From Steven Ozment

[bunnyjadwiga]

From Ancestors: The Loving Family in Old Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)

The case for "appreciable contraception" in the Middle Ages is based on church records, eyewitness reports of clergy in regular contact with laity, and demographic data. Church records document a great variety of contraceptive devices in use by the laity: simple abstinence, herbal tinctures and acidic ointments, sponges, oral sex, mutual masturbation, sodomy, prolonged nursing of infants, postponement of marriage (complex abstinence?), and coitus interruptus, the contraceptive practice most frequently confessed by married couples. Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380), who was her parents' twentieth child, condemned contraception as the "most frequent" sin of married people and the one contemporary parents were least contrite about -- an observation also frequently made by late medieval preachers. Beyond such anecdotal evidence, studies comparing the ages of women at first marriage and the number of children they subsequently bore have found that women marrying in their thirties frequently had just as many children as those who married between fifteen and twenty-five-- a circumstance that only the practice of birth control would seem to explain.

A. Under the circumstances, Catherine of Siena WOULD be against birth control.
B. Ozment cites Noonan's Contraception; a history of its treatment by the Catholic theologians and canonists
also "Birth-Control in the West in the Thirteenth and Early Fourteenth Centuries" by P. P. A. Biller
Past and Present No. 94 (Feb., 1982), pp. 3-26

Comments

[paquerette.livejournal.com]

a circumstance that only the practice of birth control would seem to explain.

I disagree. There are a lot of factors that would cause many people to only have a certain number of children. I'm trying to figure out how to word this and it's not coming, so bear with me. The more children a woman bears, the more likely that something happens that prevents her from having more - anything from severe injury to the birth canal, (were midwives stitching tears then or did things just heal however?) uterine prolapse, less time and energy and inclination for sex, being sick of your husband and avoiding him as much as possible. Probably other stuff I'm not thinking of. I'm not sure how much postpartum hormonal disruption is a modern phenomenon or not, but things like hypothyroidism and diabetes tend to pop up afterward.