There was a great discussion on this topic in January of 2006. While medieval medical literature doesn't necessarily reflect true life one gets the impression that medieval people were fanatically interested in periods. Not having one meant that your humors were out of balance and there are lots of herbal remedies to bring on the menses. (Now, some of these amount to early chemical abortions but that's another topic entirely.)
It's possibly a medieval woman did not greet her period with the desire to hide it that modern marketing has instilled in many of us. It was part of life and meant that you were healthy. However, I suspect flauting it wasn't good either and I have a completly unsubstantiated theory the part of the humilation of being publicly stripped to one's shift showed off some old blood stains. Another aspect I intend to investigate someday is how much flow a woman who is not surrounded by so many artificial hormores has. There are so many phyoestrogeons in the environment that I'm not sure we can take modern experience as typical. Cheers, Mary Haselbauer _______________________________________________ h-costume mailing list h-costume@mail.indra.com http://mail.indra.com/mailman/listinfo/h-costume
