Reproductive Pressure and Royal Couples

This book explores royal couples’ experiences of and responses to fertility problems in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Situated in the history of infertility, it focuses on royal couples who were not generally infertile in the conventional sense, but who nonetheless experienced reproductive difficulties or heightened pressure to produce a child. It challenges perceptions of these couples’ fertility by uncovering experiences of secondary infertility, sub-fertility, and contemporary anxiety about reproduction which have previously been overlooked because many of them had children. Drawing on English and Scottish examples, it explores the pressure to reproduce that royal couples experienced, and how they responded to this with medical and spiritual therapies.

Emma Trivett completed her PhD in medieval history at the University of Edinburgh in 2022. She continues to research and publish on royal fertility in medieval England and Scotland.