Abstract
The natural starting place for a study which analyses accounts of female bleeding in early modern England is to decode the terminology that early modern women both understood and used to describe these events. The first occasion of bleeding, menarche, or a girl’s first menstrual period, acts as an indicator that she has reached puberty. However, ‘menarche’ was not a term that had any currency in this period and, indeed, is not one that is glossed in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1900. Instead the event was simply referred to descriptively as the time when a girl could expect to have her first menstrual period.
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Notes
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© 2013 Sara Read
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Read, S. (2013). ‘What a Small Excess Is Called Flooding’: The Language of Menstruation and Transitional Bleeding. In: Menstruation and the Female Body in Early Modern England. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137355034_2
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