Medieval women had their first child much later than previously thought, says researcher

Costume dramas would have us believe that women in the Middle Ages became mothers at a much younger age than they do today. University lecturer Krista Milne wants to refute this image with the help of an NWO XS grant. "In the past, not all data was taken into account."

Previous research into the age at which women had their first child in the twelfth century revealed an average age of 18.5 years. "People often find that shocking, because it is so far removed from the age at which women have their first child nowadays," says Milne.

For her, it was a reason to take another close look at the data used. "It turned out the scholar who suggested this average maternal age only looked at women under the age of thirty. When you include all the women over the age of thirty, you find the average age is around 23 or 23.5." That is still younger than the 30.4 years at which Dutch women became mothers for the first time in 2024, but it differs remarkably little from the 24.3 years in 1969, the last year that the contraceptive pill was only available on prescription.

Not just a first

Moreover, the one-sided focus on the birth of the first child distorts the picture. Milne: In the medieval period, women sometimes had six children, the first one at twenty and the last one when they were in their forties. When I was working on the project, I found so many examples of women who had children at, for example, 35, 38 or 42. It seems mainly a myth that women in the Middle Ages had all their children at a very young age.

Adding nuance

Milne believes that this perception still has consequences today. Milne says, "Even in medical articles there is a tendency to suggest that women are having their children significantly later than they were. I think this claim is too bold to make in this way, especially when you consider how little information we actually have about the age at which women in the Middle Ages became mothers, whether for the first time, or at subsequent births. Many statements on this subject are far too simplistic."

It is now up to Milne, with the support of an NWO XS grant, to add nuance to the existing picture. "I couldn't decide between English and math as an undergraduate. So I took many courses in both subjects. That's coming in handy now: I can use a quantitative approach to analyze data from medieval culture and, for example, find out how long women continued to have children and whether this differed between social groups."

Provided by Leiden University