p. 56 Thomas Raynalde 1545 Womans Booke – had no truck with outdate’how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [liced ideas about women’s bodies. In his section on the womb, he says it’s utterly wrong to think that periods are the purding or cleansing of some waste matter a female body can’t process. He challenged the logic found it Elyot’s dictionary definition, resisting the idea that periods are “evacuations” or “purgations” of waste matter, however natural. This is blood, says Raynalde, as “pure and holsum” as any other blood. How could it not be, he argues, because in pregnancy it nurtures that most precious of things, a human life. Menstrual blood replenishes itself every cycle like a “natural source, spryng, fountayne, or wel.”… ever fresh and ready in case a baby is conceived. … won’t even countenance the ‘dreames and playne dotage’, the fantasies and stupidity, of those who claim that period blood is dangerous… he means the widely circulating superstitions that menstruating women could render mirrors cloudy or spotted, or wither flowers or blight fruit in an orchard… One Tudor ‘book of secrets” (a popular ‘how-to’ genre of recipes and do-it-yourself tips) advises that if you wanted to clear your garden of “lise [lilce] and other small beastes” you could simply get a menstruating woman to walk around it and “all the vermine will fall doune deade”.
p. 248-9 “William Gouge’s 1622 conduct book, Of Domesticall Duties, is famous for its neatly nested and very quotable summary of patriarchal order: “A familie is a little Church, and a little common-wealth,” eacg governed by paternal authority which guides, protects and disciplines. Yet in his third edition, Gouge had to row back quite some distance. He said he needed to make a “just apology” to those he’d offended by the first two editions. He didn’t want them to write him off as “an hater of women”, he said…. He had set out the ‘utter-most’… of a husband’s supreme authority and a wide’s duty to obey. Some readers had interpreted these theoretical extremes as representing how things sgould work in everyday life and thought him completely unreasonable and impractical. In the preface to his third edition, Gouge thus tried to introduce some nuance… A husband, though he had total dominance in theory, ought in practice to make his wide ‘a joint governor of the family with himself’.
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