Paternoster Row next to St Paul’s Cathedral in late sixteenth-century London was a hive of printers and book sellers. On any given day someone who had the disposable cash might be able to buy a play by William Shakespeare or Christopher Marlowe; an instructional text on music; a history of the conflicts in France, Portugal and Ireland; or a plethora of medical books.Footnote ¹ Amongst the titles for sale was The Child-birth or Womans Lecture, written by the staunchly Puritan minister and physician Christopher Hooke. It was supposedly ‘very necessarie to bee read and knowne of all young married and teeming [pregnant] Women, and not unprofitable for men of all sortes’. Someone standing in the cathedral yard leafing through the Lecture would have learned that difficulties in childbearing such as struggling to conceive, miscarrying, having sickly or short-lived children, or birthing ‘monsters’ could be divine punishment for ‘rebelliously transgress[ing]’ God’s wishes. Being ‘a fruiteful vine’ was not simply about being capable of conception but having a succession of healthy, beautiful children. The pain and peril of procreation was necessary and redemptive. If one was to live piously, they would be rewarded by God with a ‘quiver full’ of children. In turn perpetuating the family would make believers even more full of admiration and praise for God. It was a cyclical process in which bodies mirrored the soul.Footnote ² Childbearing was central to the practice of individual, domestic and parishioners’ piety.

In this ideal model, the godly husband and wife’s ‘table’ would groan with ‘branches’ from their ‘vine’. Fertility was understood in early modern England as both easy and hard: it was as simple and impossible as living a godly life. It is notable that Hooke was a physician as well as a cleric. His instructional text interwove religious exegesis with medical instruction. These were not distinct bodies of knowledge or practice in early modern England. In just the same way that the Lecture framed fertility as related to piety, the authors of regimens described how the maintenance of health through food, drink, exercise, sleep and regulating one’s emotions was not just a medical task, but one of embodied devotion too. These two genres were related in yet another way as well. Both childbearing and the performance of everyday medical care were envisioned to be part of female domestic labour within the household. The fact that the Lecture was on sale alongside other household management guides and medical texts in St Paul’s churchyard quite literally displayed the domestic expectations placed upon women in the period. Conduct authors set out how men were meant to provide the financial means necessary to provide raw materials and women ought to work to clothe, nourish and heal family members. In this system, fertility was perceived as something women were meant to manage alongside a myriad of other care work. Procreation was represented as the chief purpose of marriage, a key route to religious salvation and the way in which property, faith and power were transmitted.

The stakes could not have been higher. Being fruitful was not just about producing an heir but redounded to both male and female reputation. It is no surprise that conception, pregnancy and birth were a veritable obsession for early modern people and provoked considerable anxiety for husbands, wives, the wider family, Church and state. One might assume then that early modern English family paperwork was awash with references to very specific measures to increase the likelihood of conception, in the same way that, as we shall see, printed medical guides were. And yet, although correspondents were happy to pressure newly married couples for information about whether they were pregnant or to make spurious predictions about when it might happen, they were much quieter about specific instances in which women and men took medical measures to remedy infertility. They were especially taciturn about instances in which men might be considered physiologically responsible for childlessness. This chapter mines family paperwork for hints about how elite families understood infertility and how they might have sought to remedy it. In doing so it reveals a deep-seated discomfort with the idea that men might have to put effort into perpetuating the family whilst also uncovering hints that they regularly did so. Whilst people were desperate for tardy conception to be seen as the result of women’s bodily frailty, this was not always possible. Infertility could be caused by male impotence or weakness of seed, or by a lacklustre match, all explanations that sat at odds with ideals of domestic order, fruitfulness and male mastery that were core values of godly and ascendant families. Families wrote about men’s and women’s bodies in notably different ways that foregrounded evidence of wifely submission and male strength. The politics of getting pregnant were unstable and fraught with disruption, but also had great significance in the construction of narratives about family identity. These findings support those of historians of medicine that have been keen to point out that men were involved in household medicine.Footnote ³ Likewise, histories of early modern masculinity have highlighted how domestic spaces and material culture defined and, at times, threatened the construction and representation of male identity.Footnote ⁴ These two literatures encourage us to look beyond the representation of separate male and female spheres of knowledge and practice, and appreciate the ways in which normative and prescriptive models of work and expertise conditioned cultural scripts that did not always map on to the experience of gender and everyday life. Men were often involved in the practice of increasing fertility within households and outside them, and they were often thought to be physiologically and emotionally responsible for childlessness, although they and others sought to minimise or even scrub these facts out of family paperwork.

Longing to Be Fruitful

At first glance, cheap and prescriptive material would seem to suggest that everyone wanted to have children in early modern England. Added to this, elite families consistently placed a high value on conceiving in correspondence, although sometimes they wrote about childlessness in abstract terms that refrained from speculating about who or why a couple might not have had issue. A 1685 ballad described how women who were childless were constantly reminded of this fact by their neighbours’ births and had to woefully attend countless christenings that rubbed salt in the wound. The ballad told the story of a Female Doctress who touted a medicine developed in her sixty years of practice that could cure barrenness, but was really scamming couples out of their hard-earned money.Footnote ⁵ The 1621 A Discourse of the Married and Single Life commiserated with husbands, who would live in ‘great discontent’ without children, believing themselves to be ‘in hatred with God & nature’.Footnote ⁶ The sight of ‘other mens children’ would ‘greeveth’ them and they would wish that even the ‘worst of them were his’.Footnote ⁷ A glut of ballads in the seventeenth century mocked men who were cuckolded by their wives and thought that they were fathers only to discover they were raising another man’s child. The midwife Jane Sharp noted in her popular 1671 The Midwives Book that conceiving a child was ‘the earnest desire if not of all[,] yet of most women’.Footnote ⁸ Nicholas Culpeper, author of A Directory for Midwives (1656) assumed that ‘All men and women desire to be fruitful’.Footnote ⁹ The books that literate couples kept on shelves in their home, the drinking songs that men would have encountered in ale houses, the plays they went and saw, the sermons they heard in Church and the passages from religious, medical or philosophical texts that may have been read out, all would have impressed upon couples the importance of getting pregnant quickly after marriage.

It is no wonder then that people expressed a deep longing to be fruitful, and when they did not conceive quickly became distressed. A woman called Jane Shrewsbury, who remains otherwise unknown in the historical record, wrote a ‘fervent’ prayer about her unrequited desire to have a baby. She told God how she and ‘the world’ had ‘long expected to heare tydings of my safe deliverie’ of a child. Would God let this ‘expectation vanish into smoke?’ she asked.Footnote ¹⁰ Alice Woodward sought the help of the astrologer-physician Richard Napier in 1604 because had had taken ‘much guilt’ and could not ‘quiet her mind’ because ‘she hath not the fortune other women haue’ after enduring six stillbirths. She had one surviving child.Footnote ¹¹ Forty-four people asked Simon Forman and his protégé, Richard Napier, explicitly about fertility a total of fifty-two times between 1569 and 1620. But this figure obscures the larger number of women who asked the practitioners whether they were pregnant. When the woman in question was not ‘with child’, determined according to the stars, the case notes habitually turned to the wider problem of why the individual had not got pregnant. Elizabeth Amon, for example, asked whether she was pregnant in 1596. Forman failed to record a judgement, but thought she was ‘troubled with the mother’ (suffocation of the womb) and ‘stopt in the stomack’ and this was why she had not had a baby.Footnote ¹²

In correspondence, the expectation of family members that newly married couples would get pregnant immediately after getting married was positively relentless. The tone of such letters was often humorous and yet below this veneer one senses the collective anxiety of wondering whether the family name would be continued, and what this might say about the lineage’s providential destiny if it was not. John Molyneaux wrote to Alice Kenyon, a Lancashire gentlewoman, in 1674 expecting ‘to hear y[o]u are w[i]th child’.Footnote ¹³ In 1656 the Earl of Northampton wrote to his daughter-in-law’s father celebrating that his daughter, Frances, was finally pregnant. ‘I am extreamly glad to heare that wee are likely to have more of y[ou]r breede by my most fertill Mistress.’Footnote ¹⁴ A later letter praised Frances for continuing ‘her virtuous qualitie of Multiplying in the world’.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet another letter asked whether she ‘daily encreaseth’, a reference to her burgeoning belly.Footnote ¹⁶ A year after Mary Sackville, daughter of the fifth Earl of Dorset, and Roger Boyle, an Irish peer and Member of Parliament, had been married and still not had a baby, their families freely expressed their anxieties. When Sackville finally conceived, Boyle’s father wrote to Mary’s father, Richard, confessing that he had been ‘almost asham[e]d to hear’ that Richard had ‘gotten’ his own wife pregnant ‘befor[e] my son had gotten y[ou]r Daugther with Childe’. Now that she was pregnant, he had ‘Redeemed himself’. This happy outcome, he noted, was hardly surprising because Mary and Roger were a ‘Coupl[e] descended from two such fruitfull families’. They would never have been long in ‘Imitating their Ancestors’.Footnote ¹⁷

Frances Widdrington wrote to her sister, Mary Arthington, both of the Yorkshire landowning Fairfax family, to say that she was sorry that she was ‘not yet breeding’. Apparently Mary’s husband, Henry, was convinced that Frances herself was pregnant but ‘I would not have you fully to beleeve him’.Footnote ¹⁸ Joan Ellyot heard from her ‘sister Bowes’ that the wife of Simonds D’Ewes, the Suffolk parliamentarian and antiquarian, was pregnant and asked him for confirmation in the 1640s.Footnote ¹⁹ Another letter admonished him for not writing more regularly about the progress of ‘sister Buckenham’ and her pregnancy, in a way that suggests that within families pregnant or potentially pregnant women’s bodies were seen as intensively, and at times exclusively, of interest.Footnote ²⁰ News of the conception and pregnancies of family members and peers was a constant source of gossip in the correspondence of elite individuals. John Mordaunt, a politician from Warwickshire, wrote to his wife to tell her that Mistress Lucy was ‘breeding’ and that ‘wee are now like to have A fertile Neighbourhood’. He had heard the news from ‘[th]e Women yesterday’.Footnote ²¹ Anne Chaytor wrote to her brother, William, in 1673 in Croft near Darlington to tell him that a brewer’s wife had been ‘brought to bed’, meaning given birth, to six babies at once – it was a ‘healthy tyme hear [here] and frutfull’.Footnote ²²

This network of information about other people’s fertility and sexual practices created a thick and tense environment in which elite men and women must have felt considerable anxiety. Mary Rich, the Countess of Warwick, described retrospectively in her memoirs how whilst initially her and her husband and been happy with two children, when they died, she was ‘very desirous’ of more and ‘sought to God’ to ‘keep up the honour of that noble house’ by conceiving. While previous generations of the family had been plentiful, she worried that the line ‘grew so thin, that the name was like to sink’.Footnote ²³ Her lack of issue might be the downfall of the whole family. As well as being key to the survival of the Church and to personal and familial piety, having babies was also crucial to inheritance and lineage, a question that was particularly pressing for these elite families. The repercussions of not having children for powerful families was most obviously and dramatically indicated by royal precedent – succession was a consistent concern for the English monarchy over the medieval and early modern period. Childbearing, therefore, far from being a purely domestic concern sat at the very heart of the experience of family and public life.

Although cheap print of the period was awash with instances of couples using food and medicine to bolster fertility, family correspondence was not as vocal about these cures. Furthermore, family members often refrained from speculating about the possible physiological or emotional causes of a couple’s childlessness, especially when this pertained to men. Given the stakes, the candour with which correspondents discussed conception in rather public paperwork, and the ubiquity of childbearing and sex in cheap print, the absence of specific references to fertility aids is notable. Jennifer Evans has suggested that despite this relative silence in family correspondence and in practitioners’ casebooks, the fact that medical, magical and practical cures for infertility were so widespread in printed medical texts and practitioners’ advertisements means that fertility remedies must have been commonplace in early modern English homes.Footnote ²⁴ In printed casebooks, particularly of surgeons, she shows that male patients were treated for genitourinary conditions that were thought to impact on infertility but that writers did not always linger on these ramifications, ‘perhaps as a means of reassuring male readers that these outcomes were not a forgone conclusion’.Footnote ²⁵

Daphna Oren-Magidor similarly suggests that people, and particularly women, were embarrassed to visit a physician for conditions relating to sex and birth. Female practitioners may have offered more discretion in treating infertility, but they also rarely kept written records of their practice, and this might be why there are limited records of treatment.Footnote ²⁶ This may very well have been true with regards to practitioners’ casebooks but does not explain the tentativeness in family correspondence. The silences in this material are important in what they reveal about the place of women and their bodies within households. Male fragility or lack of virility threatened domestic order as well as the family name, and it was this familial priority that drove these absences or at times the destruction of evidence of men being physiologically responsible for childlessness. Male status within families generally was dependant on the appearance of a normative and orderly domestic realm whilst simultaneously needing to be seen as largely separate from this world and the labours that it entailed. Families then prioritised public stories of quick, easy and inevitable conception, and they sought consolation when their experiences did not live up to this ideal by explaining childlessness as women’s fault and additionally their responsibility to (secretly) remedy. Reading against the grain in correspondence and recipe books reveals the subtle ways that early modern families navigated this conundrum of outcome versus appearance. It certainly did not stop men representing the victory as all theirs when women eventually conceived.

Strutting About

When men wrote to their friends and family about conception, they were keen to represent themselves as virile, and showed little interest in maternal effort. When Walter and Barbara Bagot of the prominent Staffordshire aristocratic family had a baby in 1725, Barbara’s father, William, wrote to Walter commiserating that although it would have been better if the child was a boy, ‘Sir Walter it is Pla[i]n you can get, and your wife can Bring children.’ The birth had made Walter an exceedingly ‘happy’ grandfather.Footnote ²⁷ In 1727, when the wife of George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, gave birth to a ‘fine chop[p]ing lad’, he wrote to Walter, who was his brother-in-law, that he was ‘vastly happy in it’ and ‘they say I strut about’ the streets of London ‘& look like the Prince of Candee’.Footnote ²⁸ In 1672, Lord Parry gossiped to his wife, Katharine, that Sir Edward Nicolls had loudly boasted to all his friends that he had ‘but 2 bouts’ of sex with his wife and the baby ‘came’. It had also been reported that when he was told that his wife had given birth to a big healthy baby, he was so incredulous that he could be the father that he sought confirmation from the women who were with his wife during delivery.Footnote ²⁹ As Nicolls’ initial bravado and Parry’s derision reveals, not everyone was convinced when men claimed to have conceived easily. This is clear in an exchange between Sir William fifth Lord Paget, a politician and Buckinghamshire landlord, and his steward, John Jone’s wife, Mary, in the 1630s. He wrote to say that he was disappointed to hear that she was still not pregnant. The fault, he was adamant, was with her husband, ‘for I thinke you very fruitful were you well handled’. He told her that he would be at his house by Michaelmas, ‘where if I finde you still barren, I will take some paines with you myselfe’.Footnote ³⁰ Conception was often represented as related to male sexual skill, or as William said of his son, down to men getting women pregnant and women bringing it to fruition. Men merely had to ‘handle’ women well. It is unclear how serious Paget’s threats to have sex with his employee’s wife were. The rate of illegitimate pregnancy in domestic servants attests to the liberty that masters took with female members of the household.Footnote ³¹ Underpinning the humour in Paget’s letter, was clearly a reality that the Jones’ childlessness reflected poorly on John, and more broadly on his employer, Paget, too.

Men felt and expressed shame, sadness and fear when they were unable to get their wives pregnant. Dudley Ryder, the future Chief Justice, fretted in his diary in 1715 when he was twenty-five that he would struggle to get a future wife ‘with child’. He worried that he was not ‘very powerful that way’ and that a future spouse would ‘have reason to complain’. He even doubted whether he should marry at all but could not imagine how he might be happy without a wife.Footnote ³² There was also of course the very real threat of a marriage having to be annulled if a husband was unable to perform sexually. Lord Orrery, if we recall, told his son he was ‘almost asham[e]d’ of him that he had taken so long to get his wife pregnant. That his wife’s parents had had a child since the young couple married only made things more humiliating. Roger only ‘Redeem[e]d himself’ when Mary got pregnant in 1666.Footnote ³³ The conception was all thanks to the advice that Orrery had given him, which he, in turn, had passed on to Lord Powerscort, his brother-in-law, which would mean he was the ‘next that Gits his Wif with Child’.Footnote ³⁴ Sadly this advice has been lost or, more likely, was never kept, owing to its potentially mortifying content, but points to a far less visible network of men writing to share advice about conception and fertility, albeit one that made discretion paramount. Failing to conceive, particularly when the cause was lack of male vigour or virility, was not something one wanted to feature prominently in the family archive.

An equally shameful cause of childlessness was the possibility that a couple was an incompatible match. In yet another example of the ways in which families could control the evidence attesting to their fertility and reputation, when Theophilus, seventh Earl of Huntingdon sent his uncle Arthur a letter in 1672 confessing that he was unable to consummate his marriage to Elizabeth Lewis, he insisted that his uncle burn it on receipt. The only reason we know of its existence is that Arthur’s letter containing advice survives. The couple had been married for six months, provoking Theophilus to ask his uncle for advice, but not without asking him first to burn the request for help upon receipt. The problem, Arthur was relieved to read, was not Theophilus’ ‘member’, which the newly married man assured him was ‘stiffe standing’. The couple had already visited two doctors. One had given Elizabeth an electuary, the other, called Dr Duchon, recommended Theophilus refrain from masturbating. It would be easier to ‘gett yr P: in to her’ when she had her ‘flowers’, or was menstruating. This was because ‘those parts are most apt to delate and widen when she is in that condition’.Footnote ³⁵ This was one area in which practice appears to have differed from prescription. Childbearing guides of the period were adamant that having sex while a woman was menstruating was ungodly and could lead to a host of infant illnesses or deformities, especially leprosy. Sharp, in her midwifery guide, for example, detailed how babies might be unhealthy if conceived while a woman was menstruating, but acknowledged that some couples might prefer sex at this time because the ‘membranes are so dilated by the moisture of those parts that the pain is far less’.Footnote ³⁶ This belief clearly motivated the other pieces of advice that Duchon and Arthur proposed – to keep a bottle of oil by the bedside as lubricant and Elizabeth to take a glister, or laxative, ‘before you have some hopes and intend to enter her’, there would be ‘roome a nuffe that ye head of your pindle may enter’ and there would be ‘otian [ocean] a nuffe, too deepe your rudder to feele the bottom againe as it is’.

As Stanhope’s letter makes clear, men being physiologically responsible for childlessness was categorically more embarrassing than blaming women, in this case, Elizabeth. But this also raised the possibility that it was not only that she was not being ‘well handled’, in Lord Paget’s words, but that she did not love her husband. Arthur reassured Theophilus that Elizabeth loved him ‘most passionately’.Footnote ³⁷ A later letter hints at a troubled relationship. Two years and three months after Arthur’s advice, Elizabeth gave birth to a son. Bridget Croft, Theophilus’ godmother, reflected that they should have called the baby ‘peacemaker’ because ‘as his first beginning in ye womb did begin in better agreement’ between the couple. She hoped his birth would ‘so unight your hartes in affection as nothing shall ever separate yin’.Footnote ³⁸ This puts Arthur’s cajoling that Theophilus and Elizabeth would be the ‘fondest and lovingest couple in the world’ when the young man’s ‘P: has beene up to the hilts in her C’ into context, and explains why his uncle warned him against visiting a prostitute. There were clearly rumours circulating about the couple already and Arthur told him not to bother with those ‘trattles and lyes that you heare’. Stanhope said he would rather his nephew was dead than shamed the family by being unfaithful to his wife and giving her the ‘pox’.Footnote ³⁹

It was not just men that sought to conceal their own infertility, but women were encouraged to also be discreet about lack of male virility. Wives who exposed their husband’s sexual frailty were severely criticised. Thus, in 1693, the Athenian Mercury, an early advice column that printed questions from supposed readers and answers from a (probably fictional) team of experts, printed the story of a ‘very personable Gentleman’ who had been happily married to a ‘fine young Lady’ for three years without having any children. He knew that the fault was his. After she died, he married a woman of substantial fortune but failed to tell her he was unable to have children. His first wife’s mother visited his new marital home and exposed his infertility, berating him for marrying again ‘when he knew himself not qualified for a Husband’. The gentleman in question was so ashamed and horrified by the public discussion of his incapacity that ‘he immediately went up stairs, and ript up his Belly’ and died. When asked for its ‘Sentiments’ on the episode and the ‘Opinion of the two Wives’, the publication responded that the first wife who ‘Conceal’d her Husband’s Infirmity’ was a ‘Subject for Admiration’ and the second wife was also not to blame. The mother-in-law, however, had exposed his secret, and that was worthy of condemnation.Footnote ⁴⁰ The editor of the Mercury, John Dunton, remained childless himself and his barrenness and ‘no-performance at home’ was mocked in a play of the same year, 1693, by Elkanah Settle.Footnote ⁴¹ Dunton may very well have been the author of the response, and, if as Helen Berry suggests, many of the stories in the Mercury were manufactured, he was also possibly the author of the initial question. The impacts of being known as being generatively challenged could be devastating for men, and women were expected to be complicit in upholding this aspect of male and familial honour.

Discreet wives emerge as a theme in accounts of couples struggling to conceive. When the marriage of Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex, and Frances Howard, was annulled in 1613, Frances was adamant that she had kept her husband’s inability to consummate their marriage a secret and only divulged it when he was publicly accused of something even more shameful: being cuckolded. The breakdown of their ill-fated marriage became the subject of several pamphlets, notably the very detailed account by George Abott, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1715, that drew on evidence given at court and rumours reported by members of the aristocracy and the king himself. Frances’ case rested on the fact that Robert was incapable, despite many attempts, of having sex. Whether or not it was Frances that was the origin of the rumours, it remained that tales of Robert’s sexual non-performance spread far and wide.

The couple married in 1606, when Robert was fifteen and Frances sixteen. By the time Robert had returned from a two-year grand tour to begin married life, the match had soured, and Frances was rumoured to be having an affair with the Earl of Somerset. Once they were eighteen, the couple began cohabiting. Frances told the commissioners that she hoped they would begin having sex ‘after the fashion of other married Couples’ leading to ‘lawful Issue’ and making her a mother, but when they were ‘naked and alone in the same Bed’, she ‘offer’d her self, and her Body’ to no avail.Footnote ⁴² Robert ‘labour[ed] a quarter of an Hour carnally to know’ Frances before accepting defeat and bidding her goodnight. He told commissioners that he had been unable to get aroused because she had insulted him calling him a ‘Cow, and Coward, and Beast’.Footnote ⁴³ Some speculated that he had been bewitched, whilst the archbishop diagnosed the problem as ‘Want of Love, which restraineth all Motions of carnal Concupiscence, and not any Impotency’. He opposed the annulment of the match, assuming that if the couple could rekindle their romance, all would be well.Footnote ⁴⁴

The King himself reported that it was not just Frances he was not attracted to but all women. Robert’s friends had ‘put a Woman to him’ to cure his impotence but ‘he would not touch her’. He had also reportedly travelled to Poland to be ‘unwitched’ of his impediment.Footnote ⁴⁵ Another source, a ‘good friend’ of the Earl, recalled how one Sunday morning, surrounded by five or six captains and ‘Gentlemen of Worth’ in his chamber, he had responded to talk of his impotence by rising out of bed, pulling his shirt up and showing all how ‘able, and extraordinarily sufficient’ his erection was. The men supposedly ‘cry’d out Shame of his Lady, and said That if the Ladies of the Court knew as much as they knew, they would tread her [Frances] to Death’ in jealousy.Footnote ⁴⁶ Importantly, Frances claimed that the only reason she had shared details of their intimate sexual activities, or lack of, was because there were ‘false Rumours of her Disobedience’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The Earl, in contrast, was described by Abott as refraining from ‘ill Speech of his Lady’ altogether, ‘for which we all much commended him’, something Abott’s account clearly shows was not the case, but served to represent Frances as failing in her duties as a wife and potential mother.Footnote ⁴⁸ A mere three months after the annulment was granted, Frances married Robert Carr, first Earl of Somerset, the man she was supposedly having an affair with all along. They were both imprisoned in the Tower of London for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, and their daughter, Anne, was born in custody in 1615. Essex returned to his seat in Warwickshire and there ‘lived a private Life’ in embarrassment.Footnote ⁴⁹

Gossiping about one’s husband’s lack of sexual prowess was a frequent feature of satirical print that mocked men that were cuckolded by their wives. In Fumblers-Hall, for example, Alice All-Cock initially sought to remedy her husband’s impotence and lack of desire by dosing him with anchovies, caviar and muscadine, well-known aphrodisiacs, but when this did not work, she asked a gaggle of women for their assistance and advice.Footnote ⁵⁰ In A. Marsh’s Ten Pleasures of Marriage (1682), an unflattering picture of the expectations of a middling newlywed couple in the seventeenth century, the ‘good woman’ sought the help of her neighbours to conceive (Figure 1.1). A mere three months after the wedding she asked her neighbours ‘what caresses’ they received from their husbands. In turn, she ‘most shamlesly relates what hath passed between her and her husband, twixt the curtains, or under the Rose’, hoping to ascertain ‘whether her husband understands his work well, and whether he doth it well, and oft enough’.Footnote ⁵¹ The so-termed ‘Councel of women’ overwhelm her with stories of their own amorous activities whilst criticising the husband. The imagined reader was clearly male; the author intrudes into the narrative to joke that the silver lining of having one’s failings shared publicly was that wives would then encourage their husbands to spend their days in the coffee house drinking chocolate and then ‘embraceth you as if you were an Angel’ in the evening. The wife was advised to discreetly supplement her husband’s diet secretly with chocolate, spices, eggs, sweatbread, lambs’ testicles and caviar. When her attempts to seduce him and this invigorating diet do not work, the wife turns to insulting him, calling him ‘Fumbler’, ‘dry-boots’ and ‘good man Dolittle’. Quite bluntly, ‘This makes him look as if he had beshit himself.’Footnote ⁵² The husband is represented as thoroughly disgraced by the public knowledge of his infertility.

Figure 1.1 A. Marsh, The Ten Pleasures of Marriage (London: 1682), 72.

RB102841, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA.

Figure 1.1Long description

In the foreground, a seated woman with an elaborate hairstyle and fine clothing is having her hair treated by a kneeling servant. Thick, dark smoke or vapor is rising from the woman's hair, possibly indicating a hairstyling or treatment process. The servant wears a simple dress and headscarf while tending to the woman’s hair with a small pot nearby. Two other elegantly dressed individuals, a man and a woman, observe the scene. The man wears a hat with feathers and a long coat, while the standing woman has a decorative headdress. Behind them, an open door reveals an outdoor setting with trees and a group of people. A framed picture on the wall depicts a classical or mythological scene.

Such texts were humorous, but they exposed a real anxiety for men about the homosocial company that their wives kept, the kinds of conversations they would have, and the dire consequences of not having children.Footnote ⁵³ The suggestion that wives might be able to dose their husbands’ meals with things that would encourage conception was something that some medical texts also catered to. Sarah Jinner’s 1659 almanac included a ‘Confection’ that caused ‘fruitfulness in Man or Woman’ that could be secretly sprinkled ‘upon the parties meat’. Almanacs were astrological books that encouraged readers to record daily happenings and provided lists of useful information including agricultural fairs, medical advice and advertisements. Jinner’s was unusually focused on matters of sexual health. With the information she provided, she hoped people would be able to treat ‘pain in the bottom of their bellies’, a clear gesture to venereal disease, which as we know hampered fertility, without ‘acquainting Physitians’ with their indiscretions. Physicians, she noted, would not know the ‘true cause of the Distemper’ and therefore be incapable of treating it anyway.Footnote ⁵⁴

Women’s knowledge perceived intuition and expertise about generation was an ambivalent experience for men. At times it could be threatening and at others advantageous both as a source of expertise and because it allowed them to distance themselves from the responsibility for childlessness. In 1664, the diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys took advantage of being in the company of women after a gossips’ feast – the celebration after a birth – to ask for advice on how to conceive. The women enthusiastically gave him ten pieces of advice that he numbered and duly recorded in his diary.

The couple should also lie with their ‘heads where our heels do, or at least to make the bed high at feet and low at head’. Samuel noted that ‘ne’r a man but I’ had risen from the table at a gossips’ feast and joined the women instead of the men, but his intrusion into the homosocial world of the gossiping feast provided him with otherwise hidden discreet knowledge about fertility. Despite Pepys’ various efforts, the couple remained childless. Such was the perceived procreative agency of women that in some circumstances they were thought to be able to decide whether or not they got pregnant and whether it would be a boy or a girl. In 1627, John Holles, second Earl of Clare, wrote to his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Wentworth lamenting that both their wives had ‘of late’ been bearing ‘wenches’, or girls, instead of boys. He was petitioning his own wife to have some boys and hoped when Wentworth’s wife saw this ‘she will take faire warning, & doe as she should doe’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Holles and his wife Elizabeth Vere actually had seven daughters and only one surviving son, the other died in infancy.

These ideas about women possessing troubling and even dangerous knowledge about generation owes much to the medieval tradition of terming this body of knowledge ‘women’s secrets’. Cheap print and correspondence were simply recapitulating a view that women could manipulate and control conception when it pleased them. By parsing out this field of knowledge from other kinds of medical and general knowledge, men also were able to claim that not being ‘fruitful’ was not their fault. They merely ‘got’ women pregnant, and their job was done. This, as men’s letters and diaries indicate, was a fiction that even early modern people knew was inaccurate. Nor was getting pregnant only of interest to women. Elite families wrote about the generative lives of their neighbours, acquaintances and far-off relatives. Men like Nicolls or Paget might have liked people to think conception was as easy as having two ‘bouts’ or ‘handling’ a woman, but the anxiety present in such exchanges and the fixation with other people’s fruitfulness point to the ways that this was often merely a narrative. It is noteworthy that when the Earl of Orrery, Roger Boyle’s father, wrote that he knew the couple would ‘imitate’ their ‘Ancestors’ in being ‘fruitful’, a quick glance of the family tree reveals that Mary and Roger’s ‘ancestors’ had not been particularly fertile. Mary’s grandfather, Edward, who only had one heir, inherited the title of Earl of Dorset from his brother Richard Sackville, when he did not have any heirs. The Boyles had a similarly chequered past with procreation. Lord Orrery had only two sons. The new couple would go on to have only three children. Examining these narratives about success and pedigree makes painfully clear how much making babies was a family affair, and not merely confined to the world of women, however much men might have wanted to represent it as such.

Understanding the Causes of Childlessness

To understand how men could absent themselves from physiological and emotional responsibility for fertility, one only has to consider the ways in which medical authors wrote about the causes of childlessness. Although childbearing guides suggested that there were multiple causes of childlessness in women and in men, authors were far more interested in the ways wives might be able to moderate their bodies in order to conceive than in their husbands following suit. The 1595 text Problemes of Aristotle explained that a couple might struggle to conceive if the husband was too cold and his seed made ‘vnfit for generation’ or because his seed was too ‘waterish’ and would not stick in the womb. Sometimes the seed of husband and wife were not compatible – if the man were choleric, for example, and the woman sanguine. Fat women would struggle to bring a child to term because they had ‘slipperie wombe[s], out of which the seede slippeth, and is not holden in’. Similarly, men and women that were too thin would also face problems.Footnote ⁵⁸ And women that were too hot would extinguish any seed cast into the womb. This was why women who were lustful rarely conceived. Having sex too frequently would ‘corrupt and spill’ the ‘instruments of conception’. Notably, even though the answer gestured to the ways in which men’s bodies might prevent conception as well as women, the question was framed in terms of why ‘some women’ were ‘barren and can not conceaue’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Similarly, the Mercury, asked ‘Why are Common Women seldom or never with Child?’ in 1691, rather than ‘Why are some couples without issue?’. The response also centred on women’s bodies and suggested that too much sex was deleterious to fertility:Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘Why does not the Grass grow in the path way?’Footnote ⁶¹ Although the frequency with which couples had sex was dependent on male as well as female activity, it was women who were held responsible, whose bodies underwent treatment and were often involved in diagnosis, as we shall see in the next section.

Other authors explained how if women did not menstruate sufficiently or regularly enough, they could ‘neither conceive, nor ingender’, and that this was the most frequent cause of childlessness. It was comparable to men possessing a ‘defect or corruption’, or whose seed was exhausted and wasted by ‘his over-moist and cold conception’.Footnote ⁶² Culpeper told readers that in order to have healthy children, both spouses had to ‘keep the Instruments of Generation pure and clean, and their Blood pure, that so their Seed being pure’.Footnote ⁶³ This was accomplished through a moderate diet and ‘Exercise of Body’. The womb might be too hot, too cold, too moist or too dry. All would hinder conception and could be remedied through a dietary regimen. The womb might be ‘shut up’ by humoral imbalance, or as Robert Barret explained, by some ‘Tumor or Callosity’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Moderate regimens connected the practice of piety to positive health and procreative outcomes.

The seed of spouses could also simply be incompatible rather than there being any defect. Sharp described how an ‘impediment not fully seen’ could mysteriously render a couple childless but with another spouse they would be very fertile. This was analogous to a broken watch that when thrown against the wall, in this case through remarriage, was jolted back into perfect working order.Footnote ⁶⁵ If spouses did not love each other, they would never be procreative, as many family correspondents feared. Culpeper explained that ‘Want of Love between man and wife’ would lead to barrenness because ‘if their hearts be not united in love, how should their seed unite to cause conception?’Footnote ⁶⁶ This was in part due to the dominance of the passions of the soul, or emotions, to understanding bodily health. Barret explained that only women who were of ‘good Temperament, of a regular Life and Conversation’ would conceive.Footnote ⁶⁷ Grief or distress in women, in particular, could prevent conception or damage the health of an unborn child, as is discussed in more depth in Chapter 2. Culpeper instructed couples to ‘avoid passions, anger, sadness, fear’ and ‘Let love be invited, and if it burn, there wil many Spirits flie to the womb and privities.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Happiness begot lusty infants, but as we shall see in later chapters, the emotional tenor of the relationship was also dependant on women’s efforts.

Childlessness could also come from a weak or non-existent erection in men, which as we have seen from family paperwork, was often represented as the most shameful and embarrassing cause. Like the Earl of Essex, this was often thought to be caused by bewitchment. Sharp noted that men in France commonly urinated through their wife’s wedding ring to cure curses and enchantments that rendered them unable to have sex.Footnote ⁶⁹ This kind of superstitious practice was normally discouraged in England but may very well have been practised in some households. Childlessness could also be no one specific party’s fault and simply be divine will. Religious and medical explanations sat comfortably side-by-side in printed literature.Footnote ⁷⁰ Eucharius Roeslin’s Byrth of Mankynde celebrated conception as the most manifest and plain sign of ‘the magnificent myghtynesse of that omnipote[n]t lyving god’.Footnote ⁷¹ Sharp explained that sometimes women were unable to conceive despite no obvious impediment because God reserved ‘to himself a prerogative of furthering and hindering Conception where he pleaseth’ so that spouses might ‘more earnestly pray’ and ‘be thankful’ when he granted conception.Footnote ⁷² Infertility then was something that might be caused by imbalance or imperfection in female, male or both bodies together or by the will of God.

While medical texts saw it likely that men as well as women could be in need of treatment for infertility, the number of pages devoted to the actions men could take are dwarfed by the chapters on what women could and should do to get pregnant. Roeslin notes, for example, that childlessness ‘may be defect and lacke in the mother receavynge the seade’ but equally there might be ‘faulte and defecte in the sower & in the seade it self’.Footnote ⁷³ And yet, despite paying lip service to the possibility that men could suffer from bodily imperfections that made conception impossible, he fails to elaborate on these faults and instead devotes two pages to outlining the ways in which the womb might be too hot, cold, humid or dry. There may be a ‘defecte and lacke’ in the sower of the seed, if it was too hot, too cold or too thin, something he hoped the wife might be able to feel within her. There were ‘dyvers’ other reasons but he found them unnecessary to rehearse. A test to discover whether husband or wife was provided (a standard test that involved urinating on a plant and observing growth) but this was only necessary ‘If ye be desyrous to know’. Another test involved placing a strong perfume beneath a woman’s legs. If she smelt the perfume, she was fertile. If not, she was barren.Footnote ⁷⁴

In this way, women’s bodies were regularly implicated in diagnosing childlessness as well as remedying it: yet another secret they had to keep and another way in which managing fertility sat within expectations of gendered labour within the household. This was in keeping with expectations of domestic labour. Culpeper’s A Directory for Midwives included a similar urine test to discover which party was responsible for ‘Accidental Barrenness’, but noted that although it was ‘sometimes caused on the mans part’, it was ‘most commonly on the Womans’. This ‘accidental’ barrenness was ‘either common too both man and wife … or else tis proper to the woman only’. If a man’s diet and exercise were governed ‘according to the rules’, Culpeper saw no ‘accidental cause of Barrenness in him’.Footnote ⁷⁵ It was not worth the space, Culpeper suggested, to outline the ways men could combat barrenness because it was so rare, in contrast to the multitude of ways the womb, and women, could obstruct conception.

Barret too suggests at times that fertility could be a joint enterprise in which wives and husbands might both need medical treatment, and yet in others seems wholly uninterested in detailing what the remedies might be for men. His Companion for Midwives provides an extensive explanation of how the womb might hamper conception and how these blockages and imbalances might be cured through diet and conduct, and fails to elaborate further on the point that ‘No conception can be without the entrance of the Yard, and the consequent emission of Seed.’Footnote ⁷⁶ As we have seen, this was not always inevitable or easy for men. The conclusion of his chapter on ‘the Causes of Barrennness and the means to prevent it’ encouraged couples to find out whether the cause was in the ‘Instruments of Generation’, in seed or problems in the womb, again suggesting that men as well as women would be worthy of medical treatment for infertility.Footnote ⁷⁷ François Mauriceau did not even deign to discuss male impediments, for, as he explained, ‘Barrenness proceeds oftner from Women than Men’ and that for every impotent man, there were more than thirty barren women.Footnote ⁷⁸ Hypocritically, Mauriceau’s chapter on ‘Conception, and the conditions necessary for it’ argued that when the seed in either party did not have the ‘requisit qualities’, was scarce or not ‘well enough conditioned’, the resulting infant ‘may be the less & weaker for it’, undermining his previous argument that male health was of marginal importance in healthy conception.Footnote ⁷⁹ John Pechey in his 1698 The Compleat Midwife’s Practice Enlarged hinted at male responsibility by suggesting that barrenness came from a ‘defect either of the Genitals, or of the blood’ as well as menstrual blood, but later only acknowledged disproportion of seed (a condition that was about the compatibility of spouses rather than male health) and bewitching (something that was not strictly the fault of the man and could only be lifted through external means, rather than management of diet and conduct).Footnote ⁸⁰ The preceding fifty-four pages of his guide addressed difficulties and diseases of the womb that compromised fertility.Footnote ⁸¹

The ways medical authors side-stepped the specific details of male sexual dysfunction parallel the avoidance of family members of similar topics in correspondence. Childbearing guides were increasingly, at least in title, directed towards midwives and female readers, so one might explain the lack of interest in treatments directed towards men to the fact that they were not the chief audience. This alone, however, is not sufficient as an explanation for the selective coverage of treatment for childlessness. In many ways, the take-away from this literature is that it may have been perceived as largely unnecessary to discuss what men might be able to do, because even if their bodies were disordered, it was women who were meant to diagnose and secretly treat them anyway. There was a significant schism between the explanations and expectations of medical practice in these childbearing guides.

This relative silence is possibly one of the key reasons that historians have assumed early modern people always blamed women for infertility. Even though men could suffer from ‘brewer’s droop’ or impotence, Olwen Hufton has observed that ‘under most conditions’ childlessness was seen as punishment for female sin or a consequence of her misconduct.Footnote ⁸² Likewise, Randolph Trumbach has characterized the ‘legal and social assumptions’ of the period as so geared towards female incapacity that early modern people would have failed to consider the possibility of male impediment.Footnote ⁸³ Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster have provided an important corrective to this view, suggesting that historians’ own ‘deeply gendered ideas’ have shaped their representation of the past.Footnote ⁸⁴ They criticize Lawrence Stone, for example, who notably calls Elizabeth Pepys ‘childless and lonely’, and assumes the physical impediment to be hers alone, rather than her husband’s, Samuel.Footnote ⁸⁵ The explanation of childlessness and treatments that medical authors recommended may also have been a product of the increasingly intensive interest in the womb as a source of female malady over the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁸⁶ Combined with an intellectual preoccupation with understanding the ‘secrets’ of generation, this meant that although medical practitioners and authors clearly understood men to be theoretically possible of suffering from a host of conditions that made it difficult to conceive or led to weak and unhealthy babies, including simply poor health, the details of these impediments sat uncomfortably alongside the prevailing model of gendered domestic labour in early modern England. A close reading of records of medical practice elucidates the ways in which treating childlessness and encouraging fertility was embedded within daily routines of care and therefore easily hidden or minimised within the written record.

Treating Barrenness

The explanations for the causes of barrenness therefore mean we need to look more critically at sources documenting medical practice, bearing in mind the considerable pressure on couples to conceive and the push to represent childlessness as more often originating in women’s bodily and emotional faults. Added to this, the advice given in medical texts for fostering fertility was often similar to advice on living healthily and preventing disease, making evidence of families treating men for infertility potentially everywhere. Eating sparingly, exercising moderately and taking care to quash excessive anger or sadness were all standard pieces of advice in many early modern regimens, but also central to promoting fruitfulness in women and men. In this sense, although some people sought the help of medical practitioners or purchased proprietary medicines from those who touted them, most of the time, treating infertility was a domestic exercise and embedded within the quotidian tasks of domestic management. One of the reasons for this was because yet again this kind of work was often subsumed within the labour women took on in households to feed and heal members and made discretion easier. This often included seeking out the answers to the medical problems that women themselves or other members of the household were suffering from.

Many elite families kept manuscript volumes containing, most prominently, culinary and medical recipes but also a miscellanea of household accounts, lists and useful information.Footnote ⁸⁷ Remedies to increase fertility and aid childbearing make up a substantial amount of these volumes, and these recipes sat side-by-side to recipes for pickling walnuts or salves for sore eyes. These receipt books were often compiled by multiple family members, sometimes across generations, combining recipes taken from printed texts with those acquired through friends, family and medical practitioners. Authorship and attribution of recipes was often fluid and complex.Footnote ⁸⁸ Women had a particularly important role in compiling and maintaining these collections, but this was not an exclusively female domain.

A substantial proportion of remedies to increase fertility were directed towards women only. Frances Springatt’s recipe book contained a remedy ‘To help conseption and strengthen Nature’ of red sage, king’s roots and comfrey roots mixed with nutmeg and the yolk of a newly laid egg, taken morning and night.Footnote ⁸⁹ A remedy in Johanna St John’s book, for example, cleansed the ‘Mother’ (womb) and caused ‘Conception’, attributed to Dr Row.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Boyle family book contained ‘A Course of Physick much tried and approued to purge the Womb of superfluous humours and to promote Conception in Barren Women’ as well as one to ‘cause conception’ and another to ‘Remedy Barrenness and promote the faculty of Generation’.Footnote ⁹¹ The latter included ‘salt of mugworth’, which would open the womb when ‘shutt up, cleanseth the Same, Cheriseth the Seminal Vessells, Comforteth and Enliveneth the Womb & maketh it fit for Conception’.Footnote ⁹² Rebeckah Winche’s recipe book included a four-part regimen to purge the ‘wombe from all hurtfull or superfulus humers w[hi]ch hinder conception’, including a potion, pills, an electuary and a wine to drink.Footnote ⁹³ The papers of the Scottish Cunninghame Graham family contained a similar four-part regimen that a woman should take before she ‘accompany her husband’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Jane Jackson’s book contained a remedy ‘For the stone stomacke and backe and to make a woman conceaue with child’,Footnote ⁹⁵ and another to ‘To keepe her conceauing’ that promised that ‘she shall not lose the seede’.Footnote ⁹⁶ A further remedy to ‘make a woman conceaue’ served both to increase the likelihood of conception and as a test for pregnancy. Soaking hemlock in water and giving it to the woman in the morning ‘and the same day she shalbe able to conceaue’. If she was pregnant, she would ‘brooke that drincke soone after’, meaning concoct or digest.Footnote ⁹⁷ All these remedies were specifically for women, and more often than not concerned with cleansing the womb, a priority entirely in keeping with the increasing interest of medical writers.

The sex of the intended patient for these domestic remedies, however, was often left unspecified or vague, suggesting that it was perhaps simply that men were not being explicitly addressed in recipes in the same way women were. Two remedies in the Jerningham family recipe book, one to ‘stir up’ lust and another to ‘causeth conception’, did not specify whether they were for men, women or both.Footnote ⁹⁸ Other recipes were specifically made to be useful for both husbands and wives. Springatt’s aforementioned remedy to help conception, for example, included the instructions that ‘man should take of it as well as the woman’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Occasionally, domestic recipe books also included instructions to reveal whether the husband or wife was primarily responsible for childlessness. Jackson’s book contained a common test, reiterated in both Roeslin and Culpeper and many other books about generation, in which spouses urinated on kernels of barley in separate vessels and observed the growth.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

These remedies were so closely tied to everyday domestic routine that several of them were to be administered through sex. Remedies ‘to help conception’ in Thomas Brugis’ medical notes stated that a concoction of darnell weed, grass, barley meal, ‘mirth and franconise’ ought to be taken ‘before ye goe to bed’. An additional recipe to promote getting pregnant with a boy instructed the woman to ‘eate mercurie an hearb common befor you lye to gather’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In Jackson’s book, one remedy instructed the user to anoint the man’s ‘yard’ with a concoction before sex in order to further chances of conceiving. Another suggests that both the yard and the ‘womans privitie alsoe’ should be anointed. Then, the husband should simply ‘deale with her; and shee shall conceaue’. Unlike other entries in Jackson’s book, this series of recipes addresses men specifically. One recipe that involved mixing the brain of a crane with ‘gramders greac’ and ‘fox greac’ [grease], kept in a silver or gold vessel, included the instructions ‘at what time thou wold haue knowledge [sex] annoynt therewith thy yard and shee shall conceaue’.Footnote ¹⁰² Perhaps such language cajoled men into imagining themselves as rectifying female fragility through their own virility – he saw himself as administering the treatment even if he was covertly the intended recipient. Or perhaps women could secrete these concoctions inside her prior to sex without ever having to make it explicit that a treatment was being used. Richard Napier recommended that Anne Throckmorton use a pessary that was to be ‘to be put up wit[h] y[o]u’ (or her husband’s penis) when she and Sir Peter Temple were struggling to conceive in 1614. Whether Peter was suffering from problems that might also be assisted or solved by the pessary is left unsaid.Footnote ¹⁰³ The consultations continued over the ensuing weeks, and indeed the following years.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Lady Hester, Anne’s mother-in-law also visited on a further two occasions, asking whether Anne would ‘live to have issue’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ These multiple medical encounters that involved family members always centred Anne’s body as the cause of their sexual and generative difficulties as a couple. Not once was the potential of Peter being responsible for their difficulties explicitly mentioned. Presumably this was unnecessarily shameful when cures might be prescribed that cured husband and wife at the same time.

Indeed, male sexual health was often written about in ways that entirely disambiguated it from considerations of fertility. St John’s book, for example, included a remedy from a ‘Mr Freeman’ that purported to ‘strengthen a weak member’, containing many of the same ingredients that were common in recipes to cleanse the womb and promote conception: red sage, comfry and fennel to be taken morning and night, hot, as a bath.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ James Shrowl’s recipe book contained a remedy ‘To heale any Lame Member’ in which the ‘member’ was bathed for half an hour, ‘chaft’ with an ointment of ruse, rosemary and salad oil and then wrapped in lambskin before bed.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Dame Mary Lister’s household book contained ‘An Excellente receite for the running of the reines & all paines and Consumptions of the back.’Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Jackson similarly included several remedies for injured or afflicted yards. One for ‘sweling of a man’s yard’ involved heating a piece of cotton in ‘new butter’ and laying ‘it to the place as hott as the patient can suffer it[.] this will helpe him within 3 or 4 dressings’. Another more curious entry sought to assist ‘one that is burnt with a harlott’, which included putting powder on the sores. Others remedied a ‘burnt yard’, ‘a sore yard’, ‘For ones yard scalded’, ‘For any member that is scald or burnt’ and six others just titled ‘Another’. The Jerningham family recipe book contained a recipe for the ‘Excoriation of the yard’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The results of such treatments were listed as to ‘help’ or to ‘heale’. Conception, or even the strength of erection, is never mentioned, despite the fact it must obviously have been a concern. Undoubtedly, many of these treatments were primarily concerned with getting rid of the painful, and sometimes fatal, symptoms of venereal disease. The silence on the greater ramifications and the stakes for generation involved in a sore, swollen, burnt, excoriated yard is notable.

When medical practitioners were asked about childlessness, they were also inclined to believe it was women that needed medical treatment. Forman and Napier often told the women who asked them about childlessness that that their wombs were insufficiently cleansed, they suffered from emotional distress or they did not love their husbands enough to be fruitful. Antonia Yersley, who asked Forman whether she would have any more children, was told that she was already pregnant, but because she was excessively fretful ‘the child will hardly prove’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Forman recorded that Susan van Hulste, thirty-three, who had asked about disease and whether she would have any children, had not had her periods ‘in order’, had ‘moch pain in the head, reins, side, shoulders, heart’, blood in her ‘water’ and ‘sweas [sways] often tymes in her body’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Lady Luce Oliver sent her urine. She had been married before, without issue, and her new husband, Napier noted, had had two children before. The problem was melancholy and windy humours in her womb.Footnote ¹¹²

It was not completely unprecedented, however, for wives to be told it was their husbands who suffered from a physiological impediment that was stopping them from conceiving or having sufficient healthy children in the casebooks. When Margery Gudging, forty-four, asked ‘whe[the]r she shall have Any child or noe’, the judgement was that she would not have any children that survived but would become pregnant again at Michaelmas. The fault, Forman recorded, ‘is in the man’.Footnote ¹¹³ Mary Goddard, married two years, asked the same question, but added that she wanted to know the cause of her childlessness. Again, the fault was primarily her husband’s. Her womb was dry and her courses not ‘well’, but importantly her husband was also dry.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Ann Timbock, thirty-one, was told that although she would conceive twice in the future, it would not be by her husband because ‘her husband & nature doth not Agree with her’. The ‘greatest faulte’, Forman recorded, ‘is in the man’ and she would have a child by someone else.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Men could be responsible not just for hampering conception but also poor procreative outcomes more broadly. When someone asked whether Jean Wintch had ever been pregnant in the past and how many children she would have, Forman judged that she would conceive four times but none of them ‘will hardly live or come to good’ and would have ‘much strife’ because of their father. They ‘shall be gentle and mild in word but much embred of base people and evil in body’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Medical practitioners took the possibility of male physiological infertility seriously, and although this was often not mentioned explicitly, they were often involved directly or indirectly in the cures administered, in a way that indicates they were catering to families at the stories they wanted to be able to tell about themselves and their fruitfulness at a later time.

In the same way as the remedies in recipe books for weak, sore or burnt yards evaded discussing fertility directly, so too did casebooks in discussing male genital problems. In January 1600, Napier noted that Richard Foster suffered from the sensation of something running like blood ‘up into his joints into his arms and belly with a pricking and into his head and then his eyes run and in the reins of his back and out of his yard matter white runneth’, likely suffering from ‘running of the reanes’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Mr Ketteridge of Newport was ‘troubled with the gonorrhea (sic) whose stones are exceeding hard for 3 weeks in great pain’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Edward Plummer, forty- or fifty-years-old, had much pain in his member ‘at the end of making water it prickes & throbs with extream payne’. His face and hands had swelled and he could barely keep anything down. He feared it was an ulcer ‘for it is as matter that commeth from him & maketh it often’, four times an hour to be precise, and was hindering his sleep.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In the casebook of the Derbyshire surgeon Joseph Binns, Mr Richardas, suffering from ‘much payne in his yarde betwixte glans & prapulis’, was diagnosed with gangrene.Footnote ¹²⁰ Another case involved ‘The Gardners man’ who had a ‘great tumor in all his yarde harde w[i]th Inflamation’.Footnote ¹²¹

In all of these cases, practitioners and patients appeared comfortable discussing problems with penises, but shied away from discussing impotence and weak seed. Not a single case in Napier and Forman’s casbeooks in which men between the ages of fifteen and fifty suffered from problems with their genitalia mentions fertility explicitly (an age group where one would imagine fertility was a concern). There are a mere four cases in the whole corpus that explicitly address failure to achieve or maintain an erection. Mr Gregory was impotent ‘sine erectione’,Footnote ¹²² Mr Piland’s erections were not strong enough,Footnote ¹²³ and Napier noted that Mr Paulin did not experience strong erections.Footnote ¹²⁴ Mr Cooke asked on behalf of Richard Powell for ‘some thing to thicken his seed’ because he was troubled with gonorrhoea, a generic term for genital discharge and urinary problems. He also could not sleep and ‘wanteth virility & erection’.Footnote ¹²⁵ Aside from the brief mention of seed, these cases do not expand to discuss the ramifications of these difficulties for conception. This is surprising when we consider the frequency with which fertility is mentioned in any consultations with women.

Added to this, in all of Forman and Napier’s cases that have been tagged in the database as being about fertility, there are only two men who approached the practitioners themselves to ask about their own bodies. Napier’s cousin, George Kimpton, could ‘beget no child’ and was noted to have a ‘very cold complexion’, and very unusually his wife was not mentioned.Footnote ¹²⁶ Lawrence Manlye asked whether he could have children, but in this particular case, Napier did not include a judgement, and it is unclear whether he was even married.Footnote ¹²⁷ In one instance, a married couple consulted the astrologers together. Dr Shephard of London and Sarah his wife visited Napier but were specifically requesting ‘physick’ for Sarah to ‘cause fruitfulness’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Goodman Barro[w] asked ‘to take some thing for to become fruitfull’ for his wife, Charity. They had been married for seven years and still not had a baby. He was turned away and advised to come back a few months later.Footnote ¹²⁹ What we learn from this is not that fertility was not a shared enterprise, but rather the available scripts were so skewed towards talking about women’s bodily impediments that even consultations involving both husbands and wives were written about in a way that stressed maternal responsibility.

Lisa W. Smith has suggested that examples of treating male sexual problems are scarce less because early modern people assumed women were always responsible for childlessness and more because of a prevailing view that male generative problems were irreparable. She notes that male fertility was dependent on healthy seed, which required abstinence from nocturnal pollutions, excessive or extra-marital sex, which was difficult to identify and tough to control.Footnote ¹³⁰ Indeed, this goes some way to explaining the absences in these sources, although as we have seen, women’s fertility was also dependent on their conduct and living healthily, and yet they received a litany of advice. Furthermore, both recipes in domestic books and case notes about male genital problems suggest at least a willingness to consider curing adjacent conditions that would affect male sexual performance. Edward Plummer, for example, was prescribed a clyster and then a ‘dry dyet’ for swelling in his face and hands and for pain and discharge from his penis in 1620.Footnote ¹³¹ He had had recurrent problems since 1601 when Napier noted he had gonorrhoea.Footnote ¹³² In surgical treatises, practitioners proudly recalled their patients’ ability to have children after surgery as proof of their skill – more evidence that it was not necessarily that these problems were thought to be incurable.Footnote ¹³³ This points to the ways in which although early modern people fully understood that conception required women and men to be attentive to their own health, there were very different ways of writing about this bodily experience.

Given fertility was interwoven into preventative healthcare and the work of feeding, healing and caring for family members, evidence for men taking treatment might be hidden behind generic medicines that strengthened, enlivened, warmed, cooled or increased appetite. It is important to remember that patients and practitioners co-created records of medical practice, and therefore we cannot be sure whether it was a practitioner, patient or both who were uncomfortable about writing about male infertility in blatant terms. Did thirty-two-year-old Roger Jeorge of Croydon, who was recorded as having ‘Diz’, or disease and was judged to be ‘full of collor [choler] in the stomacke & belly & head syde’, actually come because he was concerned about childlessness?Footnote ¹³⁴ Other generic remedies like one in Lister’s book ‘ffor to make a man haue an appetite for his meate’, might have been used for multiple reasons – sometimes for increasing appetite and strength, and at other times to increase libido and strength of erection.Footnote ¹³⁵ A remedy that purported to kill ‘heate within a man’ when ‘hee goeth to bedd’ might have served multiple purposes.Footnote ¹³⁶ It could be to facilitate recovery from disease caused by excessive heat, or to rectify a humoral imbalance between spouses. Could a corollary of a ‘Cooling Purge’ or a remedy to ‘comfort the stomack & expel urine’ used to promote health be the ability to produce lusty infants?Footnote ¹³⁷

When commercial drugs became available towards the end of the seventeenth century, they were often marketed as generically increasing bodily health but the proof of their efficacy was often that the patient went on to have children.Footnote ¹³⁸ This again meant that people could take a medicine intended to increase fertility without advertising the fact. By having a broad use, such drugs not only increased their potential market but further entrenched the idea that living well led to fruitfulness.Footnote ¹³⁹ Folded into Blanch Hooker’s personal recipe book was a printed advertisement for a ‘Prolifick Elixir’ that promised to be the ‘highest, richest and most powerful Cordial in Nature’ and the ‘only true and infallible Cure for Barrenness in Women and Impotency in Men in the Universe’, recommended by ‘Thousands’.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Lady Ann Fanshawe’s recipe book similarly contained an advertisement for ‘Dr Anderon’s, or, The Famous Scots Pills’ that treated ‘migrains, pains in the head, stomach or bellies of men, deafnes, weak or Blear’d Eyes’ and barrenness. The pills could assist ‘all Ages, Seasons and Hours’ by men, women, children and even women who were pregnant.Footnote ¹⁴¹ One of the most popular and famous of such medicines was Daffy’s Elixir, described as a ‘most excellent preservative of Man-kind’, which reduced all ‘Extreams unto an equal Temper’.Footnote ¹⁴² Helping to balance humours, the medicine promised to remove all plethora of ills. Daffy’s pamphlet told readers the medicine could cure stone and gravel in the reins; languishing and melancholy; and surfeits and the fits of the mother and spleen – all, as we have seen, linked to conception for men and women. It promised to cure green sickness, improve the colour of the face and smell of one’s breath and make the body generally ‘lusty’. It was further useful for ‘Wet Nurses, cleansing their bloud, and rendering their Milk wholsom[e] and nutritive to the sucking Babe’. ‘Finally’, the medicine ‘exalts the Genderative virtue, and restores Radical Moisture, cleansing and strengthening the Seminal vessels in both Sexes’. Daffy’s Elixir was one of several proprietary medicines that made the transition from medical advertising and print into manuscript culture. Notably, Anne de Lisle and Letitia Mytton’s collections contain the remedy.Footnote ¹⁴³ These drugs suggest that efforts to conceive and increase fertility sat easily within other daily practices of procuring humoral balance, and the methodological difficulties of finding evidence of treatment when families were so keen not to mention it or actively conceal traces of these practices.

Looking at records of medical practice reveals that managing fertility was something that families sought not to broadcast far and wide, owing to the deep embarrassment that childlessness brought. Family correspondence was littered with gossip about who had conceived and when, we find that mothers went to medical appointments with their children, and families also collectively systematised knowledge about fertility in their recipe books. Despite this, there are notable silences in this record. Infertility was uncomfortable for families in a multitude of ways. It raised the possibility that, like Mary Rich later thought, God would prevent the perpetuation of the family and its name. Another explanation was the couple was a bad match. Even more damning and troubling was that the husband had weak seed or suffered from impotence. All of these separate explanations brought with them the threat of domestic disorder and public shame for the family. It is no surprise then that early modern people sought to represent women and their wombs as the reason for slow conception before any other explanation and the reason why they were keen to employ treatments that did not make male frailty too obvious.

Conclusion

Conception was meant to be quick and easy. When getting pregnant took a long time, did not happen or couples had sickly infants, it was not just spouses that were disappointed but the family and community around them lamented too. When the fifth Earl of Dorset’s wife, Frances, was pregnant in 1655, the Earl of Northampton praised her ‘vertuous qualitie of Multiplying the world’.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ For elite families, this is exactly what generation promised: the perpetuation of their world and privilege. Making babies was inimical to personal and familial reputation, to the practice of piety, a source of gossip, and the mechanism of inheritance and lineage and thus sat at the apex of the concerns of individuals, communities, families, the state and Church.

A historian examining the paperwork that families kept alongside printed conduct and medical literature and casebooks might be inclined to agree with the chorus of medical authors that all early modern men and women wanted to have lots of children. The lifecycle of meeting, courting, marrying and conceiving that Marsh’s Ten Pleasures claimed was universal left no space for those who were equivocal getting pregnant. Getting pregnant out of wedlock could lead to complete isolation from community, family and employment as well as prosecution for women.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ In the same way as godliness was thought to beget further blessings, sin was thought to lead to more sin. Unmarried mothers were common characters in sensationalist pamphlets such as the 1614 Deeds Against Nature, which relayed the attempts of a young woman, Martha Scambler, to make ‘away with the fru[i]t of her own womb’, first through an unsuccessful abortion and then by delivering the baby into the privy, or toilet, and neglecting it.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ A law in 1624 made unmarried mothers automatically guilty and likely to be hanged if the body of an infant was found and they had not acknowledged the pregnancy, even if they claimed to have suffered from a miscarriage or the child had been stillborn.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As a result, we know much more about these women than we do about married and wealthier women who sought to terminate pregnancies. Some historians have suggested that remedies in printed and manuscript recipe books that provoked the ‘resumption’ of menstruation may have been used covertly as abortifacients.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ But while this information would no doubt have been available to women, it is impossible to estimate the frequency with which people made and took these cures, let alone the intended use. Menstruating regularly was central to women’s health in the period,Footnote ¹⁴⁹ and thus, resuming one’s ‘flowers’ may have been simply a way to increase overall health.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ As we have seen with fertility, the boundaries between regimen, health and fruitfulness were hazy in the period, often deliberately so.

Glimpses of married couples not welcoming conception are very difficult to find because expressing regret for God’s doing was liturgically and socially condemned, and therefore not likely to have been written about. Alice Thornton reflected after the birth of her eighth child, Joyce, in 1665, that the joy of being pregnant was ‘accompanied with thorny Caires & troubles, & more to me then others’ because she was worried she would not survive the delivery.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Mary Rich, the Countess of Warwick, bore two children, a boy and a girl, in the two years after getting married to Charles Rich but decided not to have any more children. Their daughter Elizabeth died when she was fifteen months old and their son, Charles died when she was thirty-eight in 1647, ushering an intensification of her puritan faith.Footnote ¹⁵² Mary thought that the death of her children and lack of an heir was ‘justice’ for their ungratefulness in not wanting any more children.Footnote ¹⁵³ She explained her reticence to have more children as being provoked by ‘great vanety’ and a ‘proude opinion’. Her husband was worried they would be unable to afford to care for a big brood.

The normative model in which a man and woman got married, immediately got pregnant and had a household of healthy, beautiful children that continued the family name, religion and inheritance rarely fit with the reality of the ambiguity and difficulty of fertility. In their paperwork, family members were keen to represent themselves as perpetually fruitful in all manner of ways that served political, spiritual and social hierarchies and to cement their own place as a ‘branch’ on the ‘vine’, as Hooke termed it. Making the perpetuation of the family line seem stable and continuous despite missteps and absences relied not only narrativising to flatten these embarrassing procreative lulls but also husbands and wives taking on substantial medical work. Whilst women consulting practitioners, self-diagnosing, seeking advice, moderating their conduct and taking medicines sat comfortably alongside a model of sacrificial motherhood, it jarred with prevailing ideals of masculinity. Virility ought not to be forced, cajoled or manufactured.