Medieval Childbirth

 Childbirth is always a perilous time.  Even with modern medicine, it is among the leading causes of death for younger women (especially those in communities without good access to health care).  It was, not surprisingly, even more perilous in medieval times.

Girls hit puberty then rather later than they do now, around fourteen or fifteen rather than at the age of eleven, which has become the most common age in the US.  Partly they didn't have all the hormones now found in the water, and partly girls were skinnier then (onset of puberty is governed in part by body mass).  So they didn't have the cases one hears about now, of ten year olds discovering they're pregnant, but by a time a girl was in her mid-teens she was considered of marriageable age, with the assumption that she would soon start having children.

Childbirth is more risky for humans than for most mammals because of our upright stance.  To keep all our internal organs from slopping down around our knees, our pelvic bones provide a solid floor to the torso, with only a narrow opening in the middle, through which a baby has to squeeze.  A cat or dog can flop down on the floor and pop out half a dozen kittens or puppies through a wide gap in the pelvis, but not humans.  The baby has to go through head first, so if a baby is upright in the womb (breech position), having a leg go through first is just not going to work.  If the baby gets stuck halfway through, both baby and mother are going to die.  King Louis VII of France lost a wife that way.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, obstetricians would practice reaching in and twirling a breech baby before it entered the birth canal, but this of course required a special touch.  If medieval midwives did something similar we don't know about it.  These days the usual answer for a breech baby or for prolonged contractions that aren't pushing the baby out is a Caesarian section, cutting open the mother's abdomen and womb to bring out the baby.  This is fine for the baby, but the mother has to recover from fairly major surgery.  It was impossible in the Middle Ages, because without antibiotics and microclamps to stop the bleeding the mother would die, so it was only undertaken if the mother was going to die anyway.  (Caesar, after whom the procedure is named, was cut out of a dying mother.)

Medieval women of course gave birth without pain killers, but at least they did not give birth lying on their backs with their feet in the air, which works fine for the attending doctor but works against gravity.  They were attended by midwives, who had a wide mix of fanciful and accurate ideas about how the procedure worked.  They would help with things like breathing exercises and would keep the procedure fairly clean, while also muttering charms, putting knives on the floor to "cut the pain," and the like.  Here they were ahead of nineteenth-century doctors, who might go straight from treating a patient with an infectious disease to treating a woman in labor, without bothering to wash up, and who would often chloroform the mother.  She'd miss the worst pain that way, but by being out of it she wouldn't be able to consciously push.

Women all lactate after giving birth, although not all give enough milk, and some babies have trouble figuring out how to latch on.  Most women nursed their own babies, but one could also hire a "wet nurse," someone who'd recently had a baby herself.  She might nurse her own baby on one breast and the baby she was paid to nurse on the other, though it was considered best by those hiring wet nurses if her baby had died, because then there was no competition.  Fashionable women might prefer wet nurses as it kept their breasts from getting as large (small breasts were considered attractive).

Contraception, without modern pills and devices, was always tricky.  Medieval people knew perfectly well "where babies come from," but humans lack the "being in heat" condition that defines the fertile period for most mammals.  There were lots of supposed ways to prevent pregnancy, including herbal suppositories, condoms made from animal intestines, and various concoctions to drink.  Some may even have worked, though humans are not nearly as fertile anyway as many creatures, and being underfed or nursing reduces the chance of pregnancy.

If they got pregnant anyway when they didn't want to, there was always abortion, or at least herbal concoctions that were supposed to end the pregnancy.  One saint, still a saint in the Catholic church, miraculously caused an abortion.  A nun, the story went, had been raped, and she was very worried that her abbess would not believe her and would cast her out as a wanton woman.  But when she realized she was pregnant she prayed to the saint, who miraculously restored her to her previous condition, as though she had never been pregnant at all.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on women, children, and hygiene in the Middle Ages, see my book, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available in paperback or as an ebook from Amazon and other on-line booksellers.

YA fantasy

An extremely popular form of literature today is what is called YA fantasy.  I write it myself.  The YA stands for "young adult," which in practice means teenagers.  Although medieval teenagers were considered functionally as nearly adults, as I have discussed earlier, modern teenagers (even if called "young adults") are assumed to be at a certain stage and to need literature written just for them.  (There is also a new fiction category, NA, "new adult," for college-age students somewhere between the teen years and full adulthood, but we don't need to worry about that now.)

In practice of course a lot of adults, including me, read YA fiction.  A good, well-written story remains good and well-written no matter who it's aimed at.  In Britain, when Harry Potter first burst on the scene, the books were issued with two sets of covers, one for kids and one more "sober" looking set for adults to read on the train without embarrassment.

In some ways fantasy is the perfect metaphor for being a teenager today.  One is discovering a strange world, which has its own mysterious rules, and which is larger than one realized.  One is facing challenges that require rethinking what one thought one knew.  Are you a peasant boy or a king in disguise?  If the latter, hadn't you ought to start acting like one?  And so on.

Fantasy also allows one to break free of the mundane.  When one is wielding a magic sword to overcome the forces of darkness, one need not worry about whether one's term paper is the right length, if the cool kids with cars look down on those who take the bus, or why the grownups don't understand the complex yearnings of one's soul.

Indeed, in most YA fantasy the grownups are pretty much out of the action (hors combat as the French say).  They are dead, or captured, or just don't understand.  That's why the teenagers have to save the day.  YA fantasy often has a certain amount of moral ambiguity, as the heroes and heroines face complex choices where there are no good answers.  But at a certain point our brave young protagonists have to overcome really really bad people, bad enough that blasting them to smithereens poses no moral challenge at all.

In fact, there is a phrase that is gaining in popularity, "as evil as the villains in YA fantasy."

Women are just as active and resourceful in these stories as the men.  YA fantasy often has young men and women interacting with each other (and facing the evil villain together), but there is very little actual sex.  If so, it happens off stage.  (This is quite different from YA set in modern America, where there may be a lot of sex.)

I had a book, The Witch and the Cathedral, selected by the New York Public Library as Notable Book for the Teen Age.  It was not a book about teenagers, interestingly enough.  The wizard-hero was in his late forties.  I think what they liked was that the sex (off-stage) had real consequences.  (The book is still available as an ebook.)

More recently I started a new series of books, which is the "Next Generation" from the wizard-hero in his forties whom the New York Public Library liked.  This one began with The Starlight Raven, which actually has a teenage heroine.  I've tried hard not to have the villains be Horribly Evil because they're Bad.

(It's available both in print as an ebook.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on medieval families and growing up then, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.

YA Fiction

Modern society takes the term "teenagers" for granted, those 13-19, whose age has the word "teen" in it.  But note that this is specific to English.  Other languages (including medieval Latin) don't have a way of naming their numbers that gives 13-19 such a distinctive handle.  (Modern French:  treize, quatorze, quinze, seize, dix-sept, dix-huit, dix-neuf.)

The modern English-speaking world has, however, seized on this artifact of our language to create a specific culture for people in this age-range.  Teenage music, teenage clothing, movies and shows that appeal to teenagers.  Doing so is helped by the fact that people in this age-range really are in a transition period, growing and changing, neither children nor adults, having aspects of both.

For medieval people, there wasn't a defined "teenage" stage, as I have discussed more elsewhere.  People were legally adults for most purposes at fourteen, though exact birthdays mattered much less to them than they do for us.

Even in the English-speaking world, "teenager" really only became a recognized, specific stage in the second half of the twentieth century.  One of the things it needed, society felt, was its own literature.  There had been children's literature since at least the nineteenth century (earlier fairy tales were originally written for adults), and at a certain point kids were expected to start reading the same books adults were reading.  But teen literature, for and about people in their teens, came into its own in the 1950s.

It was called YA, "young adult," I guess because no one would have wanted to read "overgrown kid" literature.  Originally a lot of YA had plots like, "Will Jack ask Sue to the senior prom?" (spoiler alert, he does).  But over the years YA has evolved, often addressing very serious issues like divorce, sexual harassment, bullying, and the like.

In recent years, a major proportion of YA literature has been fantasy.  A lot of basic fantasy tropes tie right into the experiences of teenagers, things like feeling like the weird one (in fantasy, the weird one develops special powers), having to figure out which side one is on as all sorts of unexpected things are revealed, or having to deal with grownups who have messed everything up (think most dystopian fantasy).  Interestingly, good YA fantasy is more likely to end with ambiguity, where does "right" really lie? whereas "adult" fantasy generally has Good whacking the heck out of Evil.

The clearest marker of YA fiction is that the protagonists are teenagers.  I write YA fantasy myself.  My novel "The Starlight Raven" starts when Antonia, the heroine, is fourteen.  It's available both as an ebook and a paperback (here's the Amazon link).  She's the daughter of a witch and a wizard, a very unusual pairing, because female magic and male magic start with very different premises and distrust each other.  She wants to be part of both, but no one thinks she can.

It's going to be a series; so far there are two books, the second being "An Autumn Haunting."  More on the way!

Interestingly, I think I was writing YA fiction without even knowing it.  One of my earlier books, in the "Royal Wizard of Yurt" series, was named a "notable book for the teen aged" by the New York Public Library.  The hero of the book, "The Witch and the Cathedral," is in his late 40s in the book, so that doesn't explain it.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

Teenagers in the Middle Ages

Medieval people grew up fast.  We now think of the teen years as a stage between childhood and adulthood.  For medieval people, in many ways adulthood arrived then.

As I noted in discussing medieval seven-year-olds, birthdays and exact ages were less important in the Middle Ages than they are now, but one was assumed to know right from wrong at age seven and be ready to take on a lot of adult responsibilities at age fourteen, with twenty-one being the age when one had normally learned all that there was to learn.

Age fourteen was considered a suitable marriage age, although, in practice, most people married later than that.  It was also the official age of puberty, and in practice probably also the real age of puberty--as indeed it continued to be until a few generations ago.  We now hit puberty around twelve or earlier, but this is because we, as a group, are better nourished than our medieval ancestors and are exposed to more hormones in water and food.

Teenage boys undergoing knighthood training would complete their training in their mid to late teens and be ready to ride off to war or tournament or to hassle the neighbors.  Boys or girls who had been set into the monastery by their parents as children would decide around fourteen or fifteen if they wanted to continue in the cloister (as most did) or return to the secular world.

A boy who was going to go to the university (remember, girls couldn't go until the nineteenth century) would head off around age fourteen, rather than our age eighteen.  He might get both his BA and his MA by age twenty-one and be ready to teach the undergraduates.

A town boy who had been apprenticed to a guild master to learn a craft (such as leather working, gold smithing, wagon making, and so much more) would make the transition in his early teens from being an apprentice to being a journeyman, someone considered skilled enough at his craft to actually be paid for his labor.

By the time a peasant boy or girl was a teenager, they were taking on full responsibility for farm tasks.  This is still the case in many rural areas, where you will see fifteen-year-olds driving a tractor or a hay wagon.

There are numerous examples of medieval teenagers leading armies.  Both Charlemagne and Louis the Pious had sons who led rebellions against them before the boys turned twenty.  One of the most famous teenaged war-leaders was Joan of Arc, who first heard angel voices telling her what she needed to do when she was thirteen, who was leading men into victorious battle at seventeen, and was burned at the stake at age nineteen.

Joan of course was unusual by any definition, but really it was not considered odd before the twentieth century for teenagers to take on adult responsibilities.  Look at Mozart at the end of the eighteenth century, composing as a small child, taking musical commissions when still extremely young by our standards.

Medieval teenagers were presumably just as potentially surly, obnoxious, or reckless as modern teenagers.  But it was not a "stage" in which one was expected to be like that.  (Even the term "teenager" is very modern.)  Rather, these were traits that the real grownups wanted them to overcome as quickly as possible.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

For more on medieval families and growing up then, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available from Amazon and other ebook platforms.