“To Women This Is Not To Be Told”

Secrecy in Contraception and Abortion in late Medieval Scandinavian Medical Texts

Abstract

In reproductive medicine in late medieval Scandinavia, different kinds of secrecy are a through line. Secrecy can indicate privacy or propriety – elements of the reproductive process that are concealed from view out of shame and social taboo. Secrecy can also indicate the illicit nature of fertility management that is concealed to avoid punishment or stigma. Yet another facet is not secret in this sense of unknown or guarded knowledge, but instead indicates something that is known but ought not to be spoken about openly. Tension between the inaccessibility of reproductive matters to men, and those men’s suspicion of women’s motives, creates an uneasy push and pull between discovering women’s reproductive secrets and keeping them hidden. This dynamic plays out in surviving late medieval medical texts, in which reproductive knowledge and control are assigned to women, but also, paradoxically, concealed from them.