The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

by Michael Pye

In Italian cities, these laws were aimed at women for the most convoluted reason: their clothes cost

so much that men couldn’t marry, which was leading to sodomy, so fashion was distracting everyone from the serious business of replenishing the population of cities like Florence.

Fathering a child was an offence against the Kontor’s rules, but since the only penalty was to provide a barrel of beer for everyone else, it also sounds like something to celebrate.

Something had to be done to hide pregnancy, to stop pregnancy, to avoid getting pregnant in the first place or to give the child away very quickly. There were the usual expedients: anal sex, oral sex, the medieval speciality of separating out the male and the female orgasms so the male seed and the female seed could not mix, which everyone knew was required for pregnancy. Courting couples were allowed heavy petting and by the time anyone was printing books about such things, which in this case is 1637, there were sometimes healthy outdoor games: boys throwing the girls into the sea off a Dutch beach and then carefully drying them

off, which was followed in very short order by walks in the nearby woods.55 There was also coitus interruptus, but that required, as the sixteenth-century memoirist Pierre de Bourdeilles, Seigneur de Brantôme, put it, being careful and watching ‘for the time of the tidal wave when it was coming’.

Abortion was wrong, contraception was wrong, the true purpose, and only excuse, for any sexual act was to get babies; and yet there are manuscripts written in ninth-century German monasteries which give detailed, even plausible, instructions for making the menses flow. One includes parsley, the coarse-leaved hartwart, rue, black pepper, lovage, thyme and celery