Ages at menarche and menopause: Some mediaeval authorities

Abstract

It is well known that the duration of the fecund period in the female has not been constant, in the last couple of centuries at least. Tanner¹ has assembled the best menarche statistics currently available for Western peoples in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has concluded that the average age at menarche has fallen fairly consistently, at a rate of four months per decade, since c. 1830. This puts menarche somewhere between 15+ and 17+ in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, against equivalent figures of 12+ and 14 in the mid-twentieth. For earlier periods Tanner's methods cannot be applied because of the lack of clinical data of the order he requires; but Backman, in a more general survey, concluded that in classical antiquity the time of menarche was fairly constant at around the age of fourteen and probably remained at about that age until the beginning of the modern era, But c. 1500, or earlier, a retardation of menarche began throughout Europe ... By the end of the eighteenth century this process of retardation had produced the very high figure of 17·5–18 years, at least in northern Europe. In the early nineteenth century, perhaps c. 1830, there began a progressive decline in the age of menarche, which now seems to be levelling out at around the age of 14·0–14·5.