, Nicholas (Parliamentarian 1616–1653), 163 and medical writer, 1616–1654), Childbed death-rate, 158 3, 27, 36, 41, 46, 60–1, 64–5, 83, Childbirth, 1, 92, 106, 113, 116, 122, 85, 87, 98, 129, 135–7, 141 145, 151, 159–60, 166, 185 Chlorosis, see Greensickness Davy, Sarah (member of a gathered Churchill John, Duke of Marlborough church, 1637–1669), 114 (1650–(1722), 93 Deacon (female), 174 Churchill, Sarah Duchess of Defloration, see Hymenal bleeding Marlborough (1660–(1744, m, Delaval, Lady Elizabeth (memoirist, 1667), 92–3, 173, 183 1648–1717), 8–9, 21, 52–9 passim, Churchill, Wendy, 5, 80, 178, 179, 67–70, 118–19 183 Deuteronomy (Bible), 35, 135–6 Churching of women, 163–5 Devereux, Robert, the Third Earl of Cleanings, see lochia Essex (1591–1646), 45 Clifford, Lady Anne (diarist, Diemerbröeck, Isbrand van (Dutch 1590–1676), 65, 176 physician, 1609–1674), 30, 127 Clifford, Margaret, countess of Dionis, Pierre (French surgeon, Cumberland (c. 1560–1616), 1643–1718), 110–11, 120 65–6, 68 Donne, John (poet and clergyman, Climacteric age, 41–2, 49, 58, 172, 1572–1631), 2, 75, 167 175–6 Drake, James (physician, 1667–1707), Clitoris, 124 29, 32, 47–8, 110–11, 120 Cockburn, William (physician, Drake, Judith (writer and medical 1669–1739), 33 practitioner, fl. 1696–1723), 48 Cole, Elisha (lexicographer, fl. 1670s), Dupleix, Scipio (French historian, 182 1569–1661), 41 Collins, An (poet, fl. 1653), 15–16, Dysmenorrhoea, see Menstruation 119–20 (painful) Colostrum (first milk), 164 Conception, 19 Emmenagogues, 4, 17, 180 Cook, John (fl. 1730), 17 Enema, 26, 88, 94 Cooper, Thomas (Bishop and Epilepsy, 49–51, 58, 202 n57 lexicographer, c.1517–1594), Eve (biblical figure), 20, 33–4 27 Evelyn, John (author and diarist, Cornwallis Bacon, Lady Jane (letter 1620–1705), 103, 132 writer, 1581–1669), 92 Corrupt matter (in menstrual blood), Fanshawe, Lady Ann (memoirist, 16, 28, 31, 64, 87, 99, 128–9, 134, 1625–1680), 58, 165 137, 152 Ferment theory, 16–19, 25, 33, 49–51, Courses, see menstruation 110 Crawford, Patricia, 5, 24, 25, 28, 30, Fissell, Mary E., 113 35, 58, 83, 85, 92, 102, 103–4, Fitzherbert, Dionys (diarist, 105, 109, 118, 158, 163, 175, 179 1580–1640), 119, 205 n31 Cressy, David, 164, 168 Flemyng, Malcolm (Scottish Crooke, Helkiah (physician, physician, d. 1764), 110 1576–1648), 36, 99 – 100, 123, Flooding, see lochia 124, 130–1, 134, 136, 161 Flowers, see menstruation Index 245
Ford, John (playwright, 1586–1639), Hall, John (physician, d. 1635), 71–2, 69, 181 95 Forman, Simon (astronomer and Harley, Brilliana, Lady physician, 1552–1611), 83, 86, (Parliamentarian and letter writer, 175 1598–1643), 7, 11, 29, 88–92, 171 Forster, William (physician, fl. 1745), Harrison, Lady Margaret (mother of 191 n46 Lady Ann Fanshawe, d. c1640), Fothergill, John (physician, 58 1712–1780), 175, 178 Harvey, Gideon (physician, Freind, John (physician and professor 1636–1702), 32 of chemistry, 1675–1728), 17–19, Healy, Margaret, 4, 5, 182 30, 42, 60, 72, 93, 110–11, 127, Helmont, Joan Baptiste van (Flemish 141, 172, 176 chemist and physician, Fuller, Thomas (clergyman, 1580–1644), 13, 33–4, 197 n64 1608–1661), 168 Herbert, Lord Edward of Cherbury Funeral sermons, 118 (poet, 1583–1648), 74–9 Herrick, Robert (poet, 1591–1674), Galen, Claud / Galenism (1st century 167 CE physician), 13–19 passim, 35, Hickey, William (memoirist, 86, 87, 110, 137 1749–1830), 211 n96 Gataker, Thomas (clergyman, Hildegard of Bingen (visionary, 1574–1654), 118 1098–1179), 25, 34 Genesis (Bible), 97 Hippocrates / Hippocratic (Greek Geneva Bible, 113, 115, 118 physician, c. 460 - c. 370 BCE), 1, Gibson, Thomas (physician, b. 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 25, 36, 39, 47, c1647–c1722), 21, 30, 35, 47, 124, 49, 51, 64, 76, 86, 110, 129, 137, 127, 130–3 passim 149, 160, 162, 172, 175, 182, 231 Gilby, Anthony (clergyman, n25 c1510–c1585), 117 Hobby, Elaine, 14 Gossips, 163 Hoby, Lady Margaret (diarist, Gout, 86, 175, 225 n27 1571–1633), 8, 86–8, 90, 94, 104, Gowing, Laura, 25, 28, 82, 92, 145, 113, 175 174, 178–9, 181, 185 Holme, Randle (author, 1627–1700), Green, Monica H., 25, 44 28, 199 n83 Greensickness (Chlorosis), 22, 63–81, Howard, Frances, countess of Somerset 83, 128–9, 184, 185 (formerly Essex) (1590–1632), 45, Greenwood, Will (scholar, fl. 137–8 1657–1659), 39–41 Howard, Frances (Lady Frances Groeneveld, Joannes (also John Stewart, Duchess of Richmond Greenfield, physician, and Lennox, 1578–1639), 83 1647–c1710), 32, 172 Humoral theory, 14, 15, 54, 87, 161 Guillemeau, Jacques (French surgeon, Humours, 12, 14, 18, 47, 64, 99, 129, 1550–1613), 35, 149, 160–2 134, 172 Gwyn, Nell (actress and mistress to Hymen, see also maidenhead Charles II, 1650–1687), 107 anatomy of, 132 appearance of, 124 Haemorrhoids, 154 existence dispute, 134 Hakewill, George (clergyman, Hymenal bleeding as proof of 1578–1649), 40, 52 virginity, 135 246 Index
Infertility, 4, 73 Marten, John (surgeon and physician, as a weapon, 119, 185 d.1737), 32–4, 58, 78, 102 worries about, 43–4, 66, 155 Maternal death in childbed, 151 Isaiah (Bible), 27, 105, 113, 115–17, Maternal death rates in childbed, 158 214 n49 Maternal fears, 154 Isham, Elizabeth (memoirist, Maternal imagination, 154– 56 1609–1654), 8, 67–70, 78, 114 Matrons, jury of, 137–8 Matthew (Bible), 114 Johnston, Sir Archibald Maubray, John (Scottish physician, (Parliamentarian and judge, 1700–1732), 76, 129 1611–1663), 96 Mauriceau, François (French Jonas, Richard (schoolteacher and obstetrician and surgeon, translator fl. mid–sixteenth 1637–1709), 147, 150–1 century), 3, 194 n15 Menarche (first menstrual period), 1, 10, 15, 24, 39– 59, 114, 128, 169 King, Helen, 1, 39, 64–5, 87 age at, 44 King James Bible, 35, 115 delayed, 63–81 early, 60–3 Labour, 30, 133, 145, 150–3, 159, 164, and marriage, 45 167, 181 Men-midwives, 83, 133–4 Labour pain, 67, 154 Menopause, 171– 180 Lactation, see breastfeeding age at, 172 Leade, Jane (visionary, 1624–1704), Menses, see menstruation 20, 34 Menstrual clouts, 106–11, 183 Lemnius, Levinus (Dutch physician, Menstruation 1505–1568), 19, 46 absence as a sign of pregnancy, Leviticus (Bible), 117, 161, 211 n97, 83–4, 181 214 n49 absent (amenorrhea), 4, 10–11, 30, Literacy rates, 9–10, 186–7 83, 98, 100, 120, 129, 131, see Lochia, 22, 35–7, 154–62, 198 n77, also greensickness 199 n83 alternative names for, 24–34 Lord, Alexandra, 11, 15, 58, 61, 83, and the Bible, 25, 28, 34, 35, 97, 133 102, 113–20, 162 Lunar theory, 17 and breast milk, 36, 136 Lying-in, 2, 84, 95, 149, 157, 161–5, and foetal nutrition, 21, 36, 113, 168 124, 126 heavy bleeding (menorrhagia), Maidenhead, 140, 168, 184, see also 88–9, 94, 96, 98, 114 hymen medical theories about, 16–21 Maids (servants), 66 menstrual pain (dysmenorrhoea), Maids (virgins), 2, 46–7, 50–1, 58, 69, 97–102 80, 83, 99–100, 122, 127, 128, in pregnancy, 20–1, 126, 145–6, 147 130, 135–6, 141, 144, 176 regularity, 4, 10–12, 15, 18, 26–7, elderly, 122, 129, 133 50, 67, 83, 85, 86, 91, 92, 96, Malcolm, Sarah (convicted murderer, 110, 160, 171, 182 1710–1733), 3, 111–13, 183 and sexual activity, 102–3, 107–8, Man-midwife, 152 131, 162 Marriage, average age at first, 11, 45, Menstruum,20 200 n31 Midwives, generally, 43, 138, 152 Index 247
Mildmay, Lady Grace (memoirist, A New Way to Please You; or The Old 1552–1620), 49–50 Law, 173–4 Miscarriage, 30, 85, 91–2, 95, 153– 54, Romeo and Juliet, 68–9 156 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 69–70, 181 Moon, 17, 29, 49, 73, 197 n64 A Winter’s Tale,47 Mortality rates, in childbed, 107 The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret, 66 Nicholson, Edward (author, fl. 1712), 116 Plethora, 15–19, 21, 140 Novellas Pliny the Elder (1st century Roman The London Jilt; or, The Politick Whore natural historian), 28, 29, 127–8 (1683), 85, 134, 141, 143, 165 Poems (by title) Loves Intrigues (1713), 56–7 ‘Another Song (Excessive worldly Grief)’, 119 Old Bailey, The, Central Criminal ‘Another Song (The Winter of my Court, London, 3, 61, 148 infancy being over-past)’, 15, Orgasm, 19, 78, 141 119 Osborne, Dorothy (1627–1695), 196 ‘Before the Birth of One of Her n34 Children’, 159 ‘Cure for Greensickness’, 78 Painful periods (see menstruation, ‘A Dialogue Betwixt the Soul and menstrual pain) the Body’, 159 Paracelsus (Philippus Aureolus ‘The Disappointment’, 143 Theophrastus Bombastus von ‘On Flowers in a Lady’s Bosom’, 123 Hohenheim, physician and ‘The Green-Sickness Beauty’, 75 theorist, 1493–1541), 13 ‘To His Mistress’, 167 Paré, Ambrose (French barber-surgeon, ‘Julia’s Churching or Purification’, 1510–1590), 134 167 Paster, Gail Kern, 14, 70, 140 ‘On Mistress Willis’, 107 Pechey, John (physician, 1656–1716), ‘On Mistris N’, 77 147, 166 ‘Song (By all loves soft, yet mighty Penetration (intercourse), 128, 186 Powers)’, 107 Pepys, Elizabeth (1640–1669), 84, 97, ‘Sonnet XIX’, 167 100–1 ‘Tunbridge Wells’, 73 see also Samuel Pepys ‘Upon the Singing of the Lark’, 53 Pepys, Samuel (Navel officer and Porter, Roy, 2, 10, 12, 13, 14, 98 diarist, 1633–1703), 22, 82–3, Post-partum bleeding, duration of, 94–103 passim, 184–5 160 Perimenopause, 88, 171 Pre-natal bleeding, see antenatal Pessaries, 108 bleeding Phillips, Edward (lexicographer, d. Prolapse (uterine), 108 1696), 39 Puberty, 39–41 Phlebotomy, see bloodletting Pubic hair, 39, 41 Pitcairne, Archibald (Scottish physician, 1652–1713), 30 Quickening, 84 Placental abruption, 147, 153 Plays Ralegh, Elizabeth, Lady (wife of The Changeling, 137–41 courtier Sir Walter, 1564–1647), The Gentleman Dancing Master, 48–9 183 Macbeth, 172 Rape, 61–3, 106, 139, 143 248 Index
Raynalde, Thomas (physician, Thornton, Alice (autobiographer, fl.1540s), 27, 41, 76, 126, 153, 194 1627–1707), 6–8, 13, 16, 19, 37, n15 54–5, 131, 154–60, 182 Rich, Mary, Countess of Warwick The Trotula,25 (autobiographer, 1625–1678), 11, 173 Unmarried women, 12 Rivière, Lazare (French physician, Uterus, see womb 1589–1665), 19, 127 Rueff, Jakob (Swiss physician, Vagina, anatomy of, 124 1500–1558), 4, 84 Vairasse, Denis (French novelist, c1630–c1683), 135 Sadler, John (physician, fl. 1636), 30, Venette, Nicolas de (French physician, 102, 183 1633–1698), 128, 133, 135, 138, Sanitary protection, see menstrual 166 clouts Virginity tests, 137–8 Savage, Lady Sarah (diarist, 1644–1720), 25, 85–6 Sennert, Daniel (German physician, Walker, Garthine, 3, 62–3 1572–1637), 60, 98, 99 Wandering womb, 87 Sermons, religious, 115, 117, 118, 184 Warren, Ira, 131 Sermon, William (Norwich physician, Wear, Andrew, 13, 15, 158 c1629–c1679), 108–9, 111, 138 Westover, John (apothecary-surgeon, Shakespeare, William (playwright, 1643–1706), 72, 94–7 1564–1616), 2, 47, 95 Wet nurses, 21, 65, 69, 84 Sharp, Jane (midwife/author fl.1671), Whately, William (clergyman, 4, 24, 27, 28, 35, 36, 41, 49, 57, 1583–1639), 94, 102, 162 60–1, 64, 83–4, 124, 127, 128–9, White fever, 64, 65, 128–9 149, 156, 162, 164, 169, 176 Wilcox, Helen, 5–6 Smellie, William (obstetrician, Wilkes, Richard (Staffordshire 1697–1763), 28, 31 physician, 1690–1760), 133, 147 Soranus of Ephesus (2nd Century Willis, Thomas (Oxford physician, Greek physician), 126, 134 1621–1675), 37, 49–51, 160 Spencer, Edmund (poet, 1552–1599), Wilmot, John, Earl of Rochester (poet, 219 n77 1647–1680), 2, 73–5, 106–7, 140, Sponges (to absorb menstrual flow), 141 107–9 Wilson, Adrian, 11, 159, 164 Steel water, 73, 74, 80 Witches / witchcraft, 178 Stone, Sarah (midwife/author fl. Woman’s month, 165 1737), 36, 152–4, 164, 165 Womb, 4, 16, 18, 19, 20, 30, 36–7, 42, Streater, John (translator and printer, 60, 64, 71, 72, 83, 84, 87, 99–100, d. 1687), 3 108, 110, 113, 122–9 passim, 134, Sutton, Katherine (Baptist writer, 140, 147, 151–6 passim, 177, 183, 1630–1663), 27 216 n10 Woolley, Hannah (writer, 1622–1675), Terms, see menstruation 141 Thompson, Elizabeth (midwife/diarist Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary (writer, fl. 1669–1675), 5 1689–1762), 33, 165