Medicine Link 8

Medicine and Sexual Practices: Pregnancy and Gynecology

Scriftboc offers various kinds of evidence about the sexual and medical practices associated with women. Some involve health and sanitation as well as magic, but it would seem properly to belong to the latter category:

"A woman who mixes a man's seed in her food and then eats it so that the male be more agreeable (more in love) must fast for three winters." (14.08)

However, the next section, concerning abortion (14.09.0), is particularly interesting to us today:

"A woman who undergoes an abortion in her womb and kills the foetus, if it is forty nights since she received the seed (forty days after conception), before it received a soul (that is, was alive), like the murderer she must fast three winters and every week must keep the two fast days until evening and must observe the three fasting periods. If she (lit., it) lose the foetus, she must do penance for one year or keep the three fasting periods."

You can search the text of the Scriftboc in several ways to form a complete picture of how it deals with some of these questions:

• responsibility for control of sexual behavior
• the party more likely to be overcome by sexual urges
• the party more likely to try to obtain secret sexual satisfaction
• the party responsible for the child before and after birth--note that there might be a difference in these cases.

To get to the text, to back to the module, select "Texts," and then load into the top and bottom windows the material from the "Scriftboc" menu you want to work with.

You will also notice that a considerable part of the Leechbook concerns the reproductive health of women, early gynecology. Recent work on gynecology in Anglo-Saxon England (but primarily about the later medieval period) can be found the essays by Stuard and Lemay in the Bibliography.

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