Soc Hist Med (2016) 29 (2): 267-289.doi: 10.1093/shm/hkv029
- ↵*Email: T.L.Tyers@swansea.ac.uk
- Theresa L. Tyers is Honorary Research Fellow, Swansea University. Her first degree was in French Studies, on completion she worked at a Lycée in northern Brittany. Tyers returned to the University of Nottingham to complete an MA in History (Research) in 2006 and was awarded PhD for the thesis ‘The Trotula and her Travelling Companions c. 1200–1450: The Rebirth of Fertility’ in 2012, and subsequently invited to join Swansea University where she belongs to the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Research and the Research Group for Health, History and Culture groups. Tyers' thesis focused on the transmission of medical knowledge after the Norman Conquest of England, in particular the changes that took place during the translation process from the Latin source texts into the vernacular. Although her main research focuses on manuscripts produced in romance vernaculars, Tyers' is also interested in the ways in which in plant medicine crosses both language and geographical boundaries as cultures and societies change over time.
Abstract
This paper explores the advice for fertility and health care contained in a late fifteenth-century manuscript: London, British Library MS Lansdowne 380. This study has chosen to engage with the larger theme of whether women had access to medical writings in the vernaculars of later-medieval England and whether this enabled them to control their own fertility. The paper shows that many women did have direct access to written knowledge, and that this knowledge combined theoretical and practical understanding for use in a domestic setting. Rather than being disenfranchised from responsibility for their own fertility, women collaborated with their husbands to ensure offspring and the future of their families. By refining the understanding of the use of manuscripts, the source of the knowledge they contained, and the question of ownership, the paper adds to our awareness of the scope and practice of fertility medicine in the later Middle Ages.
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- © The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine.
