Abstract
Although an allowance of a year or two either side of the normal expected age of menarche of 14 was not seen as problematic, if a girl was to begin to menstruate at a much earlier or later age, that was a cause for concern. This chapter moves on to explore the literary representations of early and delayed menarche within a society which associated this event with a change of status from a child to a potentially marriageable young woman, and considers the ways in which representations of menarche occurring at an inappropriately early or late age demonstrate the significance that this culture attached to this timing.
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Notes
Nicholas Culpeper, A Directory for Midwives; or, A Guide for Women, in their Conception, Bearing and Suckling their Children (London: Peter Cole, 1662), p. 21.
John Freind, Emmenologia, trans, by Thomas Dale (London: T. Cox, 1729), p. 1.
Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book; or, The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered, ed. by Elaine Hobby (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 216.
Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 59.
Susanna Centlivre, The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (London: E. Curll, 1714), p. 8.
Thomas Raynalde, The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman’s Book, ed. by Elaine Hobby (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), p. 106.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, ed. by Jill L. Levenson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
John Ford, Tis Pity She’s a Whore, ed. by Brian Moms (London: A & C Black, 2000), III.2.82-3, p. 52.
Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago, IL: Chicago Llniversity Press, 2004), p. 91.
Lesel Dawson, Lovesickness and Gender in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 53.
Lord Edward Herbert, The Poems of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, ed. by John Churlton Collins (London: Chatto and Windus, 1881), pp. 99–100.
John Maubray, The Female Physician Containing all the Diseases Incident to that Sex in Virgins, Wives and Widows (London: James Holland, 1724), p. 43.
Thomas Carew, Poems, with a Maske by Thomas Carew (London: H. M., 1651), pp. 161–2.
John Marten, A Treatise on the Venereal Disease, 7th edn (London: John Marten, 1711), p. xi.
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© 2013 Sara Read
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Read, S. (2013). ‘Full Sixteen and Never Yet Had Those’: Representations of Early or Delayed Menarche. In: Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47003-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-35503-4
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