Reproductive Rights, childbearing and motherhood anxieties in Early Medieval Ireland

Abstract

This paper falls in the fields of history of women and medical history discussing Early Irish Medieval legal texts, from the seventh and eighth centuries, written in a Christian milieu both in vernacular and Hiberno-Latin. It analyses information concerned with reproductive and sexual rights. This paper has three parts: the first analyses vernacular texts ruling the rights of married couples to produce heirs. Early Irish vernacular texts list situations that would give the right to spouses to divorce their partner in case they could not have children together. The second part studies texts that discusses the right of pregnant women to access food, and of breastfeeding babies to be accompanied by their mother and maids in case of need of medical care, and if taken out of his own home for this reason. The third part investigates ecclesiastical canons against couples procreating outside wedlock and/or bound to religious vows. The paper highlights the anxieties women may suffered to produce children when their families decided that their future was to be wives and mothers, and also the anxieties they suffered when they produced illegitimate children, suffering social shame, causing abortion, leading to painful emotions of loss and guilt, and often to the loss of their own lives.