‘Women’s Monthly Sickness’: Accounting for Menstruation

Abstract

After menarche there was, for many women, a number of years of uninterrupted menstrual cycles, before the disruption to this pattern caused by pregnancy and then lactation. This chapter analyses how people in early modern England accounted for menstruation. As well as this, it considers painful menstruation and its management. As was outlined in the Introduction, there were several competing medical models seeking to account for why and how menstruation should occur. While there was a vibrant medical debate about the reasons for menstruation and how it happened, an analysis of how people other than medics experienced and recorded menstruation has been lacking. Laura Gowing argued that ‘[1]iterate discourse did not necessarily represent the way that most early modern people thought about their bodies, and unpicking the cultural construction of sexual difference still leaves us with questions about the materiality of the body’.¹ By setting the surviving personal or more conventionally literary material in the context of medical writing, this book evaluates the likely impact of theoretical posturing on the understanding of this physiological function, providing some answers to the issue that Gowing has raised. This analysis will therefore highlight the sorts of difference to be found between the very public medical debate and the more personal accounts in diaries, journals and letters, and also will consider the differences between the ways in which men and women recorded this topic.