Menstruation in the Middle Ages
Everybody from scientists and scholars to middle school students generally agrees that the best-developed human tendency is that of evolution. The most common form of said evolution is the biological kind, but along with this, humans also propel the evolution of minute aspects of themselves, such as society, language, and thought. It is therefore no surprise that while there has always been some sort of theorization surrounding menstruation, this theorization changed considerably through the ages.
The Ancient World did not lack diversity in beliefs regarding menstruation, but it was largely accepted that it had something to do with the moon. Slowly, while the word itself retained this lunar connection, society began drifting away from this belief and coming up with newer ones. This period of history is what is generally referred to as the Middle Ages.
What were the Middle Ages?
The duration of the Middle Ages — or the Medieval Era — is difficult to define. Until recently, most historians were at the consensus that the Ancient World came to an end with the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century CE, and the Modern Period began with the Renaissance in the 15th century. This was a particularly tempting classification because the Renaissance, or the ‘rebirth’, was the supposed revival of Ancient Rome and Greece, and the brief period that lacked the features of antiquity — with ‘brief’ being about a thousand years — was simply history hitting the ‘pause’ button.
Despite this being a blatantly Eurocentric perspective of the past, it was accepted as the truth for quite a while because it emerged during height of the colonial era in the 18th century, when most of the world “belonged” to one European power or other, effectively resulting in near-global “Europeanization”. Recently, however, this historical division has been pulled into question. For one thing, a millennium is a long time to establish as a single time period. For another, different paths of the world progress in very different ways — the fall of the Roman Empire, for example, coincides almost perfectly with the dawn of the Chinese Golden Age.
For the sake of this article, we may assume the Middle Ages to begin with the 6th century CE and ending circa the 17th century CE. However, it is imperative to remember that this time period meant different things to different people, and the historical context of the time must be kept in mind.
Case Study 1: Medieval Europe
The sixth century saw a number of drastic changes in Europe, starting with the collapse of the Roman Empire as a result of the Gothic War. Although Rome fell about a hundred years before this, it was the Goths’ cutting off of the aqueducts in the siege of 537 that put a definitive end to the empire. This left Europe fractured into a number of small kingdoms under Germanic rulers, who perpetually fought one another for land and wealth. Considering this the beginning of the Middle Ages in Europe means understanding that this time period in European history was largely fraught with wars and political and social tension. These political tensions eventually culminated in the formation of a number of monarchical states — such as France, England, and Austria — and the pervading social system of feudal orders. The decline in these systems can be seen beginning from the 17th and 18th centuries with the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in England, the French Revolution in France, and the gradual advent of the Industrial Revolution throughout the continent.
Throughout this period, there are very few texts making any mention of menstruation. In order to understand different theories thereof, we have to turn to a variety of unrelated, and often questionable, sources.
Medical records from 9th to 15th centuries, such as the Almanach für Österreich auf das Jahr 1491 and the works of Pietro Paolo Magni, talk about the humoral theory, according to which the human body is made of four liquids, or humors: black bile (or melancholy), red or yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. An individual was considered healthy if their humors were balanced, and an improper amount of any of these humors resulted in sickness. This theory is why the practice of bloodletting was common at this time, with physicians draining certain amounts of blood to restore their patients’ humoral constitutions to balance. It is unsurprising that many such physicians saw menstruation as the female body’s inbuilt system of bloodletting, and consequently, it was assumed that women suffered from some sort of illness every month, for which there was no definitive cure.
Aside from the medical point of view, the most commonly understood one was the religious. Religion — primarily Christianity — was the dominant sphere of Medieval European life, and it didn’t look upon menstruation kindly. In the Bible, Leviticus 15:19–30 says, “…she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening.” Many believed that menstruation, in that it involved a loss of blood, was some form of repentance for Eve’s sin. As a result, it was seen as punishment, but not as something abjectly undesirable, since it was a step towards absolution. It did, however, imply that women, as soon as they lost the “innocence of girlhood”, were inherently sinful and needed to redeem themselves of said sin. Once a woman reached menopause, she was seen as having successfully repented.
Other sources we may turn to are fictional ones — in this case, the works of William Shakespeare. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet refers to her “stainless maidenhood”, which can be inferred in context to mean she has not yet had her first menstrual cycle (since she was 13, this was perfectly ordinary for the time) and goes on to suggest as well that menstruation was a “stain” on one’s maidenhood. Since Juliet was going to be married in the duration of the play, this also indicates that the belief that a girl’s first period signaled that she should now be married off was not prevalent at this time. In Lady Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in the first act of the play, she calls upon the heavenly spirits to “unsex” her and “make thick [her] blood” so that she might formulate a plan to kill the king. Menstrual blood was considered thinner than ordinary blood, so we can infer that she is calling for the cessation of her femininity through stopping to menstruate, implying that menstruation was seen as a significant marker of one’s femininity.
Case Study 2: Medieval China
In 581 CE, China saw the establishment of the short-lived Sui dynasty, which conquered South Chen later in the century to unify the Chinese subcontinent, putting an end to centuries of political division. Many new institutions emerged alongside this unification, many of which lasted until a handful of centuries ago. For the next millennium, China continued as a single political body, with occasional internal strife and a period of political uncertainty brought in the 13th century by the Mongols. This period of relative stability continued until the 1840s, when China’s long-reigning Quing dynasty was pulled under scrutiny after its defeat at the hands of the British during the Opium wars.
Just as there was a popular belief in the Ancient World that connected menstruation to the moon, so too was there one in the Middle Ages. This recurring belief was that of seeing menstruation as an illness, which most Chinese scholars seem to have done. In his Comprehensive Good Formulas for Women, Chen Ziming listed menstruation under ‘women’s diseases’, and saw the womb as simply the part of the body that allowed conception. Hŏ Jun, a Korean physician who wrote about Chinese medicinal practices in his ‘Precious Mirror of Eastern Medicine’ (approximate translation), disagreed. According to him, menstruation was not an illness of women, but an illness of the womb, which itself was not an organ specific to women. The only difference was that men’s wombs were not susceptible to this disease.
Whether menstruation was supposed to be an illness of the woman or of the womb, it was an illness all the same, and therefore deemed by general society to be impure. A menstruating woman was not supposed to touch sacred statues, make offerings, or pray in public, and temples only permitted the entry of women who were either very old or very young.
Case Study 3: Medieval India
The 6th century welcomed India much the same as it did Europe — with the dissolution of a long-reigning empire (in this case, the Gupta Empire) into a collection of regional kingdoms with a series of weak rulers and repeated invasions from the east, west, and north. Eventually, in the mid-7th century, the Rajput dynasty established control over much of the northern part of the subcontinent, after which India followed in China’s footsteps as an almost unified body under the rulership of a single empire, beginning with the Rajputs, shifting to the Delhi Sultanate, and ending with the Mughal Raj. For India, the middle ages were a period of prosperity, brought to an end in the 18th century as the Mughals began to lose their footing when the British established control over Bengal.
Aside from a brief period during the Delhi Sultanate, the standing of women in general society throughout this period can be summed up in two words: not good. They were seen largely as the property of a man, whether this man be their father, brother, husband, or even son. Until the Mughal period, there was little education that was made available to them. Menstruating women supposedly made cows infertile, and menstrual blood was thought to attract evil spirits. There does appear to have been a pervading concern for uterine health, but this largely seems to have been less out of concern for the woman than for her son-bearing ability. Various Ayurvedic medicines were taken during menstruation to ensure overall vaginal health and fertility.
In the Mughal period, wealthy women were supposed to be educated, and it was possible for them to inherit and control land and finances. This period also saw the development of Unani medicine, inspired by Persian practices. Many doctors were women, known as Hakeem, as were midwives, or Dai. They treated not only fertility, but also menstrual illnesses like bacterial vaginosis. Nevertheless, menstruation remained tabooed, and menstruating and pregnant nurses were considered dangerous for infants to be around.
The flow of menstrual blood was most often stemmed using rags, a method that remains common in many parts of India — and the world at large — even today. Besides this, the Onnara Mundu was used frequently in Kerala and other parts of south India. It was a type of cotton loincloth worn around the waist, and had the added benefit of preventing sideway leakage.
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Although the sparsity of sources from the Middle Ages — in contrast to those of the Ancient World — make it difficult to piece together a holistic view of how menstruation was seen in that time period, it is evident that the general perception of menstruation was an overall negative one. This downward shift in understanding also reflects a change in the status of a woman herself in society. Although most of what has been discussed in the previous sections has been relegated to the past, remains of certain practices can be found even today in pockets of the world. In order to create a society that is amenable to menstruators and their needs, it is imperative to take mistakes from the past and mold them into solutions for the present.
About the Author
Gia is a writer who daydreams more than she writes. She is often found drinking coffee, surrounded by several copies of the same book and listening to one song on loop for two weeks in a row.