The medieval biological clock? Gendered reproductive aging in medieval western medicine

Abstract

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.