Du sexe à la mort L’invention médiévale du poison menstruel

In the Middle Ages, the poisoned body was associated with menstruating women and menstrual blood. These associations fed developments in medical and ecclesiastical texts which had different but not entirely opposing objectives, before contributing to pseudo-scientific arguments from the seventeenth-century onwards. In this way we move from a discourse centred on health and knowledge to a moralising and guilt-inducing discourse used to control the body.