Abstract
This chapter focuses on menarche, an event which was taken to mean that the body was sexually mature and physically ready for what ancient medicine, from which early modern medicine took its lead, claimed to be the next stage of the transition to womanhood. I will analyse the social and medical context in which a normal, timely menarche was written about in the early modern period, and situate this within the accounts of female adolescence more broadly, since menarche is part of a series of physical and emotional changes. According to the widely privileged Hippocratic teachings, the end of male puberty was a sudden affair, as the production of semen proved that the boy was sexually mature, ‘but in girls a more gradual series of events is necessary to complete the process of becoming a woman’.1 As discussed in the Introduction, Helen King has demonstrated how the Hippocratic text On Generation indicated that as a girl grew, the channels in her body were opened to make ‘a way through and a way outside’; as part of the growth to maturity, menarche was considered to be the first transitional bleeding.2
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Notes
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© 2013 Sara Read
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Read, S. (2013). ‘Having the Benefit of Nature’: Menarche and Female Adolescence. In: Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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