Medieval women managed their periods with folded strips of linen, moss, and other absorbent materials, much as you might expect given what was available. But beyond the practical side, menstruation in the medieval world was shaped by religious stigma, humoral medicine, and herbal traditions that influenced how women experienced their cycles for centuries.
What Women Actually Used
The most common approach was simple: rags made from linen or wool, folded and placed between the thighs or fastened to an undergarment. The word “on the rag,” still used as slang today, likely traces back to this practice. Written instructions from the period describe how to fold fabric into a usable pad shape, and these cloths would have been washed and reused.
For a long time, historians had little physical proof of this. Textile fragments found at archaeological sites were typically interpreted as scraps of clothing, packaging, or building material. That changed with a recent discovery in Tønsberg, Norway, where archaeologist Sunniva Wilberg Halvorsen reexamined textile finds from a latrine dating to the 1200s. Among the fragments were torn, folded, and pleated strips of fabric that looked nothing like ordinary cloth remnants. One tested positive for blood, and fly larvae found nearby had fed on human blood based on isotope analysis. The shape of several textiles suggested they were either pads or bands used to hold a pad in place.
Moss was also found in that same latrine. It would have been a practical choice: naturally absorbent and mildly antiseptic, useful for soaking up blood and preventing stains. Sheep’s wool, leaves, and grass were likely used as well, depending on what was locally available and what a woman could afford. Wealthier women with access to good linen probably had a more comfortable experience than peasant women making do with rougher materials.
Why Doctors Thought Periods Were Essential
Medieval medicine ran on humoral theory, inherited from the ancient Greek physician Galen. The body was understood as a balance of four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. Too much of any one caused illness. Bloodletting, cupping, and leeching were standard treatments for all sorts of conditions, because draining excess blood was thought to restore balance.
Menstruation fit neatly into this framework. Physicians viewed it as the body’s natural way of purging excess blood, a kind of built-in bloodletting that kept women healthy. A missed or irregular period wasn’t just a reproductive concern; it was a sign that dangerous excess blood was building up with nowhere to go. This is why medieval medical texts devoted so much attention to restoring menstrual flow. Suppressed periods were treated as a serious medical problem requiring intervention.
The language itself reflected this thinking. Medieval texts often called menstruation “the flowers,” drawing an analogy to plants: just as flowers precede fruit, menstrual flow was seen as a precursor to fertility. Restoring a woman’s “flowers” was a common goal of herbal medicine.
Herbal Remedies for Pain and Irregular Cycles
Women didn’t just endure cramps and irregular periods without trying to do something about them. Herbal medicine was the primary tool, and certain plants show up repeatedly across medieval texts from different parts of Europe.
Mugwort was one of the most widely used. A ninth-century poem called it “the mother of herbs,” and it was reputed to cleanse the womb, ease childbirth, and restore menstrual flow. Various parts of the plant were prepared as teas or decoctions and taken for painful periods. It appeared in medical traditions from Italy to India to Vietnam, suggesting a very long history of use for menstrual complaints.
Pennyroyal, a member of the mint family, was another common remedy. It had culinary uses as well, making it easy to access. Other plants used across medieval herbal traditions included saffron, coriander, and cumin, all of which appear in texts addressing women’s menstrual health. These were typically prepared as infusions or decoctions and taken by mouth. Some of these herbs, particularly pennyroyal in large doses, could be genuinely dangerous, causing liver damage or worse. The line between “restoring the flowers” and inducing an abortion was often blurry in medieval herbal texts, and some of these remedies likely served both purposes.
The Church and the “Curse of Eve”
Religion added a heavy layer of shame to an already difficult experience. In medieval Christian Europe, menstruation was widely framed as the “Curse of Eve,” a punishment inherited from the fall in the Garden of Eden. This wasn’t just folk belief. It was reinforced by church authorities and scholastic writers, particularly during the thirteenth century when figures like Albertus Magnus wrote influential texts on natural philosophy and the body.
The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 helped systematize many church teachings, and the period that followed saw menstrual taboos become more formally entrenched in Christian thought. The core idea was a contrast between the “purity” of the male body and the perceived impurity of menstrual blood. Women were seen as physically and emotionally compromised by their cycles. In some interpretations, menstruating women were discouraged from taking communion or entering sacred spaces, though enforcement of these restrictions varied widely by time and place.
Classical Greek and Roman texts, rediscovered and translated during this era, reinforced many of these attitudes. Ancient writers like Pliny the Elder had claimed menstrual blood could sour wine, kill crops, and rust iron. When these texts circulated alongside church teachings, the result was a dense web of stigma that treated menstruation as both spiritually polluting and physically dangerous to others.
How Often Women Actually Menstruated
One important detail that often gets overlooked: medieval women likely had far fewer periods over their lifetimes than women today. Poorer nutrition and lower body fat meant many girls started menstruating later than the modern average. Once they did, frequent pregnancies and extended breastfeeding (often lasting two years or more per child) suppressed menstruation for long stretches. Periods of famine or food scarcity could also interrupt cycles.
A woman who married in her mid-teens and had multiple children might spend much of her reproductive years either pregnant or nursing, with relatively few menstrual cycles in between. This doesn’t mean periods were rare or unimportant, but it does mean the practical burden of managing them was somewhat lighter than it would be for a modern woman who menstruates monthly for roughly 40 years.
The Silence in the Historical Record
One reason this topic fascinates people is how little was written about it directly. Medieval texts on medicine discuss menstruation in clinical terms, focusing on when it stops or becomes excessive. But the everyday logistics of managing a period, what women used, how they washed their cloths, how they handled heavy days while working in the fields, are almost entirely absent from the written record. Most medieval authors were men, and the domestic details of women’s lives rarely made it onto parchment.
That gap is why archaeological finds like the Tønsberg textiles matter so much. They offer physical evidence for practices that women clearly maintained for centuries but that nobody thought worth writing down. The clustering of textile fragments in one corner of the latrine even hints at gendered patterns of use within shared spaces. For the most part, though, we’re left to piece together a picture from scattered references, herbal manuals, and the rare physical artifact, a reminder that the most universal human experiences are sometimes the hardest to find in the historical record.