There are few things in human history that have been constant. Among them are death, taxes, and of course...periods.
Yep, people have been dealing with Aunt Flo since the beginning of time.
You asked us how people with uteruses dealt with menstruation in the Middle Ages, and Getty medievalist Larisa Grollemond has responded with several period facts from the time period.
In medieval Europe, menstruation was connected to humoral theory: the belief that the body is made of four major humors or fluids, one of which was blood.
If you had too much of one of the humors, early Western medicine believed, it lead to disease. Bloodletting was a common cure for a variety of diseases, and an attempt to get the body’s humors back in balance by getting rid of “excess” blood.
So, the reasoning followed, menstruation—the monthly release of “excess” blood—was a sign of illness. And therefore, everyone who had a period was in some way diseased. Thanks, Doc.
Many believed that anyone who was currently menstruating could make people near them sick. And menstrual blood itself was thought to dull mirrors and even kill crops.
What Did People Do before Pads and Tampons?
The short answer is that most people with periods used cloth rags as a kind of DIY sanitary pad. Linen was a particularly good material for that purpose. But there’s also evidence that some people used a particularly absorbent type of bog moss.
The slightly less upsetting news is that, in the Middle Ages, people had fewer and lighter periods because of more-frequent childbearing.
There were also plenty of herbal remedies for pain, and to combat particularly heavy bleeding. Many of those recipes are recorded in manuscripts known as herbals, that record plants and their medicinal uses.
And that’s how people dealt with periods in the past!
Want to learn more about life in the Middle Ages from medievalist Larisa Grollemond? Head to our Instagram page.
