Conclusion

Abstract

Laura Gowing argued throughout Common Bodies that ‘the most apparently natural of bodily events and processes — like desire, labour or motherhood — are the product of culture’ and sought to show how ‘social and material conditions made women’s bodies what they were’.¹ This study, similarly, has situated its analysis of the occasions of female transitional bleeding within the social and cultural framework of early modern society, seeking to show how understandings of the ways in which the female body worked were represented both in elite medical texts and in more personal and private discourses. The overriding concern of this study has been to analyse the ways in which women might have understood their reproductive bodies. By showing the social pressures on women to keep silent, at least in public, on this topic, and the subsequent ways in which a small number of women found to work round these conventions, by inventing codes and oblique euphemisms, this book offers an analysis of the ways in which menstruation and other transitional bleedings were accounted for, for the whole reproductive cycle, in early modern England.