Margaery's Moon Tea

[Lost Melnibonean]

2 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

The whole problem is that the middle ages is a long time prior to the first millenium and almost another half millenia after the first. And a lot of views change from this to that to this again. And if we're talking Europe - well that was a constant chnageable patchwork plaid of duchies, baronies and earldoms, some under a church administration, others not. You had wars between bishops and dukes over territory, so the church wasn't this all legal power, and laws and views varied from territory to territory and lord to lord. The church's power only became strong enough to pursue people legally all over Europe in the 16th century, when Europe became more a set of empires and emperors backed the pope. But that's not the middle ages anymore.

There wasn't even a universal agreement and law what marriage was until the 12th century, or that a priest was to be present to legalize it.

What we can say overall over tha long time and various legal situations is that the religious view was that sex was only meant for procreation and that performing certain sexual acts or taking stuff to prevent conception was a sin. And yet, someone who ran to be elected pope wrote manuscripts that included all the apothecary knowledge of the time to prevent conception (anti-conception) or to help the menses to flow. In other words, if you skipped a period because you were pregnant and took tansy, you had performed an abortion, but as far as anybody else knew had just helped your menstruational cycle. The literature also shows disagreement from the same author, depending on the case.The records show that abortion was rarely a crime any administration tried to pursue, and if they did for mild punishments only.

Heck, the link I provide talks about a trial for a woman who had committed "infanticide" (drowned the baby after it was born) - she was found not guilty, for it was her body and her child and she was free to do as she wished with it. Sounds like she was not married, and thus might have been a prostitute. If she had been married, the child would be her husband's property, not hers.

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/12/birth-control-and-abortion-in-the-middle-ages/

I would submit that Westerosi "law" most resembles law in medieval England. The development of US law has more in common with English law than the development of continental European law. Which clearly proves that Margaery was using the moon tea for...

[Ygrain]

7 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

Heck, the link I provide talks about a trial for a woman who had committed "infanticide" (drowned the baby after it was born) - she was found not guilty, for it was her body and her child and she was free to do as she wished with it. Sounds like she was not married, and thus might have been a prostitute. If she had been married, the child would be her husband's property, not hers.

http://www.medievalists.net/2013/12/birth-control-and-abortion-in-the-middle-ages/

The woman is not to be punished by any means. And this is so because she bore a baby boy and had her own right to him. Thus, she may kill him and make him perish, for everyone is free to do with what is his, or hers, that which he, or she, pleases to do. (Brno, Moravia, 1353)

Interesting. I'd like to do some digging for theoriginal source, though.

[sweetsunray]

7 hours ago, Lost Melnibonean said:

I would submit that Westerosi "law" most resembles law in medieval England. The development of US law has more in common with English law than the development of continental European law. Which clearly proves that Margaery was using the moon tea for...

You're shifting goalposts, because the picture you painted of fanatical anti-abortionists in the middle ages was incorrect. You projected the Christian religious views of our age and their might in law from the modern age onwards (15th century) because of religious wars onto the middle ages. You made a very understandable common mistake there.

As for medieval England: if you check the last link I provided, then it seems that only a significant amount of anti-abortion trials were held in Germany, not England. And the whole baronies patchwork plaid also applies to England for the most part of the middle ages.

As for homicide: it includes unintentional manslaughter, whether we use commonwealth definition or not, and the 12th century document says "lesser" than homicide.

All that said, if George wants the HS to go anti-abortion on Margaery, he could do so. I doubt he will.

[Lost Melnibonean]

3 hours ago, sweetsunray said:

You're shifting goalposts, because the picture you painted of fanatical anti-abortionists in the middle ages was incorrect. You projected the Christian religious views of our age and their might in law from the modern age onwards (15th century) because of religious wars onto the middle ages. You made a very understandable common mistake there.

As for medieval England: if you check the last link I provided, then it seems that only a significant amount of anti-abortion trials were held in Germany, not England. And the whole baronies patchwork plaid also applies to England for the most part of the middle ages.

As for homicide: it includes unintentional manslaughter, whether we use commonwealth definition or not, and the 12th century document says "lesser" than homicide.

All that said, if George wants the HS to go anti-abortion on Margaery, he could do so. I doubt he will.

By definitionn homicide includes any killing of a human being from murder to negligent homicide and even justifiable homicide. 

My intention was not to paint a picture of nonexistent fanatical anti abortionism in medieval England, but simply to point out that the intentional was considered a criminal offense of a lower degree. If you set aside our disagreement over the definition of homicide and read the post where I first raised the point, I think you'll see what I mean. 

[The Dragon Demands]

Abortion/contraception were generally frowned upon in the Middle Ages.  Severity of punishment or even *enforcement* of such punishment was quite variable, however, and entire books of academic scholarship continue to analyze the specifics.  

In general, however, most women in the Middle Ages wanted to have as many children as possible - this is a society in which infant mortality was very high.  Peasant women needed as many children as possible to help with farm work or house work; nobles wanted as many children as possible to ensure their lineage survived (if you had only one heir, they might randomly die from common diseases).  

So, broadly, the only women who regularly practiced contraception/abortion were prostitutes.  Much of the research on medieval attitudes towards abortion/contraception has had to focus on court records and reports about prostitutes, or court records criticizing the contraception/abortion practices in brothels, which were often handed down from one group of women to the newcomers.  There probably were apothaceries and the like dealing in such chemicals (woods-witches, not maesters, essentially), but the effectiveness is variable.  Everything from "wear a charm on a necklace and you won't get pregnant" (not very effective) to "mix these herbs into a potion and the chemical is a contraceptive/abortive drug (some of the surviving recipes which have been recorded are in fact effective chemical ingredients).

So it's a broad topic.

Quote

In his book The Criminalization of Abortion in the West: Its Origins in Medieval Law, Wolfgang Muller notes that the medieval thinkers had differing ideas

Prof. Muller?  Oh I took one of his courses a few years back, he's nice.  I didn't take his medieval law course, unfortunately, just one of the more general ones (my paper was on German adaptations of French Arthurian romantic epics - all of which I read in translation of course); due to course rotation I took the "Medieval Women and Gender" course that the department head was teaching.  But the position they all had is that things were actually kind of variable.  

A major point I will stress is that a failure of prior historians is that they used to believe everything they read in their primary sources at face value; they thought every single papal declaration was carried out throughout Western Europe.  HOW?  Purely from a logistical standpoint, how the heck could they have enforced rules and attitudes about things like, crusading, across such a pre-modern area?  It used to be thought that the main reason people went on the crusades is "because the pope told us we were saving other christians".....but when you look at non-churchmen records, the reality is that most of them were going "because we were told this would absolve us of our sins" and they never even heard the specific papal reason.

So while there are some legal codes cited here about "this is the punishment on the books for abortion".......don't jump to the assumption that it was necessarily enforced consistently or effectively.  

Contraceptive/abortion drugs, "Tansy Tea", are quite easy to access in Westeros; woods-witches commonly make them, and even maesters are expected to make them on command for the noble families they serve.

But it's an open question whether or not the Faith of the Seven (and other religions) have stated rules against contraception/abortion, or even harsh punishments on paper.  It is quite possible that they do have strict rules against it *in THEORY*, which are just never enforced, because it's impossible in a pre-modern society with medieval levels of communication and travel.  

Personally, I suspect that given that the Faith practices clerical celibacy and believes that sex is only for procreation (in principle), they probably don't like contraception, and really wouldn't like abortion.  Do they *discourage* such practices, or do they have severe punishments?  Possibly up to considering it murder?  It is unknown...but also irrelevant.  The fact "on the ground" is that if they do have a prohibition against this it hasn't been enforced effectively.  

I asked Elio and Linda about this a year or two ago; the question had come up in their "Blood of Dragons" RPG game, and they could only answer with the brief acknowledgement that "it is tacitly assumed that contraceptive/abortive drugs are readily available to women who want to find them, from maesters, apothecaries, woods-witches, etc."  -- which is just observational knowledge, judging from the novels themselves.  I inquired for specifics and they simply said they had no idea, and were thus hesitant to speculate, because Martin hadn't mentioned anything regarding it.  

So that's kind of where we stand at this point.   Little more can be speculated without direct Q&A with GRRM or something.

[Prof. Cecily]

Moon tea, Tansey tea.

Did Queen Margaery actually ask for Moon tea?

We'll never know.

 

While following this thread, I took the opportunity to  investigate Tansey tea and it's attributes as well as attitudes about abortion in the ancient world. I came across this text about the writings of the physician who accompanied Claudius on his campaign to Britain in AD 43

 

Quote

...The doctor's duty is to heal, not to harm and, in this admonition, Largus provides the earliest reference to the Hippocratic Oath, when he appeals to the provision that forbids a woman being given an abortive pessary. It is Hippocrates, "the founder of our profession" who "handed on to our discipline an oath by which it is sworn that no physician will either give or demonstrate to pregnant women any drug aborting a conceived child." Then "how much more abominable will those men judge it to do harm to a fully formed human being who consider it wicked to injure the uncertain hope of an unborn child" (trans. Hamilton). ...

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/aconite/largus.html

 

I only mention this as a curiosity I stumbled upon, thanks to this thread.

I think GRRM gives a foreshadowing of this situation in the scenes where Holster Tully and later Lysa mention moon tea. Granted, Lord Tully begging forgiveness and saying the word tansey on his deathbed is nothing in itself, but when thought of in connection to Lysa's hysterical outburst to Lord Petyr in that dreadful confrontation at the Moon Door, I think there's a great deal of ambivalence about the use of Moon tea in Westeros.

Quote

A Storm of Swords - Sansa VII

"NO!" Lysa gave Sansa's head another wrench. Snow eddied around them, making their skirts snap noisily. "You can't want her. You can't. She's a stupid empty-headed little girl. She doesn't love you the way I have. I've always loved you. I've proved it, haven't I?" Tears ran down her aunt's puffy red face. "I gave you my maiden's gift. I would have given you a son too, but they murdered him with moon tea, with tansy and mint and wormwood, a spoon of honey and a drop of pennyroyal. It wasn't me, I never knew, I only drank what Father gave me . . ."

"That's past and done, Lysa. Lord Hoster's dead, and his old maester as well." Littlefinger moved closer. "Have you been at the wine again? You ought not to talk so much. We don't want Alayne to know more than she should, do we? Or Marillion?"

And then there's another thread exploring the use of Moon tea here:

http://asoiaf.westeros.org/index.php?/topic/144576-why-didnt-lollys-drink-moon-tea/#comment-7829462

 

Again, thanks to all who've participated in a thread which gave me much to think about.