When a Woman Hates Her Husband: Love, Sex and Fruitful Marriages in Early Modern England

Abstract

ABSTRACTIf spouses’ ‘hearts be not united in love’, their seed could not ‘unite to cause Conception’, the seventeenth‐century astrologer‐physician, Nicholas Culpeper noted. The authors of early modern medical and conduct texts argued that marital compatibility and harmony were necessary for a union to be fruitful. But where historians of sexuality have assumed that such exhortations spoke to the centrality of sexual pleasure, male and female, to conception, this article contends that having a happy and procreative marriage required far more than achieving a certain measure of enjoyment in sex. Working out whether a prospective spouse would be suitable was a complex process that took into account social, financial, emotional, bodily, religious and astrological similarities. Drawing on conduct manuals, childbearing guides, medical casebooks and the accounts of two unhappy wives, Anne Dormer and Sarah Cowper, this article shows that while the frameworks of compatibility and incompatibility in medical and conduct literature seemed to offer a way for talking about unavoidable and conscionable disagreements and childlessness, there was considerable pressure on women, rather than men, to overcome unhappiness and ensure fruitfulness.