ABSTRACT
One way to learn what medieval people knew about chemical means of birth control is to explore the way they translated technical concepts into their own language. Manuscript sources are indispensable in finding this data, when manuscript evidence is combined with scientific data about the chemical drugs they were taking, the conclusion is that medieval people were aware of effective means to control births and regulate family sizes. Historians have regarded the appearance of oral contraceptives and early-term abortifacients in medical documents as magic, superstition, or ineffectual nonsense. They believed that only in the modern era, was there such knowledge. It was not until the 1960s that studies of such botanical agents began to be reported in Indian, Chinese medical and pharmaceutical journals. Western scientists are reexamining their previous skepticism that such agents actually affected fertility and so must historians follow their science colleagues and attribute more credibility to their documents.
