Medieval Sources and Approaches to Infertility and Marginalization

Several historians have highlighted sources that suggest infertility could lead to stigma and isolation in the Middle Ages. For example, Sylvie Laurent discussed how infertility was viewed as a divine punishment for the couple’s sins.Footnote ¹⁸ In support of this, she quoted an early- to mid-fourteenth-century preaching handbook by John Bromyard, a Dominican friar based in Herefordshire. Bromyard described at length how God had created marriage for the purpose of having children, but he went on to ask why ‘many’ (multi) married couples remained childless. His answer was that many people married not primarily in order to have children, but for other reasons, such as money or lust.Footnote ¹⁹ He argued that these people did not use the sacrament of marriage as God intended, and so God withheld the blessing of children from them. For ‘if married people intended the same goal as God intends, and used this sacrament ordained by Him reverently, it would seem to be amazing, in fact almost irrational and almost impossible, that they would be denied [marriage’s] lawful goal and the blessing of children.’Footnote ²⁰

Because of the way it links infertility with sin and lust, this passage has been discussed by scholars interested in the history of contraception, even though Bromyard does not explicitly mention birth control as one of the sins he had in mind. His argument is hard to follow in places, and the various possible interpretations in relation to birth control have been discussed helpfully by Peter Biller.Footnote ²¹ The thrust, though, is to link childlessness within marriage with God’s displeasure and with sinful behaviour. Bromyard’s remarks thus suggest that couples experiencing infertility might find clergy (and perhaps laypeople too) viewing them negatively, as having done something to forfeit God’s blessing of children.

Another scholar who emphasized the social stigma and marginalization that could result from infertility was Ronald Finucane, in his 1997 study of children in medieval miracle narratives. In a short discussion of fertility miracles, he commented that, in cases of infertility, ‘the couple well knew what to expect from kin and neighbours: sterility brought shame and disappointment.’Footnote ²² Finucane cites as an example of this a miracle recorded at the shrine of St Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, in around 1300, as part of his canonization process. A woman came to Cantilupe’s shrine, asking for a child: many people thought she was infertile and she held this ‘as if it were a reproach’ (quasi pro opprobrio). After visiting the shrine, she had twins.Footnote ²³

Regina Toepfer has recently argued that this type of marginalization is embedded in one narrative strand of the Bible, which told of a series of infertile women who went on to conceive special children miraculously, including Sarah, the wife of Abraham; Rachel, the wife of Jacob; Hannah, the mother of Samuel; and Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist.Footnote ²⁴ The stories of Rachel (Genesis 29–30) and Hannah (1 Samuel 1) include the most detail about the women’s emotional responses to their situation. Both women’s husbands had children by another wife, and the Bible talks about the women’s sadness at their infertility, as well as how Hannah was mocked by her husband’s fertile wife, Peninnah. Eventually, of course, both women went on to conceive special children, and Rachel is recorded as saying: ‘God has taken away my reproach [in the Latin Vulgate text, opprobrium]’ (Genesis 30: 23; NRSV).

There are, therefore, medieval sources that place infertile people on the margins of the Christian community, depicting them as feeling reproached (in the Cantilupe miracle) or (in Bromyard’s case) as being potentially sinful, and there were biblical models for presenting things this way. However, these instances do not tell the full story. From Finucane’s account, we have a relatively brief account of one miracle. The story may or may not be representative of wider experiences: other accounts of fertility miracles often do not mention this type of shame or marginalization. There are also signs that the anonymous author of the Cantilupe miracle modelled his reference to the woman’s reproach on the biblical text: the phrase quasi pro opprobrio recalls the word used by Rachel in Genesis 30: 23. This does not necessarily mean the reproach was not real, but it suggests that the author was echoing the Bible text to present the experience of infertility in this way. Moreover, his emphasis on the woman’s shame and sadness served to make the eventual birth of twins even more miraculous.

Similarly, John Bromyard’s is only one voice. I have not found other treatises on preaching that suggest infertility was a punishment for acting against God’s purpose for marriage. I have argued elsewhere, in relation to magic, that Bromyard’s views were often stricter than those found in other works on preaching and confession.Footnote ²⁵ There is as yet no detailed study of his thought on sexuality or marriage which can confirm whether his views on these topics were equally severe, but it is at least possible that with infertility, too, he took a harsher view, and expressed it more forcefully, than many of his clerical contemporaries.Footnote ²⁶

In fact, as other scholars have pointed out, attitudes to infertility are likely to have been complex. Jean-Claude Bologne, in one of the earliest studies to look at medieval infertility in detail, pointed to sources and genres where stigma and marginalization were prominent themes, notably in romance literature. Nonetheless, he argued for a diversity of views, pointing to the narratives of the birth of the Virgin Mary among other sources.Footnote ²⁷ This diversity of views should not be surprising since, as the work of Moss and Baden and Toepfer highlights, the Bible, which provided many models for thinking about infertility in religious terms, did not speak with a single voice on the matter.Footnote ²⁸

Even within marriage, messages about the value of having children might be qualified. On the one hand, there was an expectation that marriage would result in children, and contemporaries expressed anxiety about royal and elite marriages which did not produce male heirs.Footnote ²⁹ On the other hand, marriage theology and law, drawing on St Augustine, but much developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, viewed reproduction as an important justification for marriage, and for sex within marriage, but not the only justification. Marriage was also a way of giving men and women a legitimate outlet for their sexual desire, and a sacrament that represented the love between Christ and the Church.Footnote ³⁰ Therefore, even people who knew themselves to be infertile could still legitimately marry and have sexual intercourse. For example, Peter Lombard, in a hugely influential textbook on theology, noted that some couples ‘because of defect of age or some other cause, are not able to engender children,’ but this did not invalidate their marriages.Footnote ³¹ Thus, despite the existence of sources that spoke of marginalization, from a legal and theological point of view, the marriages of couples experiencing infertility were still valid and indissoluble.

These voices are disparate, because they think about childlessness and infertility in the context of larger discussions of other issues, such as marriage law and practice, or as one among many miracle narratives. They do not add up to a consistent view: for example, the fact that infertility did not invalidate a marriage does not mean that childlessness within marriage was regarded as a positive thing for – or by – most people. Nor can we assume that biblical narratives of miraculous conception offered comfort to people who never went on to have the children they prayed for. However, this inconsistency is itself important. There were different strands to medieval churchmen’s writing on infertility, drawing on earlier texts which themselves offered different models. These models might prompt later medieval writers to present the experience of infertility differently, depending on their audiences and interests. We can see this in late medieval English retellings of the conception and birth of the Virgin Mary.

The Birth of the Virgin: Marginalization in the Pre-Christian Past?

The story of Mary’s birth to her parents, Anne and Joachim, is modelled on the Old and New Testament stories about special children like Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Samuel and John the Baptist, all of whom were born after their parents had been infertile for long periods. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, a hugely popular collection of saints’ lives compiled in the mid- to late thirteenth century which survives in hundreds of manuscripts, formed the source for many later medieval versions. It was written to provide material for preachers, but by the end of the thirteenth century, it was also being read by elite laypeople, so its message could reach lay audiences both directly (through reading) and indirectly (through preaching).Footnote ³² Jacobus’s account of the nativity of the Virgin Mary told how Anne and Joachim, who were virtuous and charitable, had been married for twenty years without having a child. One day, Joachim went to make an offering at the Temple in Jerusalem, but the priest publicly humiliated and excluded him because of his childlessness:

Instead of going home, Joachim went to live with his shepherds, and his disappearance caused Anne to assume he was dead. Later, an angel appeared to Joachim and told him that he and Anne would have a child. The angel also said the priest had been wrong to denounce Joachim, and offered a very different perspective on the couple’s infertility: ‘I have seen how you were put to shame, and heard the reproach of childlessness wrongly put upon you. God punishes not nature but sin, and therefore, when he closes a woman’s womb, he does this in order to open it miraculously later on.’Footnote ³⁴ The angel went on to list as examples several infertile women in the Bible who later had special children: Sarah, Rachel, the anonymous mother of Samson, and Hannah.

Here it was the man, not the woman, who was depicted as being excluded and humiliated because of infertility. Jacobus later described Anne weeping, but in his version of the story, she was said to be weeping because her husband had disappeared, ‘not knowing where her husband had gone,’ rather than explicitly because she was childless.Footnote ³⁵ Here the Golden Legend’s retelling differed from the original account in the Protevangelium of James, and also from the Latin version in the Pseudo-Gospel of Matthew, both of which described how Anne quarrelled with her slave, who told her that God had made her infertile. Then, upset, Anne lamented her situation, comparing herself to the birds and other creatures in the natural world that had offspring. She was then visited by an angel who told her she would conceive.Footnote ³⁶ Instead, Jacobus’s version is closer to another popular Latin version, the Nativity of Mary, which omitted the scenes featuring Anne and instead included the angel’s speech to Joachim.Footnote ³⁷

Jacobus’s version may simply reflect his sources, but it may also represent a choice to tell the story in this way: he drew on a wide range of hagiographical texts when compiling the Golden Legend, so he may well have known of the alternative episodes featuring Anne and chosen to omit them.Footnote ³⁸ If so, it is difficult to know why. He often abbreviated his sources, boiling a story down to its essentials and focusing on episodes that would provide engaging material for sermons.Footnote ³⁹ Perhaps he felt that Anne’s reaction was not necessary to the story. Perhaps he also preferred the clear message the angel delivered to Joachim that infertility was not the result of sin. Whatever the reason, the story, as it was transmitted influentially by the Golden Legend, focused on the exclusion of a man.

This is revealing for what it suggests about the gendering of infertility. It is often assumed that infertility in the Middle Ages was viewed as a problem that lay in the woman. This assumption fits much of our evidence, but it obscures substantial differences between different situations and types of source material. For example, male infertility was recognized by medical writers as a possibility, although most of the time it was probably not the first explanation suggested by either doctors or their clients.Footnote ⁴⁰ Treatment could be a different issue from causation: Joan Cadden, working on learned Latin medical texts, has argued that these works often presented women as the focus of treatment, but recipes for medicines did sometimes expect men to play a role in the treatment alongside their wives.Footnote ⁴¹ The Golden Legend reminds us that marginalization is a separate issue again from causation or treatment, and so experiences of infertility might be complex and gendered in different ways.

How might this story relate to the actual experiences of men and women in the Middle Ages? On the one hand, the story of Anne and Joachim was set in the distant, pre-Christian past, and the Jewish priest was shown to be wrong to have excluded Joachim. The story also described a case of miraculous fertility which led to the birth of a unique child. It did not necessarily mean God would act like this in all cases, and so offer reassurance to lay audiences. On the other hand, in Jacobus de Voragine’s version, the angel speaks in universal terms. He says that when God closes a woman’s womb, he does this in order that he may later open it miraculously. He does not say this is what God is doing in Joachim’s case; he says this is what God does. The angel’s message is also clear: Joachim and Anne are not being punished by God, and other virtuous people have experienced infertility. The priest was wrong to exclude Joachim.

We can explore some of the possible ways this story related to experience in one context – late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England – by looking at some of the retellings in Middle English vernacular sermons and saints’ lives. These often drew on the Golden Legend, but they also edited the text, cutting sections, adding extra details, and incorporating information from other sources; although the exact transmission of this material is often hard to trace. They were written at a time when increasing numbers of laypeople were reading devotional works in the vernacular, and when the cult of St Anne was growing in popularity. Gail McMurray Gibson and Elizabeth L’Estrange have argued that Anne was sometimes used as a role model for late medieval men and women who were expected to produce children (appearing in books of hours, for example), and have shown how those who were seeking to have a child sometimes appealed to Anne for help.Footnote ⁴²

The later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were also a time when fertility and childlessness within marriage are likely to have been a prominent concern. The immediate context for the Middle English retellings was the period after the Black Death, which had led to a catastrophic fall in population. Demographic studies of England have shown that population growth remained low until at least the mid-fifteenth century, due to high mortality rates caused by repeated outbreaks of plague. This had consequences for the fertility of families: in the second half of the fourteenth century, around twenty-nine per cent of landowners had no child to succeed them and, even after the 1450s, when the population began to recover, around eighteen per cent of landowners left no child.Footnote ⁴³ These figures do not just include those left childless by infertility, but also high rates of infant and child mortality, but anxiety about being left childless must have been real. At the same time, there were prominent cases of royal childlessness: Richard II and his wife Anne of Bohemia had no children, while Henry VI and his wife Margaret of Anjou had been married for eight years before a son was born.Footnote ⁴⁴ In this context, the many vernacular retellings of Anne and Joachim’s story might tell us something about the concerns of their lay readers and listeners, as well as the clergy who wrote them.

One of the most widely copied and influential sermon collections from late medieval England was the Festial of John Mirk, a collection of sermons for saints’ feast days probably written in the 1380s. Mirk was a priest and Augustinian canon, who wrote to provide sermons for parish priests to use with their congregations.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Festial was widely copied, surviving in twenty-two complete manuscripts, plus an additional later revised version in four manuscripts, and further manuscripts containing one or more individual sermons. It was also printed several times in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁶ Evidence suggests that some manuscripts of the Festial were owned by its target audience of parish priests, and so, indirectly, its content may have reached their lay congregations.Footnote ⁴⁷ A few other manuscripts also contain Latin works for better-educated priests, while a few again might have had lay readers.Footnote ⁴⁸

Mirk includes two sermons on Mary’s conception, one for the feast of the conception of the Virgin and one for the feast of her nativity. Both, like the rest of the Festial, draw heavily on the Golden Legend, but the Golden Legend’s material is divided between the two sermons, with the bulk of the account of Mary’s conception falling into Mirk’s sermon on the conception of Mary.Footnote ⁴⁹ However, Mirk’s editing of his source material produced some interesting differences between the Festial and the Golden Legend. Joachim’s response to the priest’s rebuke changes slightly. The encounter with the priest – Mirk calls him a ‘bishop’ – follows the Golden Legend quite closely, but after being excluded, Joachim is ashamed, and weeps.Footnote ⁵⁰ The detail of his weeping is not mentioned in the Golden Legend, but it gives a little more emphasis to Joachim’s emotional response.

There are other differences. Unlike in the Golden Legend, but as in earlier versions of the story, including the Protevangelium, Anne laments her childlessness, saying: ‘Lord, woe is me for I am barren and may have no fruit, and now, moreover, my husband is gone from me’.Footnote ⁵¹ Later, after being told by the angel that she will have a child, Anne thanks God for curing her infertility: ‘for I was a widow [thinking Joachim was dead] and now I am a wife; I was barren and now I shall have a child; I was in woe and weeping and now I shall be in joy and pleasure’.Footnote ⁵² However, Mirk omits the angel’s speech to Joachim, so there is no statement that infertility is not, in fact, God’s punishment. In this version, then, there is more emphasis on the sadness of both Anne and Joachim. Meanwhile, the ‘bishop’ is still shown to be wrong to exclude Joachim, but this is less strongly emphasized. In this way, Mirk places a subtly greater emphasis on the ways in which infertility leads to marginalization (and the emotional responses to that), without the corresponding reassurance that it can happen to virtuous people as part of God’s plan.

This emphasis on marginalization also appears in the much shorter account in Mirk’s sermon for the nativity of the Virgin. There Mirk highlighted ‘the joy and the gladness’ Anne and Joachim felt when Mary was born, but also mentions their previous marginalization: ‘by her birth, the great reproofs that they had suffered for such a long time because of hur [=her/their] barrenness were then put away, and from that time they went forth boldly among others of their lineage with worship and honour.’Footnote ⁵³ The manuscript used as a base text for the modern edition uses ‘hure’ for both ‘her’ and ‘their’, so it is unclear whether Mirk was referring to ‘her (i.e. Anne’s) barrenness’ or ‘their (i.e. Anne and Joachim’s) barrenness’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Given that Mirk’s Anne laments in his sermon for the conception of the Virgin that she is infertile, ‘her’ is perhaps more likely, but either reading is possible. Whoever was deemed to be the source of the infertility, however, the exclusion and emotional responses are presented as shared by Anne and Joachim.

Mirk’s text was not stable, and a revised version of the Festial from the early fifteenth century tells a slightly different story. This version reinserted material from the Golden Legend and other works. Susan Powell and Helen Leith Spencer have argued that the anonymous redactor was likely to have been based in a university and was probably trying to add more scholarly material to the text for an academic audience.Footnote ⁵⁵ Here, in the sermon for the conception of the Virgin, Joachim is described as ‘confused and ashamed’, but – as in the Golden Legend – he does not weep. Also following the Golden Legend, Anne does not lament her infertility, but the angel’s speech to Joachim is reinstated: God ‘sees the shame that you have because your wife Anne is barren. But I, the angel of God, am sent to comfort you. I tell you God punishes sin, but not nature.’Footnote ⁵⁶ A version of Mirk’s sermon that was less closely tied to a parish context, and to a lay audience who might encounter or experience reproductive disorders, seems to have placed fidelity to the Golden Legend above discussing the marginalization and sadness that couples might experience.

By contrast, the Speculum Sacerdotale, another set of sermons from the early fifteenth century, written (like the Festial) for parish priests, but seemingly less popular and surviving in only one manuscript, pays more attention to Anne’s feelings of exclusion.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Speculum’s sermon for the nativity of Mary includes the speech Anne makes in the Protevangelium of James and in the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew, in which she compares herself to the birds and animals who have offspring.Footnote ⁵⁸ When Joachim goes missing, Anne prays:

Here, infertility is something that marginalizes people not just in the human world, but also in comparison to the natural world, where everything produces offspring and praises God for it: everything, that is, except Anne.

Finally, the Life of St Anne, written in verse form by Osbern Bokenham, an Augustinian friar based at Clare Priory in Suffolk, speaks most clearly to the possible experience of infertility. Bokenham wrote a series of lives of female saints in English verse for several East Anglian noble and gentry women between 1443 and 1447, later copied together under the title Legends of Holy Women. These were based on the Golden Legend, but with some adaptations, as we will see. The Life of St Anne was commissioned by Katherine Denston, the wife of a wealthy Suffolk merchant named John Denston, and it speaks directly to the Denstons’ own fertility concerns. As Gail McMurray Gibson and more recently Mary Beth Long have pointed out, at the end of the poem, Bokenham asks Anne to help Katherine and John have a son (they already had a daughter, named Anne).Footnote ⁶⁰ Perhaps linked to this, as both Long and Alice Spencer have noted, Bokenham places particular emphasis on Anne’s and Joachim’s emotional responses to their infertility, following Joachim’s exclusion from the Temple.Footnote ⁶¹ He discusses Anne’s feelings first. She prays ‘with great sadness, oppressed and prostrate’.Footnote ⁶² As in the Protevangelium of James and in the Speculum Sacerdotale, she sees the birds feeding their young and laments her childlessness but, unlike in the Speculum, she accepts God’s will: ‘I thank you, lord, that you have done what pleases you with me, excluding me from the gift of your benignity: such is my lot.’Footnote ⁶³ Then the angel comes to Anne, with the news that she will conceive. However, after this, she quarrels with her maid, the maid mocks her for being childless and she weeps.Footnote ⁶⁴ This order of events is the same as in the popular Gospel of the Nativity of Mary, but Bokenham’s decision to reproduce the maid’s rebuke (not found in the Speculum Sacerdotale) underlines the stigma Anne faces, as well as her changing feelings, as they move from grief, to acceptance, to joy, and back to sadness.

In Bokenham’s retelling, Joachim also articulates his sadness and feelings of exclusion in detail.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a speech whose source I have not identified, Joachim ascribes the couple’s infertility to Anne, describing how he has ‘laboured in vain for twenty years’ and his seed has been ‘lost’.Footnote ⁶⁶ He also reflects on the shame of public exclusion and his feelings of being less of a man: ‘I lack the proof of manhood, and when men are counted I am left behind … when I think of the shame I felt when the bishop ordered me out of the temple and despised my offering, I want to mourn.’Footnote ⁶⁷ Mary Beth Long has suggested that Joachim’s shame results more from his public humiliation than from the infertility itself, and if so, this may reflect a fear of the public stigma surrounding infertility, as well as private sadness.Footnote ⁶⁸ The range of emotions and models offered in Bokenham’s retelling is thus more varied than in most other versions, talking at some length, and prominently, about both Anne and Joachim’s sadness and feelings of exclusion. This set of varied, and changing, emotions may well have been intended to resonate with a patron who was experiencing fertility challenges, and so may reflect what Bokenham perceived the experience of infertility and exclusion to be.

Within Middle English retellings of this single story, then, we find subtly different perspectives on infertility and margins. The basic message is the same: Joachim and Anne were saintly people, and God had a plan to give them a special child, but the description of their experience differs. These versions vary in how far Joachim’s treatment by the priest is criticized by the angel, and how clearly the angel states that infertility is not a divine punishment. They also vary in how far they discuss the couple’s emotional responses, with some authors giving more space to this than others. As Kristen Geaman and Mary Beth Long have noted, different authors also placed different emphasis on how far Joachim, as well as Anne, was held responsible for the couple’s infertility.Footnote ⁶⁹ Beyond the question of responsibility, however, the emotional response is also gendered in a variety of ways. In many versions of the story, it is Joachim who is described as marginalized and saddened following his public humiliation at the Temple, but only Bokenham links this to a sense that his manhood is threatened. There is more variation in how far Anne’s emotions are discussed. Bokenham – writing for a woman who was herself struggling with infertility – gives Anne’s emotions the most space. It seems likely that other versions, with a less clearly female audience in mind, regarded female responses as less important to discuss than Bokenham did.

In some cases, these changes to the narrative reflect wider changes in the text, for example in the case of the revised version of the Festial, where the redactor includes more material from the Golden Legend throughout. Here, it is not clear that there was a conscious intention to change the text’s depiction of infertility. Nonetheless, these different retellings show different authors presenting different experiences of marginalization and infertility to their audiences, and making choices among the versions of the story circulating in late medieval England. These might reflect variations not just in the sources available to them, but also in how far they wanted to acknowledge the sadness of infertile couples, and how strongly they wanted to argue that they should not be excluded. In the case of Bokenham, we can perhaps go further and suggest that acknowledging the sadness and marginalization caused by infertility might have provided comfort and reassurance to specific patrons who were experiencing reproductive difficulties.