Chelsea and Sarah are two women who have a lot in common. They share a deep desire for children. They both struggle with fertility problems. They are both devout Christians and believe that their infertility is in divine hands and will be resolved according to God’s will. Chelsea writes about her infertility that it “does not define me/us. In fact, I feel blessed to be given this opportunity to trust God.” Sarah, meanwhile, writes “If God should deny me the mercy of children it is in infinite wisdom. If he totally deny it, it is in mercy and in love to my soul and if he see good to bestow it he will. In the meantime, it is good for me to hope and quietly to wait upon him.”
The women are separated by, you may have guessed, about 300 years. The first quote appeared in Chelsea’s blog, Starbucks, Peace and the Pursuit of a Baby, in April 2012. The second quote appeared in Sarah Savage’s spiritual diary in September 1687.
Looking at these quotes, it is tempting to focus on how similar they are. The past might be another country, but like most other countries it is inhabited by people who, at the basic level, share desires, concerns, and emotions. Reading Sarah Savage’s diary, it is easy to find feelings and needs that echo those of thousands of women facing fertility problems today. There are also some evident historical continuities. Chelsea’s particular brand of Christian faith can be understood as a continuation of the “godly” Puritanism that compelled Savage to write her diary, and the two women’s devout responses to infertility stem from the same source.
For the past several years I have lived my professional life in Sarah Savage’s world. I have researched and explored the lives and experiences of English women and men who faced fertility problems in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. I have become so immersed in their world that a friend who is a modern day OB/GYN teases me, saying I talk about my historical subjects as though they were patients. And while those early modern “patients” may express thoughts and feelings that seem eerily familiar to us, the differences between their world and ours are staggering, not merely cosmetic or technological.
Let’s start with the obvious. We live in a world of home pregnancy tests, ultrasounds, and IVF. We can know with almost complete certainty that we are pregnant within two weeks of ovulation. We know about ovulation, full stop. That already puts us miles ahead of the seventeenth century. If we get pregnant, we can see the fetus grow within us, and hear its heartbeat using a Doppler device we got on Amazon. And if we do not conceive, or do not carry a pregnancy to full term, we also usually know something about why. Chelsea places her faith in God, but she also relies on all the latest treatments and can say with a fair degree of certainty that her fertility problems stem from PCOS. All of this knowledge does not mean that we can solve all fertility problems, and it doesn’t even necessarily reduce our worry and anxiety about conception and pregnancy. It does, however, mean that the 21st-century experience of infertility is vastly different from the one people had even one century ago, let alone three.
Forget about understanding the exact cause of a fertility problem, or even diagnosing that it existed. Let’s start with this simple fact: in the early modern world, there was no reliable way to know if a woman was pregnant until she had given birth to a baby. You could make educated guesses. You could assume, based on physical characteristics and personal experience. But unless an actual baby was delivered, ideally in front of witnesses, there was no way to be sure. Mary Tudor famously thought she was pregnant twice in her life when she was not, but these cases might be easily dismissed: after all, she had no previous experience with pregnancy, and the pressure on her to provide a Catholic heir was massive.
Take instead Mary’s contemporary, Honour Plantagenet, Lady Lisle. Lady Lisle had seven children with a previous husband before she married Arthur Plantagenet. In December 1536, Lisle was convinced that she was pregnant, enough to send out notices to friends and family and to receive letters of congratulation and gifts. Around June or July of 1537, she entered her laying-in chamber in anticipation of the birth. It never came. By late August, Lisle had no choice but to admit to herself that she had not been pregnant at all. It was quite a blow, and it was said that she “weepeth and sorroweth without comparison.” Despite her extensive experience with childbearing and the attention of physicians and other attendants, Lisle could falsely believe that she was pregnant because there was no certain way to prove otherwise, except letting time take its course.
Even in the early modern period, people knew there was a link between menstruation and pregnancy. The main method women had to guess at the state of their fertility was to follow their cycle. This was by no means certain, however, because poor nutrition and general living conditions meant that even fertile women might have highly irregular cycles. Some medical guidebooks suggested that as long as a woman got her period once a year, all was well. Still, the diaries of Sarah Savage and Lady Margaret Hoby indicate that women did keep track of the timing of their period. Even their husbands sometimes took note: both Elizabethan scientist John Dee and the diarist Samuel Pepys carefully recorded the timing of their respective wives’ periods. For women trying to conceive, menstruation was a bit of a double-edged sword. A late period might be hopeful, because it might signal a pregnancy, but it could equally mean a medical problem or even an end to fertility altogether.
Princess Anne (later Queen Anne) called her period “Lady Charlotte.” In her correspondence with her close friend Sarah Churchill, she took regular note of Lady Charlotte’s visits and absences. In July 1692 she wrote that “I have not yet seen Lady Charlotte, which I wonder very much at for I used to be very regular, and I cannot fancy she has taken her leave for nine months.” A few days later she wrote again: “Lady Charlotte is not yet come to me and I doubt if I should prove with child. It is so soon after my illness to hope to go on with it… if I am not [pregnant] it is a very ugly thing to be so irregular.”
Anne was worried about her fertility, and she had every reason to be. When she wrote the letter she had already been pregnant nine times, yet only three pregnancies had resulted in living children, and of those two had died in infancy of illness. By the end of Anne’s fertile years she could count seventeen pregnancies, yet not one living child. With an irregular menstrual cycle and a history of miscarriages, premature labors, and stillbirths, it is hardly surprising that Anne was worried. She got advice from numerous physicians, and in 1693, when she believed herself pregnant again, she wrote that she was “so desirous of children I would do anything to go on [to full term].” But she knew that Lady Charlotte’s absences could be as much a sign of infertility as of fertility, and she knew that she had little beyond guesswork and her own experience to tell her which it was at any given moment. She also knew, as most fertility patients in her period did, that while she had many treatment options, none were remotely certain.
It’s not that early modern medicine didn’t acknowledge fertility problems or try to treat them. It offered many different kinds of treatment. Most of the medical advice was based on the humoral medical theory prevalent in that time. In a nutshell, this theory claimed that the body was made up of four humors, which had to be in a proper balance of these qualities in order to be healthy, and to produce children. Available treatments sought to balance the “intemperate” body. Herbal remedies were the most common, with preparations based on sage, cinnamon and ginger being popular choices for fertility patients.
If the imbalance was serious, more dramatic remedies such as blood-letting or inducing vomiting were used. If you were a wealthy, upper-class woman, you might choose to “take the waters” in one of the reemerging spa towns. Anne favored Tunbridge Wells, while other prominent women preferred Bath or Buxton. There were also some more “magical” treatments, from tying a frog around your waist to making a drink from boar’s testicles. Most patients took their pick from any or all of these options and added to them prayer and devotion according to their specific faith. The variety of treatments available at the time is indicative of the uncertainty people felt about their efficacy.
Medical advice also had another dimension: a humoral imbalance leading to infertility might be a born trait, but women who had it were characterized, in the medical literature, as tending to too much drink, too much food, too much anger, or too much sex. Promiscuous women were believed to be infertile, and women who “domineered” their husbands or generally acted in ways a good woman shouldn’t were also thought to be bringing infertility upon themselves. Childbearing was absolutely central to women’s identity in the early modern period, and was considered the primary (although not only) justification for marriage. So these medical books were saying that how you should act as a “proper” woman was how you must act if you wanted to fulfill this basic function. And if you were a married woman with no children, well, there was a good chance that it was your fault.
Sarah Savage’s fertility concerns were short-lived, and she eventually had eight children. Other childless women in her period were not so lucky, but they found methods of coping: they filled their lives with “good works,” focused on literary pursuits, practiced informal adoption (actual adoption was quite rare), or found other meaning. But in a world in which their fertility was forever uncertain, and in which motherhood was seen as the primary goal of all married women, it was difficult to state that their infertility did not define them; to some extent, it did.
***
Sources:
Excerpts from “Starbucks, Peace and the Pursuit of a Baby” have been included with Chelsea’s kind permission.
Sarah Savage’s diary is in manuscript at the Chester and Cheshire Record Office.
Lady Lisle’s correspondence is in: Muriel St Clare Byrne. The Lisle Letters. Vol. 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Queen Anne’s letters to Sarah Churchill are in the British Library, Additional Manuscripts 61414 -61415.
Image of birthing chair via.
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Spelling and punctuation have been modernized throughout for easier reading.
Calling my period “Lady Charlotte” from now on.
So much better than Aunt Flo!
For serious, I thought I was just repulsed by period nicknames like “Aunt Flo” but it turns out I just needed them to be like 1000% classier
See, what we all need is period period nicknames. I am all for Lady Charlotte and her contemporaries!
Then we can imagine them having a pleasant tea party together when they’re not busy plaguing us.
I swear I remember hearing about someone saying “the monkey fell off the roof”.
In France at the time they called periods the cardinal.
Very interesting piece!
This is a bit of a tangent, but would you be able to expand a bit upon informal vs. actual adoption? In the early modern period, what would have defined actual adoption?
This also caught my eye, and I would love to read even a little more about it!
So I’ve actually just been looking more into this recently. It appears that in Early Modern England there is actually *no* legal adoption, in the sense of making someone formally your child and heir. There was legal adoption in a few other European countries in this period, but still quite rare and contentious. In England, however, you couldn’t do it.
So when I write about “informal adoption”, I mean taking on the education and care of (usually) children/young adults who are not directly related to you, and acting in a role that is like that of a parent, but without making them your legal heirs.
Thanks!
Just adding to that, the first Act addressing legal adoption in England and Wales happened as late as 1926–prior to that people could only informally adopt children, but they had absolutely no legal rights to protect their relationship. If a relative of the child’s showed up and claimed them, they would have had no recourse. They could make the child an heir, but it worked best for no one challenging the will if the child was already a close relation or if the parent had no relatives who could try to claim a better right. Like Jane Austen’s oldest brother was “adopted” by a rich childless aunt and uncle and changed his name to theirs after he inherited upon their deaths. But even though he had been informally adopted and lived with the couple almost solely from the time he was 12 or so (when both of his parents were still living), there was still a lawsuit against his inheritance, which he ended up winning.
Thanks for this comment! The history of adoption has been proving more difficult to research than I expected, and of course this is why.
It’s probably later than what you are looking for, but Jenny Keating’s book A Child for Keeps covers adoption in England between the World Wars. This review talks a little about history before that http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/806
I come from a family (in the US) with a long multi-generational history of adoption. By the 1960s adoptions in my family were legal, but even back one generation in the 1930s they were informal.
My great-grandparents adopted the infant children of their neighbors when the parents died. These girls were raised with my infant grandfather and treated exactly the same as the biological children. However as adults, they never referred to themselves as sister and brother (even though they had a pleasant relationship) and I was in college before I learned that the nice old lady who always hugged me at church had been raised as my great-aunt. I don’t think they even thought about legal adoption then. Raising children who needed a family was just something you did because you were good people or good Christians or you had a strong community. Family had a wider meaning, if that makes sense. We were all one neighborhood, one immigrant group, one church, one set of workers at the same factory… one family. We’re all in this together.
Modern culture is significantly more fragmented, I think. Families are more insular. We don’t live by our parents any more, we don’t stick to our same ethnic group. Family today means the solid legal circle of parents and minor children, excluding all others. Because we look at family as such a separate, significant thing, we now need a legal act to integrate a child into a family. But that’s relatively new. I don’t think people of even 100 years ago would have even thought of it.
I suspect that depends on your class. Legality mattered particularly if you had property to pass on. I’m guessing that if your great-grandparents had had something like a business or a farm that they wanted to pass on, and perhaps if one of the girls had been a boy, the question of formality might have arisen?
Nowadays, it matters because huge amounts of our legal rights and responsibilities are based on legally-sanctioned kinship relationships. It is a huge deal that both me and my (female) partner are legal parents to our daughter: if that law hadn’t been changed, our family would be incredibly vulnerable.
Exactly this.
Legality mattered a great deal in the early modern period (in which, by the way, nuclear families were the norm and couples waited until they could afford to start their own household before they got married).
It defined inheritance law, which was crucial if you had anything to leave your children – and this actually became *more* important during this period. In the middle ages you could (broadly speaking) write a will naming anyone you wanted as your heir. Over time, stricter rules developed until you were basically required to leave your estate to specific legal heirs even if you preferred something different. Hence the whole Jane Austen drama about not being able to leave the estate to the girls and needing them to marry well.
While I’m not an expert on this, I would hazard a guess that the lack of formal adoption laws was not the result of a more open and fluid view of family, but rather of a very real concern over allowing people to circumvent rules about inheritance by adopting. The concept of legal adoption existed because it had been in existence in Classical Rome, and some European countries at least contemplating allowing it in this period, but this was contentious precisely because it placed ideas about blood ties and formal inheritance into question.
I could listen to you talk about this all day.
“Lady Charlotte” is too charming; I don’t know whether I have a million questions to ask Anne about it or just want to let it hang there, delightfully.
Ditto! We need a Toast update when this book comes out.
And seventeen pregnancies and no living children, oh geez. Poor Anne.
I think only one of her children made it to double digits – Prince William, who died when he was 11.
What about the “quickening”? Seems like the fetal kick or movement was a big part of trying to ascertain pregnancy.
Thinking about this article in particular: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/20…
Quickening had a special status, certainly, and it was something that people looked for in pregnancy and was seen as a positive sign.
However, it was understood that this wasn’t certain. Women could mistake other things for quickening, (I’ve seen “wind in the stomach” as the most frequent culprit). Cathy McClive has done great academic work on this, here for example: http://shm.oxfordjournals.org/content/15/2/209.ab…
Quickening was when a public announcement of pregnancy would be made, too, eg when Anne of Austria was pregnant with the eventual Louis XIV.
“if I am not [pregnant] it is a very ugly thing to be so irregular” ugh I feel you so hard Princess Anne. It is at least very comforting to be able to tell with reasonable certainty very early on whether one is pregnant or not, but on the other hand it’s very hard to shake the “IF YOU ARE NOT A VIRGIN YOU CAN NEVER EVER EVER BE 100% SURE YOU’RE NOT PREGNANT” fearmongering that inundated my (for the US, still relatively liberal) sex ed upbringing.
Whenever I give blood or have a vaccination or something and get asked “Is there any chance you could be pregnant”, I don’t know what to say. I mean, I am on the pill, but it’s not 100% effective and I have sex with my partner and don’t routinely take pregnancy tests, so maybe! I hope I’m not, but it’s definitely not impossible!
I’m one of those people who get hung up on the “any chance” part of that- I mean, parthenogenesis has never been documented in humans but it might happen! I have been known to sleep walk so maybe I go and pick up strange men and don’t remember it? I haven’t had sex with anyone in over a decade but I still hesitate the briefest moment before answering.
Every so often I am convinced I’m the next virgin Mary. Or the next step in human evolution where women can reproduce without having sex in MONTHS.
You never know. It could happen!
Human bodies are weird! Anything is possible!
Before I had a hysterectomy I was asked approximately 27,000 times if there was any chance I was pregnant. When I went in for pre-screening a couple of days before surgery they made me pee in a cup for a pregnancy test. The morning of surgery they did another. When I balked at that, the nurse said basically that if I didn’t do it (and of course pay for it) then they wouldn’t do the surgery because no one wanted to get in there and discover they’d been tricked into an abortion instead of a hysterectomy. Sheesh.
There was absolutely no chance whatsoever that I could have been pregnant for similar reasons to yours. I mean, I’m pretty sure I would have KNOWN I’d had sex anytime in the recent past, it would be so noteworthy. And I definitely hadn’t had any angelic visions.
I was recently in the hospital getting CT scans, they asked if I could be pregnant and I responded with “I have an IUD and if I was I’d abort anyway”, which the nurses got a kick out of. I was concussed at the time, or I wouldn’t have been so bold!
Years ago I had a CT scan after crashing my bicycle while drunk, and I bet money I said the same thing.
I got so offended when I was trying to get a flu shot at a CVS clinic and I said there was a chance I could be pregnant and so they wouldn’t give me the flu shot unless I called my doctor, which seemed so complicated that I burst into tears. (It turned out I actually was pregnant, so when I went to my doctor to confirm, they immediately gave me a flu shot there.)
Ugh. Aren’t pregnant women EXTRA supposed to get the flu shot anyway?
That is super weird. I recently went to CVS for a flu shot, told them I was both pregnant and breastfeeding, and they didn’t even mention it before giving me the shot.
I’m a bit of an evangelist about Fertility Awareness just for this very reason. People with irregular, even extremely irregular, periods can still tell if/when they’re ovulating and if/when to anticipate a period by tracking a couple of bodily signs. I use it for birth control but it never ceases to amaze me that it’s not recommended more frequently for women with irregular periods or fertility/menstrual/reproductive problems as a diagnostic or tracking tool just for peace of mind! Or that it’s not taught in sex ed, honestly.
There was a time for a while last year when I was super stressed that I was having 45+-day cycles followed by 30-day cycles, and I would never have known that I actually wasn’t pregnant and everything was just dandy with my uterus, thanks, unless I had been tracking things. I adjusted some of my choices and diet/exercise things to help with stress and Lady Charlotte is back to her regularly scheduled visits, but it’s good to know that if I ever have another 45+ day cycle, I won’t have to panic that I’m pregnant if I’m not.
Do you have any good websites a girl could read to educate herself on the subject? Bonus points if they talk about PCOS. I got kind of overwhelmed on the matter trying to figure out some stuff on my own. Like, I was tracking my body temp for a while, saw the distinct rise that’s supposed to signal ovulation, saw it drop back down two weeks later, and did NOT get a visit from Lady Charlotte-and like half the websites I read basically suggested this was impossible, and I can’t tell which websites are good and which ones are trash.
https://kindara.zendesk.com/home http://blog.kindara.com/?tag=PCOS
I use Kindara to track — they have so much stuff on the blog and the Zendesk covering women who are tracking for health reasons as well as TTC/TTA, which is awesome, imo, in a sea of Catholic family planning weirdness and crazy TTC abbreviations. Plus if you use their app, you can submit a chart to the community, or to one of their charting specialists to evaluate what’s wrong, if anything.
FWIW from my reading/research, it’s possible (although unlikely) to get false temperature shift when your hormones are lining up to anticipate ovulation but you haven’t actually ovulated. Then there’d be no need for Lady Charlotte to come evict a nonexistent egg, right?
Thanks, I’ll give that a shot!
False temperature shifts might be more common with PCOS, who knows. I’ll bug my OB/GYN about it. I’ve been trying to figure out on the internet what the conditional probabilities are on the three or four different things that could be happening (at least I’m sure “pregnancy despite no symptoms and two failed tests” is lowest on that list) but so far not much luck.
Using an app (I used Ovia) took some of the guesswork out for me. It adjusts the more you use it, and it has a setting for irregular cycles. My PCOS throws off even the expensive ovulation predictors, so the app with temperatures was more helpful.
I’m in weird limbo right now where I don’t know if Aunt Charlotte is gone because I’m nursing a baby or because UGH PCOS but as soon as she returns, I’ll use an app again, even though I’m not looking to have another kid any time soon. I just feel better knowing what’s going on.
Agreed!
I am currently reading The Other Boleyn Girl and this is relevant. (As someone who plans to never be pregnant, I’m so glad I’m not an old school noble woman.)
I think about this way more than I should. On the one hand, I don’t want to have kids, so I am glad my whole life wouldn’t depend on it (although my family is Catholic, so I guess I could have become a nun). On the other hand, my mom delivered six kids, and her mom delivered two, with zero complications or issues. So I feel like I would at least have genetics on my side?
I read a while ago that there was a study suggesting that Catholic women are actually more fertile than average and have fewer complications.
I can’t find it because if you google anything about Catholic women and fertility it comes up with stuff about contraception, and it was only one study and may have been bullshit. But it chimed with my own experience: all the women in my family have got pregnant very easily (except my aunt who has endometriosis, and even she had two kids in the end after being told she was probably infertile). My mother got pregnant as soon as she came off the pill after she got married (I worked out recently from my brother’s birth date that she must have got pregnant literally the first time she ovulated after the wedding), and the doctor famously said to my grandmother when she was pregnant with her third ‘I’ve got no concerns, Mrs X, with you it’s one push and they’re out.’
I know none of this really means anything, but given the emphasis on big families in Catholic societies, I wonder if it is true and there’s a little bit of sexual selection going on there – that within Catholic communities, women from big healthy fertile families were more likely to get married – and possibly that some women who knew there was a history of infertility in the family and there was a slim chance they’d have children became nuns.
All rampant speculation, but fun speculation.
Actually, the completely anecdotal and lacking-scientific-rigor evidence of my study suggests that Catholic women had fertility problems about as much as Protestant ones (especially if they happened to be a queens or from aristocratic families. Granted, these factors may have been more significant).
The ones who really seem to be having large families are Quaker women. Again, totally anecdotal and unscientific, but I’ve looked at quite a few Quaker documents from this period, because these were women who left more historical records than most, and all of them seemed to average at 9-10 children per woman. I’ve yet to find a childless one.
I am a cis man and do not have a period but I do like the idea that the slang name for a period gets fancier the higher in rank you are, and like to think if I was a fancy noble woman I would say things like “Dear diary, I still haven’t gotten a visit from Daenerys Stormborn of the House Targaryen, the first of her name, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lady of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, the Unburnt, Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea. But am I pregnant or infertile?”
But I will have to settle for naming a cat that.
Dear cis man,
Internetting with women — you’re doing it right.
In love and misandry,
S. Pebbletush
This is amazing! Thanks for writing it!
Let’s start with this simple fact: in the early modern world, there was no reliable way to know if a woman was pregnant until she had given birth to a baby.
As someone who reads (and occasionally tries to write) a lot of women-centric historical fiction, this has always been very interesting me as a point of contrast to life as I know it.
Also, as we’ve all learned from reading advice columns, this is still the recommended method of learning if a woman is pregnant if the woman is neither you nor your significant other.
Have any book recommendations in the women-centric historical fiction genre?
this is fascinating! I love that feeling of seeing a historical subject I have never given any thought to before and immediately thinking, “yes, of COURSE I am interested in that!”
One thing I noticed in reading this was the contrast between Sarah’s trust in God’s will expressed in her diary and the medical/scientific idea that infertility was a woman’s fault. Is it more that these were separate sets of beliefs, or more like two facets of the same belief that God would afflict an unruly woman with infertility? Would love to hear more about where that line was between scientific and church-y doctrine on this!
I could write a whole post (or, well, a whole book) about this, but the short answer is that it’s part of the same or a similar doctrine.
The kind of “improper” behavior that causes infertility in the medical texts is sinful behavior (lust, excess eating, idleness, anger etc.) – so implicitly or explicitly the medicine is reinforcing the religious view.
You do get a different emphasis on religion depending on whether the person is from the “godly” crowd or not, but it’s there in the background regardless.
thanks for the reply – I figured it was probably a “that’s too big a subject, please refer to the book” type of question 🙂
I can only say, these doctors would have been a trifle baffled by several royal mistresses. Lady Castlemaine immediately comes to mind.
Another advantage to modern day medicine – it’s a LOT easier to determine which potential parent is the one with fertility issues. I wonder how many cis women and trans men through the centuries got the blame when the problem was with the little swimmers.
Yes! And this ties into the other issue – if there were problems conceiving, it was always the woman’s fault! To wit: some modern scholars believe that Henry VIII had a medical condition that played a role in how many times his wives suffered miscarriages.
This is actually a bit complicated. The medical texts all recognize that male infertility is possible, but the real-life cases all “blame” the woman. So the idea that it could be the man was there, but basically wasn’t acted upon.
What about the idea that a man’s sexual performance was linked to his fertility? I know there are examples from Norman Britain about men having to demonstrate, on pain of summary annulment, that they could perform. And I’ve heard that some experts believed that a woman had to orgasm to conceive as well, so a man’s sexual prowess mattered there, too (although I’m sure if that’s true, it was used as a weapon against women — accusing them of infidelity with a man who DID get them off or some such craziness).
Regarding the orgasm thing, it wasn’t some experts – it was a fundamental tenet of reproductive medicine until the 18th century. Every fertility manual in the early modern period states outright that women have to enjoy sex in order to conceive, and some give a pretty detailed description that certainly suggests orgasm.
As for sexual performance and fertility, certainly in order to get a woman pregnant, a man had to be able to perform, and impotence was actually grounds for annulment (unlike infertility). A whole branch of reproductive medicine was based on providing aphrodisiacs to members of both sexes in order to ensure everything worked well, for which I have to refer you to the work of my colleague, Jennifer Evans: http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewItem.as…
Yes, and for the sex of the child, too. I imagine a fair number were blamed for not producing a male heir, as well….
Sometimes is was clear, as in the case of Charles II, who fathered 12 kids with women other than his wife and none with poor Catharine of Braganza. In sure there are examples that go the other way too. But most of the time, true.
Medical advice also had another dimension: a humoral imbalance leading to infertility might be a born trait, but women who had it were characterized, in the medical literature, as tending to too much drink, too much food, too much anger, or too much sex. Promiscuous women were believed to be infertile, and women who “domineered” their husbands or generally acted in ways a good woman shouldn’t were also thought to be bringing infertility upon themselves.
Disclaimer that I haven’t even actually seen Age of Ultron yet, just seen people talking about it a lot, but this is making me feel… troubled about some things in Natasha’s storyline.
This is FASCINATING, and I await the arrival of your book. 🙂
Agreed on both counts!
So late to this but this is so so interesting.
With all this, it is mind-boggling to me that George III’s sons looked at Princess Charlotte, said, “whelp, we got one legitimate heir, she’ll totally be able to safely have lots of kids. No need for us to worry bout legitimate marriages”
Which would rather have depended on Prinny having sex with her …
In France at the time they called periods the cardinal.
I think only one of her children made it to double digits – Prince William, who died when he was 11.
Quickening was when a public announcement of pregnancy would be made, too, eg when Anne of Austria was pregnant with the eventual Louis XIV.
I can only say, these doctors would have been a trifle baffled by several royal mistresses. Lady Castlemaine immediately comes to mind.
Which would rather have depended on Prinny having sex with her …