THE COUPLES AND THEIR REPRODUCTIVE HISTORIES

FOR MANY ROYAL COUPLES in the Middle Ages, concerns about fertility and experiences of reproductive anxiety have gone unstudied. This is because in many cases, such experiences do not fit the limited, medicalized view of “infertility” as the inability to conceive a child. Instead, reproductive difficulties encompassed a broader spectrum of anxieties: delayed conception, pregnancy loss, long intervals between births, and the related experience of high infant mortality that left couples without children. These experiences, scattered across chronicles, administrative records, and devotional practices, reveal that reproductive pressure was a fundamental political reality that shaped royal behaviour, diplomatic relationships, and the performance of medieval kingship and queenship, epitomizing Gayle Davis and Tracy Loughran’s observation that “it can seem that infertility is almost everywhere in history, often unrecognized even though it is in full view.”

This book focuses on eight royal case studies from thirteenthand fourteenth-century England and Scotland (Table 1). The indications that these royal couples encountered some kind of reproductive anxiety or difficulty, whether mentioned by their contemporaries or pieced together from other documentary sources for their lives, suggest that pressure for fertility was a significant aspect of medieval monarchy. When examined together, these couples shed light on experiences of infertility. Rather than viewing successful reproduction as evidence of fertility ease, this study demonstrates that even royal couples with fertility “success” navigated complex landscapes of reproductive uncertainty and employed strategies to manage both their bodies and public perceptions of their fertility. This chapter introduces the couples in question and establishes the methodology for including them in this study. It then considers the existing scholarship on these couples, demonstrating how fertility concerns have only been recognized in contexts where couples never produced children—thereby missing the broader story of reproductive anxiety as a feature of medieval royal life.