This paper examines discussions of women’s and men’s reproductive aging in a series of western European
medical texts written in the period 1100–1300. It uses the modern image of the biological clock to explore how
far physicians in earlier periods understood reproductive aging to be a process of slow decline before a final age
at ...
This paper examines discussions of women’s and men’s reproductive aging in a series of western European
medical texts written in the period 1100–1300. It uses the modern image of the biological clock to explore how
far physicians in earlier periods understood reproductive aging to be a process of slow decline before a final age
at which fertility ended (menopause for women, or a less defined ‘old age’ for men), and how far they viewed
women’s reproductive aging as different from men’s. The article argues that, in contrast to modern medical and
popular understandings, medieval physicians assumed men and women were broadly fertile up to a final cut-off
point, and had little interest in viewing age-related fertility decline as a slow process beginning well before
menopause. This was true in part because there was no realistic prospect of treatment for age-related reproductive disorders. The article also argues that in many respects – although not all – medieval writers viewed
men’s and women’s reproductive aging as similar processes. Overall the model of reproductive aging they offered
was flexible and offered room for individual variation. In this way the article demonstrates how changing understandings of the body, reproduction, and aging, demographic and social change, and changing medical
treatments influence concepts of reproductive aging.
