Bodies of Knowledge, Bodies of Mystery
Recent Work in the History of Bodies, Genders and Sexualities
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4891071 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kim M Phillips (0000-0003-4349-7814, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 87 |
| Pages | 271-282 |
| Publication date | 2019-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dbz016 |
| OpenAlex | W2918118640 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 6 |
A few years ago, a historian friend who is also a novelist asked for information on how medieval women managed their periods. To my shame, I was not able to give a definitive answer. A quick survey of available publications on medieval medical and cultural discourses, such as authoritative studies by Monica H. Green, dealt in admirable detail with ages at menarche and menopause, menstruation’s causes, its benefits and drawbacks, its role in signalling fertility, its subjection to religious taboo, its various treatment in Latin Christian, Byzantine, Jewish and Muslim contexts – indeed, its centrality to medieval perceptions of women’s health and spiritual status.1 But they said little or nothing about simple hygiene. My friend and I speculated about use of linen rags, fleece, sphagnum moss, temporary confinement, and the possibility that women simply bled onto their underclothes. I came up with a couple of textual fragments. Heloise’s third letter to Peter Abelard written in the 1130s implied that the nuns of her abbey should be supplied linen, rather than woollen, undergarments during ‘the monthly purgings of their superfluous humours’.2 Béatrice de Planissoles’s 1320 testimony to inquisitor Jacques Fournier, defending herself against charges of heresy and witchcraft, demonstrated that a scrap of linen ‘blouset’ had been used to collect her daughter’s menstrual blood though in this case for the purpose of producing a love potion; her daughter had initially bled onto her slip.3 Yet my failure to respond readily with a bundle of examples was salutary, a lesson in just how opaque to historical view some of the most mundane aspects of human bodily experience can be.
Ancient history · Art · Heresy · Literature · Nothing · Shame · Sociology · Taboo · Theology · Anthropology · French Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Psychology · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |