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Reading Menstruation and Vaginal Bleeding

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Reading Menstruation and Vaginal Bleeding 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 <www.history.ucr.edu> [accessed 19 May 2007]. 32. Jackson, ed., The Autobiography of Alice Thornton, p. 165. 33. Lear, ‘Thank God for Haemorrhoids!’, p. 339. 34. Ann Hughes, ‘Thornton, Alice (1626–1707)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38063> [accessed 24 August 2009]. 35. Anselment, ‘Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Sources of Alice Thornton’s Life’, p. 139. 36. Joanna Moody, ed., The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), p. xvi. 37. Douglas G. Green, ed., The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval: Written Between 1662 and 1671 (Gateshead: Surtees, 1978), p. 18 and p. 166. Lady Elizabeth wrote: ‘Only my aunt opossed it for the secret reason I have all ready told you’. Notes 191 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),
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