Introduction: ‘Those Sweet and Benign Humours That Nature Sends Monthly’: Reading Menstruation and Vaginal Bleeding

Abstract

One of the key features of female physiology with respect to its reproductive functions is blood loss. In early modern England, each new episode of vaginal bleeding was imbued with meaning which related not just to the physiological changes it announced in the female body but to cultural and social dimensions too. This was because each type of bleeding, from menarche to post-partum bleeding, marked a change in the way in which a woman was perceived by those around her. Helen King has shown that the Hippocratic texts, which informed early modern medical theory and practice, portrayed the process of growing from a girl into a woman as a gradual one. She has explained how On Generation indicated that as a girl grew, the channels in her body were thought to be gradually opened to make ‘a way through and a way outside’. Therefore, as part of the growth to maturity, all ‘three transitional bleedings — menarche, defloration and childbirth — cause further changes in the body’.¹ Unlike modern medical assumptions, this Hippocratic taxonomy, as understood in the early modern period, explained that all aspects of vaginal bleeding, including the blood lost upon first intercourse and that lost after childbirth, were considered to be related to menstruation. The change heralded by menarche (the occasion of a young woman’s first menstrual period) meant that the girl was considered marriageable, for example.