Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England

S. Read

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137355034
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In early modern English medicine, the balance of fluids in the body was seen as key to health. Menstruation was widely believed to regulate blood levels in the body and so was extensively discussed in medical texts. Sara Read examines all forms of literature, from plays and poems, to life-writing, and compares these texts with the medical theories.

1

‘What a Small Excess Is Called Flooding’: The Language of Menstruation and Transitional Bleeding

The natural starting place for a study which analyses accounts of female bleeding in early modern England is to decode the terminology that early modern women both understood and used to describe these events. The first occasion of bleeding, menarche, or a girl’s first menstrual period, acts as an indicator that she has reached puberty. However, ‘menarche’ was not a term that had any currency in this period and, indeed, is not one that is glossed in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1900. Instead the event was simply referred to descriptively as the time when a girl could expect to have her first menstrual period.

In terms of menstruation itself, this era used many increasingly well-known expressions to describe this physiological function; however, there are some false assumptions, or general mistakes, in the etymology of these terms. ‘Courses’, ‘custom of women’, ‘flowers’, ‘gift’ or ‘benefit of nature’, ‘months’, ‘monthly sickness’, ‘ordinaries’, ‘terms’, ‘time common to women’, ‘those’ and ‘visits’ are all words or phrases that the early modern woman would hear used and, if literate, see written in accounts which she would take to mean her menstrual cycle. Throughout the seventeenth century, ‘flowers’ was the most common alternative name for menstruation and it has a very old heritage. Patricia Crawford has written that the term is ‘apparently poetic’ but, as she later acknowledged, the euphemism seems to have derived from a horticultural metaphor.¹ Jane Sharp, the seventeenth-century midwife, claimed that it was used because ‘Fruit follows’ flowers, which is to say, it was believed that without menstruation, conception was impossible.² The Oxford English Dictionary glosses the term ‘flowers’ as the menstrual discharge, the menses, after the French term fleurs, which, it claims, is regarded by French scholars as a corruption of flours, or ‘flow’. However, Monica H. Green’s careful research in The Trotula has shown that ‘flowers’ as a term for the menses had been in common vernacular use across Europe for hundreds of years.³ For example, German nun Hildegard of Bingen used the flowers and fruit metaphor in the twelfth century.⁴ So the term ‘flowers’, as derived from the horticultural word, was in use long before science tried to reclaim the term as a derivative of the Latin fluor. As Green has explained elsewhere, ‘Rather than a corruption or confusion of the Latin term fluor, the term “flowers” was probably a colloquialism used by women who were descended from the Germanic ethnic groups that spread across western Europe in the early Middle Ages’.⁵

Crawford has alternatively suggested that the usage of the term ‘flowers’ came about because one of the early modern theories of why a woman might menstruate was based on a ferment model, with menstruation being seen as analogous to the production of alcohol. In this process, fermentation produces a scum on the surface of the liquor, also called flowers. Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing have pointed out that ‘flowers’ was a term which was used in brewing, and so in this usage relates directly to ‘the flowering or fermenting of beer’.⁶ Crawford has speculated that ‘although the term “flowers” may have its origin in the idea of the purification of a woman’s blood by fermentation, words take on meanings of their own, so that some thought menstruation was named “the flowers” because fruit followed’.⁷ However, this hypothesis is flawed, because while the idea of purification from menstruation was an ancient Hippocratic-founded one, its reinvention as the ferment theory did not take place until the mid-seventeenth century: the etymological relationship must have occurred the opposite way round to that which Crawford has suggested. Indeed, it might be the case that this scientific understanding of menstruation was influenced by recognition of the events in brewing which extrapolated such observations into assumptions about women’s physiology.

The term ‘flowers’ has a biblical resonance too: John 15:2 states, ‘Every branch in me that beareth not fruit, he will take away: and every one that beareth fruit, he will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit’. This was a well-known verse in the Bible and is quoted in spiritual diaries, such as Lady Sarah Savage’s Memoir in which she reflected on its comfort: ‘this comforts me – that I am a branch in Christ, and all such he will purge, that they may bring forth more fruit’.⁸ Savage was quoting this passage in a religious sense as she was in her 60s by this point, but its inclusion in her spiritual reflection does show that the sentiment was one which made sense to biblically literate early modern women.

The phrase ‘custom of women’ is also biblical and was only rarely used outside that context. It appears in Genesis 31:35 where Rachel tells her father that she cannot get up because the custom of women is upon her. A Christian dictionary from 1661 explains that this meant ‘The way of women, to wit, the natural disease for which women use to be put apart’.⁹ That it was seldom used apart from in this sense makes it more significant that it was the circumlocution used in a ballad mocking Zachary Crofton, a Presbyterian preacher who had become the minister of St Botolph’s in London in mid-1655 by order of Oliver Cromwell.¹⁰ Crofton had been accused of beating his maidservant, Mary Cadman, with undue severity and even worse, doing it ‘when her issue of blood was upon her’.¹¹ For the beatings and also other ecclesiastical trespasses, he was called to appear before the Guildhall commissioners. In his defence he published, under the pseudonym ‘Alethes Noctroff’, a pamphlet, Perjury the Proof of Forgery; or, Mr Crofton’s Civility Justified by Cadman’s Falsity, in which he sought vindication for his actions. This case caught the public imagination, and in short order both a play parodying Crofton and a ballad appeared.¹² Significantly, because the ballad mocks a preacher, it euphemises menstruation in the biblical phrasing:

One time above all was very sad
(upon some small omission)
The custome of women then she had,
(a pitifull condition)
Yet he administers the usual glisters;
For hees her ghostly physician.¹³

The ballad damningly claims that Crofton was unaware that Cadman was menstruating because it was his usual practice to beat her, ‘Til he saw bloud run down her heels’. The reference to Crofton as a ‘ghostly physician’ employs a widely used metaphor for priests as healers of the soul. The reference to ‘glisters’ or enemas here also suggests links to several ideas, such as that he was administering a ‘cure’ to her bottom in the form of hitting her; that an enema as a purge might have been a bodily physician’s prescription to aid menstrual disorders; and that he claimed that the beating was for the benefit of her spiritual health.

The next most common expressions, ‘courses’ and ‘terms’, like ‘customs’, both have their origins in the regular, timed nature of the menstrual flow. ‘Natural’ menstruation was supposed to follow its timely and regular course. The OED glosses ‘course’ and ‘courses’ in this way, and suggests that by 1839 the term ‘course’ was still being used, but only ‘by the ignorant or vulgar’. However, ‘courses’ can be interpreted as a translation of the Latin word cursus (‘running’). Thomas Cooper’s early Latin dictionary makes this clear, glossing ‘the monthly disease of women’ as Menstrui cursus, Menstrua muliebria.¹⁴ ‘The terms’ is explained in a similar way in the OED, which uses an example from Thomas Raynalde’s edition of The Birth of Mankind, which states, ‘In English they be named terms, because they return eftsoons [soon afterwards] at certain seasons, times, and terms’.¹⁵

In various medical texts at this time, all of the above expressions can be found and are often used interchangeably, but the more scholarly text might use menses or menstrua, which derive from the Latin for monthly or monthlies.¹⁶ The Birth of Mankind explains that the words were appropriate because ‘once in a month they happen always to womankind after 14 or 15 years of age passed (being in their perfect health)’.¹⁷ From the term menstrua (monthlies), a corruption based on a false etymology was used which, as Jane Sharp has glossed in her midwifery textbook, suggests that the term ‘menstruous’ related to monstrous. The implication that women were monstrous was a commonplace early modern insult. Sharp has explained: ‘Menstrua: quasi Monstrua’, and this might have had overtones for the way in which early modern women related to their menstrual cycles.¹⁸ This supposed connection between menstruous and monstrous is made explicit in Katherine Sutton’s conversion narrative. She modified the sentiment of Isaiah 64:6, which uses the simile of man’s righteousness being as worthless as a menstrual cloth, and reworked it into her suggestion that ‘mans righteousness is as monstruous cloathes, and filthy raggs, that comes not from a heart sanctified where Christ dwels’.¹⁹ As will be argued in Chapter 4, no woman would allude to this biblical verse using the term ‘menstruous’ explicitly, but the subtle change to ‘monstruous’ highlights the usage that Sharp’s text refers to. This means that while this substitution might have been made by the printer not the author, it seems likely that the more modest wording was Sutton’s. Indeed, Sharp herself also subverted the sentiment when she remarked that ‘it is a Monstrous thing, that no creature but a woman hath them’, but that this does not make a woman monstrous.²⁰ Clearly the conflation of ‘menstrua’ and ‘monstrous’ was so well known that Sharp felt that she must counter it. The sense that the conflation was a commonplace is also evidenced in the 1671 reprint of Nicholas Culpeper’s A Directory for Midwives. This ‘enlarged’ edition expanded on the previous commentary upon the supposed corrupt nature of menstrual blood and noted that ‘all this cavilling is rather about the word [Menstruis] or about the blood retained above a month before Conception, than about any material thing in the business’.²¹ That the parenthetical editorial addition of ‘menstruis’ replaced monstrous is a way of making sense of this discursive addition to the Directory. Sharp’s refutation, and ones like it, challenge Crawford’s claim that Sharp’s ‘ideas and attitudes’ about menstruation were ‘indistinguishable from those of male writers’.²² It is here significant, as Tiffany Potter has commented, that the first recorded use of ‘menstruous’ was in Miles Coverdale’s 1535 English Bible, which states that ‘Menstruous wemen shal beare monsters’.²³ Potter has rightly observed that ‘Miles Coverdale’s manipulation of [menstruous’s] aural similarity to monstrous is significant’.²⁴ As Laura Gowing has noted, the confusion of ‘menstruous’ and ‘monstrous’ might have made it easier for people to accept the often repeated religious ideas that intercourse during menstruation resulted in monstrous births.²⁵ Its significance can be further seen in the introduction of similar phrases in texts of various genres, such as the English translation by Philemon Holland of Pliny’s Natural History book 15, ‘Of Women’s Monthly Sickness’, which states: ‘hardly can there be found a thing more monstrous than is that fluxe and course of theirs’.²⁶ It is quite possible that the use of this phraseology in religious contexts from Coverdale onwards also informed the subsequent translation of Pliny, as any translation is a subjective, interpretive process. From this false etymology, women could be accused of being monstrous in common jests and the like, and many a ballad was described as being sung to the tune of ‘Oh women, monstrous women’.²⁷ Indeed the phrase ‘monstruous women’, as Gordon Williams has noted, was surely used on purpose in a pre-1650 joke. In it a ‘certaine thing [was] dropt at a Masque, which Monstruous woemen use to wear’; the punch-line being that a ‘Madde Knave’, who has no idea of its function, holds it up and asks whose it is, oblivious of the discomfort among the women this causes.²⁸

From the eighteenth century, scholarly texts started to prefer Greek terminology to Latin, and so from the end of the seventeenth century the term ‘catamenia’ was regularly used.²⁹ It appeared in 1688 in Randle Holme’s reference to ‘Catamenia, Womens courses or Monthly terms’.³⁰ Benjamin Allen then used the term routinely in his discourse on treating menstrual problems with healing waters.³¹ The OED ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on spelling conventions
• Introduction: ‘Those Sweet and Benign Humours That Nature Sends Monthly’: Reading Menstruation and Vaginal Bleeding
• 1. ‘What a Small Excess Is Called Flooding’: The Language of Menstruation and Transitional Bleeding
• 2. ‘Having the Benefit of Nature’: Menarche and Female Adolescence
• 3. ‘Full Sixteen and Never Yet Had Those’: Representations of Early or Delayed Menarche
• 4. ‘Women’s Monthly Sickness’: Accounting for Menstruation
• 5. ‘Wearing of the Double Clout’: Dealing with Menstrual Flow in Practice and in Religious Doctrine
• 6. ‘The Flower of Virginity’: Hymenal Bleeding and Becoming a Woman
• 7. The ‘Cleansing of the Flowers after the Birth’: Managing Pregnancy and Post-Partum Bleeding
• 8. ‘Women Grieve to Thinke They Must Be Old’: Representations of Menopause
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index