We know that women in the Middle Ages wanted to have control over their ability to conceive, and medical texts from these centuries show that while women wanted to know how they could avoid getting pregnant, many were also concerned about infertility. After all, bearing children was considered the central function of women in this period, as in many others. Although women took the blame more than men if they couldn’t get pregnant, they weren’t always faulted.
The 12th-century _Trotula_, for example, gives a precise (if inaccurate) test to see whether the man or women’s infertility was behind the lack of pregnancy. Both partners ought to urinate into separate pots filled with bran, and then watch the pans for about ten days. The pot with worms in it at the end has the urine of the infertile couple.
What could go wrong with male fertility? The _Trotula_ cites an earlier writing and gives this list: the seed’s spirit is defective, the sperm isn’t the right humidity, it might not be the right temperature. These factors might cause erectile dysfunction or a lack of sperm. Men with testicles that were too cold and dry, meanwhile, were “useless for generation”. We have recipies that claim to address this situation: medicines found in 15th-century manuscripts suggest a concoction of catnip with wine, or ground up pig’s testicles mixed with wine. Whatever we might think about the innacuracies concerning male infertility, it is interesting that Medieval people didn’t always put the blame on women when pregnancies didn’t happen.
This image is a 13th-c manuscript of the _Herbarium_ by Pseudo-Apuleius, and shows a pregnant woman being tended to by another woman grinding up medicines with a mortar and pestle.
Source(s): Medievalists.net, Daniele Cybulskie, March 2016, “infertility in the Middle Ages.” (Content and image). “Infertility in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine,” by Daphna Oren-Magidor and Catherine Rider, _Social History of Medicine_, vol 29, Issue 2, May 2016, pp 211-223. Https//doi.org/10.1093/shm/hkv141.
