As a hobby living historia that is into historical accuracy a lot, I do a lot of things for my hobby that may seem a bit…. wack. And one of those things I will talk about today. I tried using medieval menstrual hygiene products!
I was very inspired by Abby Cox’ video a while ago, in which she recreated an 18th century period apron. I had always wanted to try out menstrual hygiene products for my period of impression (pun not intended) but I always chickened out and frankly, with an office job that wasn't really something I could easily do over more than a day. But since we are in lockdown for a bit longer, now is the time to do it!
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A short disclaimer: I am mostly talking about menstrual hygiene in a Christian dominated society in middle Europe in high and late medieval times, because with our focus being everyday life of the mid 14th century in Austria and Germany, I am not qualified to give you a lot of information on early medieval menstrual hygiene or menstrual hygiene in other periods of human history or in other cultures.
In the 14th century, the overall understanding of medicine was heavily influenced by humoral theory. That was a medical tradition taken over from ancient Greek and Roman medicine when scholars such as Hippokrates and Galen formed or rather wrote down the main ideas of humoral pathology that were still prevalent in medieval times. Some roots of this theory go much further back in time to for example Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
There is A LOT to say and read about humoral theory out there on the net, so I will not wrap that up here, but to give you a very basic understanding, doctors back then believed that the human body was influenced by 4 humors or vital bodily fluids, blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. The humors needed to be in a delicate balance in order for the body and mind to be healthy. Once one was present too much or too little, the balance would be lost and people would get sick or at least would change, physically or mentally.
People believed that you could influence this balance by following certain diets and certain behavioral routines, that also included physical activity, personal hygiene etc. and of course medical applications.
And they believed that you could help the body to shed the toxic fluid amounts by draining them. For example by bloodletting and bloody cupping or leeching and also that the body would shed the humors naturally. For example male bodies were thought to grow hair on all kinds of body parts (mostly the face) and that would bring these imbalances out of the body and that female bodies menstruated for that purpose.
So menstruation was seen as a sort of “cleansing” process of the female body in order for it to remain healthy and that is actually something that is still believed today, although that does not really correspond to what we know about medicine. They also thought that menstrual blood was unclean (because basically it was supposed to be full of toxins) and that retaining it in the body was not healthy and – oversimply stated – that the region “down there” needed to be “aired” well at all times and not to be clogged up by fabric. And that was another reason for women not to wear pants or underpants in everyday situations. (And I truly hope that you can see all the underlying misogynist ideas behind this pattern of thinking.)
When people start talking about menstrual hygiene in the middle ages online, often you will find that the discussion at some point starts evolving around the question whether or not menstruation was actually a daily thing that people had to deal with back then.
Depending on which source you ask, the menarche or the first menstruation was believed to set between the age of 9 and 16 and menopause was expected to arrive between 45 and 50. That means that we have around 30 years of cycles to cover. Now usually, women were married when they reached adulthood, so at around 17 to 20 years old and the average high to late medieval family had between 2-4 living children (again, depending hugely on the specific living circumstances and the sources you ask) , meaning, that – including a high infant death rate which meant up to double that amount worth of pregnancies and nursing periods – most women would have several years of their adult lives in which they did not menstruate. Also, physical activity, physical constitution and malnutrition could have an influence on the number of periods and the amount of menstrual discharge, but not all people back then had to do hard physical work and malnourishment was certainly the exception rather than the rule of medieval daily life. So that leaves at least several years of monthly periods to be dealt with.
As we heard in our introduction about medicine, clearly, they did not know a lot about WHY menstruation happened back then, but they DID know through observation that menstruation was a normal thing and that its absence was NOT normal and that something was prob