"Early medieval writers show that women were using herbal medicine and witchcraft to control their own fertility and childbearing. Bishops in France, Spain, Ireland, England and Germany enacted canons forbidding women to undertake means of controlling their own conception, herbal and ceremonial, as well as to end pregnancies or perform abortions.

"Augustine, John Chrysostom and other church patriarchs had opposed contraception and abortion. Augustinian doctrine equated sexual pleasure with sin, demanding that couples should engage in sex for procreation only. These theologians established “the classic Christian hostility to contraception, which linked it to magic and abortion.” [McLaren, 84-5] Clement of Alexandria and John Chrysostom of Antioch both railed against women’s incantations over potions or libations intended to prevent conceptions.

"At the pope's request, bishop Caesarius of Arles renewed the campaign in the late 400s. His sermons indicate that women in Provence were using not only herbal potions but also amulets, “diabolical marks” and other magical means. [McLaren, 85] Denouncing both contraception and abortion as homicide, Caesarius issued orders that “no woman may drink a potion that makes her incapable of conceiving...” His motto was: “So much contraception, so many murders.”[Ranke-Heinemann, 73, 146-7]

"The bishop’s solution for women who didn’t want more children was simple, and ridiculously unenforceable: they should get their husbands to agree to a life of chastity. [Schulenberg, 243] Caesarius knew that married women had no legal right to refuse sex to their husbands, and that masters regularly forced enslaved women into their beds. Unmoved by their plight, Caesarius insisted: “Chastity is the sole sterility of a Christian woman.” He wrote that he would have excommunicated men who had concubines, but there were “too many.” But numbers did not faze the bishop when it came to women's attempts at birth control. Caesarius denounced women who used contraceptive herbs, as well as women who tried to conceive “by herbs or diabolical marks or sacrilegious amulets.” [Noonan, 145-7]

"Spain was another place where the early clergy tried to repress contraceptive potions and the witchcraft that women used to fortify them. In 546, the Council of Lerida condemned the use of potions to cause abortion. Bishop Martin of Braga and the second Council of Braga (572) forbade contraceptive potions and magic, singling out pregnant women who sought abortion. [Dillard, online: ch 8; fn 52 on Lerida, canon 2] By the 7th century, the Visigothic kings rewarded the clergy’s agitation with harsh penalties for seeking or enabling abortion.

"Finnian, the Irish monk who authored the first known priestly confessional manual, took a page from his contemporary Caesarius. He classified women's medicine with sorcery and love spells, and forbade them all. His book, like other Irish penitentials condemning contraception and abortion, indicate that women were using herbal potions to regulate their child-bearing. Magic was part of the birth control arsenal, to such an extent that, as Lisa Bitel writes, “The penitentials interpreted magic specifically as abortifacients or love potions.” [219] Later sources repeatedly refer to them as herbal drinks."

Shown, clockwise from upper left, commonly used contraceptive herbs: tansy, queen anne's lace (wild carrot seeds), rue, and pennyroyal. Many of the herbs used were emmenagogues, others tended to prevent implantation in the uterine wall. The priestly sources show that women used incantation, ritual knotting, and other kinds of ceremony to supplement the herbs, which are not failsafe. Some also used pessaries, inserting compounds of wax, resin, honey and other substances, or cloths saturated with spermicidal substances to block sperm from reaching the cervix.

*Herbs, Knots and Contraception* ©2004 Max Dashu (excerpt from Vol VI of the series Secret History of the Witches). Feel free to share this post and link.

https://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/contraception.html

"In the 700s the Irish Collection of Canons devoted an entire section to pronouncements on “Womanly Questions.” The monks complained that women “take diabolical drinks so that they can no longer conceive.” Following the bishop of Arles (the Bible being silent on the subject of female contraception and abortion) they equate preventing conception by means of herbal potions—”drinking sterility”—with murder. [Noonan, 155]

"This is the older oppression of female knowledge that predates more modern doctrines, the ones that are often cited to show that churchmen did not take a harsh stand on contraception and abortion until modern times. This is the encounter of peasant women's knowledge and self-determination with advancing patriarchal doctrines.

"Especially hateful in the monks' eyes were unmarried women with sex lives. A section called “Simulated Virgins and Their Morals” castigates young women for using birth control to conceal their love affairs. [Noonan, 159] (In the priestly author’s mind, there could be no other reason for using it.) Already implicit is the notion of pregnancy as a divine punishment of unchaste women, while men go untouched. The penitentials treat men's sexual exploits -- and exploitation in the forms of concubinage and slavery -- with lenience, even indulgence. The sole exception is their severity toward male homosexuality, which they rank among the worst of sins. [Brundage, 174] That husbands bought sex went unmentioned. [McLaren, 118]

"The monks show more eagerness to punish women's sexuality than concern to prevent sexual assaults against them. The penitentials of Cummean and Finnian are lax with masters who have sex with female slaves, never considering the situational probability of coercion and rape. Both simply advise the men to sell the women off and do a year's penance. In other texts, the only punishment is an order to free the slave. [McNeill / Gamer, c 40; Bitel, 151-2] No precautions are taken to protect the rights of bondswomen or their children.

"It’s not that the monks were unaware of the conditions such women endured. Boniface obliquely acknowledged the reality when, in telling Germans that a priest could only marry a virgin, he classified freedwomen (along with widows and abandoned women) as non-virgins. [Hefele III.2, 843] Only the obscure Poenitentiale Valicellanum shows compassion for women impregnated by rapists: “a woman who exposes her unwanted child because she has been raped by an enemy or is unable to sustain is not to be blamed, but she should nevertheless do penance for three weeks.” [Schulenberg, 250] But this text stands alone.

"The priesthood spoke in the harshest terms against women drinking herb infusions that prevented conception. Five centuries after Caesarius, bishop Burchard of Worms ordered an unusually heavy penance (ten years of partial fasting) for women who used folk methods of birth control. He added that “an ancient determination removed such [women] from the church until the end of their lives.” [Decretum 19, in Noonan, 160]

"Canon lawyers equated refusal of hospitality to the fertile egg with murder, while absolving men who raped or killed in battle and fully intended to do it again. Warlords were protected by the church's fiction allowing for “just wars.” For the priesthood, the sexual was sacred only if it was reproductive, and excusable only for the male, who did not have to worry about the seed he sowed."

"Though the Church described them as sorceresses, the wisewomen, herbalists, midwives and elders belonged to a spiritual tradition rooted in the land. Mother Earth gave healing herbs that restored life to the body, balanced it, healed wounds or disease, promoted conception or prevented it. Women who desired children prayed to ancient goddesses and petitioned them at holy rocks and pools. These animist divinities were invoked in childbirth, to help the mother and strengthen the newborn, for knowledge about how to conceive and how to not conceive children. (Often they ended up transformed into Christian saints, allowing a transition of their rites and symbols.) The pagans knew the cycles of life's renewal to be infinite, and appealed to the same deities in death.

"The priesthood was determined to wrest this power away from women. They preached sermons against these pagan ways, which were also women's ways. Priests anathematized those who shared their knowledge with others or who celebrated births and deaths with the ancient rites, bypassing the priesthood. The use of penitential books spread from Ireland to Britain, then to northern France and Italy and Spain, and finally to Germany. With them spread the notion, accompanied by a studied disregard of rape and poverty and abusive husbands, that birth control was illicit and sinful.

"In a 7th-century English penitential, Egbert of England obliquely condemned any woman who used birth control as “destroying others by her art of maleficium, that is by potion or some art.” The identity of the "others" is clear from the context: this passage appears in a chapter on the sins of women in marriage. [Noonan, 156] Elsewhere Egbert orders penance for any woman who “works witchcraft and enchantment and magical filtres... the extent of her wickedness being considered.” [McNeill/Gamer, 246]

"Two eighth-century Frankish penitentials prohibit a woman's taking potions “in order not to conceive or to kill what she has conceived.” Another Frankish writer insisted so absolutely upon motherhood as women's destiny that he judged her to be “making herself an enemy to herself not to have children.” [Merseberg B and C and St Huberts penitentials, in McNeill/Gamer, 155] A woman's temperament, her circumstances, her desires and goals were as nothing compared to a theoretical duty to be a passive vessel of childbearing. Even rape victims were supposed to bear any children engendered on them. The priesthood treated their “sin” as greater than the rapes inflicted on them.

"As royal families converted to christianity, state laws were revised to reflect church condemnation of women's efforts to control their pregnancies. Priestly influence added a fine to the Salic law for “maleficium” in which a woman prevented her own fertility. The Pseudo-Bede penitential also used the Latin word maleficium to describe women's contraception methods. The word literally means “evildoing,” but it had long signified “sorcery” in Roman law. Here it refers specifically to drinking contraceptive potions: "Have you drunk any maleficium, that is, herbs or other agents so that you could not have children?"

John Noonan concludes in his ground-breaking study of contraception that maleficium had acquired a specific clerical meaning of "sterilizing magical act." Prohibitions against female sterility potions are repeated in Jerome, Martène, Caesarius, and the Pseudo-Vigilia, Regino of Prum, Merseberg, and St Hubert penitentials. [Noonan, 156, 159]"

"Several contraceptive plants mentioned by ancient Mediterranean writers were probably among those women used in early medieval Europe: members of the carrot family, pennyroyal, artemisia, willow and rue. These were all herbs known to later witches, some bearing rich folkloric traditions. [Riddle, Estes & Russell, 30-33] Certain penitentials mention potentially fatal mixtures using such herbs as belladonna and honeysuckle. [Rouche, 523] Northern sources refer to women using vaginal suppositories with cedar oil, or cabbage leaves, or fresh mandrake and other leaves. More recent German folk contraceptives include teas of marjoram, thyme, parsley and lavender (which also abort), the root of worm fern, and brake, known as “prostitute root.” [Noonan, 171]

"Canonical literature indicates that pagan magic also played a part in contraception. [Noonan, 156-8] It appears that women gathered, prepared and consumed the herbs with incantations and other ritual. Possibly knotting of cords played a part in contraception as it did in healing or the more notorious intervention of impotence magic.

"As late as 1025 the Corrector Burchardi referred to women's use of “maleficia and herbs” in birth control, implying that ceremonial was as much a part of it as the medical drinks. Burchard indicated that women prepared both contraceptive and abortifacient drinks. He treated preventing conception as homicide, but admitted that many women needed to limit the number of children they bore because they could not afford to raise them:

'It makes a big difference whether she is a poor little woman and acted on account of the difficulty of feeding, or whether she acted to conceal a crime of fornication.' [Decretum 19, in Noonan, 160]

"The Pseudo-Theodore and Pseudo-Bede penitentials had said much the same thing several centuries earlier. Paternalistic allowances could be made for poverty, but the desire to punish women for sexual 'transgressions' remained undiminished.

"Most modern writers have assumed that women in this period did not know any effective birth control methods. Angus McLaren, David Herlihy and others make a strong case that they did. McLaren shows that late marriage and high infant mortality were not the only cause of low numbers of children. He points out that as late as 1150, Clemence countess of Flanders used the arte muliebre to stop bearing a child every year." [McLaren, 113-16]

Shown above: Egbert of York penitential book

"By 700 priestly writers had begun to call women who were herbalists and witches “poisoners” (veneficae). The Homilia de Sacrilegiis used this charge to denounce the witchcraft of contraception and abortion, which it called pagan acts. [Flint, 236; and fn 132] Bishop Gerbold of Liège used the term “poisoner” to denounce women who performed abortions or who “make magic so that their husbands will love them more.” Regino of Prum conflated contraception with poisoning of husbands, saying that giving males or females sterility drinks should be considered as homicide. [Noonan, c 167] Although this belief was not held consistently by the Church, it is again doctrinal since the 20th century.

"Infanticide of newborns, especially female babies, has been tracked in early medieval baptismal records and other documents. The unrecorded roster of missing females, already known from Greco-Roman times, continued vanishing into time. Saints’ biographies such as the Vita of St Liudger (c. 800) refer to infanticides by pagan Germans. Their custom, however, forbade killing a baby who had taken any food. [Schulenberg, 245]

"Remembering that the feudal codes gave men legal control over their wives, it is not surprising to find that women resorted to magic to better their lot. They practiced love spells to attract desired partners, but once hitched other concerns came to the fore. The author of the Pseudo-Bede penitential also condemned “offenses in marriage and magical arts practised by women.” His chapter “On the Devices of Women” shows his disapproval of women who actively undermined their official inferiority to men through “magical arts.” [McNeill / Gamer, 209ff] Ligatura, the witchcraft of male impotence, was one weapon in the subversive female arsenal.

"Churchmen’s pronouncements backed up the sexual double standard and women's degraded legal status. Priests failed to take a stand against battery and mutilation of wives. But they condemned sexual intercourse with the woman on top. [Ranke-Heinemann, 150, t.o.] The Pseudo-Egbert penitential allowed men to repudiate adulterous wives, but women could remarry only in the unlikely event that their promiscuous husbands decided to enter a monastery. [McNamara / Wemple, 103]

"Pseudo-Theodore (XII, 5) also withheld women's right to divorce adulterous husbands. The author's attitude toward women accused of adultery is punitive in the extreme. Even when the wife wants reconciliation with her husband, he is given the privilege of doing to her whatever he likes: she “is in the power of her husband.” [McNeill, Gamer, 208-9] This phrase originates in Roman law, and is also found in early Christian legal codes like the Spanish Forum Iudicum.

"The English penitential known as Pseudo-Theodore set a harsher penalty for oral or anal sex than for premeditated murder. [Ranke-Heinemann, 149] It severely limited even approved, missionary-position marital sex, with a calendar that "provides for over 300 days of abstinence" a year -- not counting those required during menses and pregnancy. [See Charon] Psuedo-Theodore allowed a man who had accepted baptism to put away his pagan wife and remarry, without any further obligation to her, on religious grounds. He upheld slavery, going so far as to declare a freedwoman's child still a slave. The old Irish penitentials also stood by the slave system, and later confessional books on the continent offered no challenge to the degradations of serfdom. [McNeill/ Gamer, 36-7]

"Witchcraft remained the primary female recourse to power, whether it was the power to attract love, to enjoy sex, to avoid unwanted sex, to conceive or not to conceive, or to protect against rape and battery. Folk culture offered young women a subversive power to act in their own lives, a power that grew out of the old pagan ways."

Shown: Egbert of York penitential book

y 700 priestly writers had begun to call women who were herbalists and witches “poisoners” (veneficae). The Homilia de Sacrilegiis used this charge to denounce the witchcraft of contraception and abortion, which it called pagan acts. [Flint, 236; and fn 132] Bishop Gerbold of Liège used the term “poisoner” to denounce women who performed abortions or who “make magic so that their husbands will love them more.” Regino of Prum conflated contraception with poisoning of husbands, saying that giving males or females sterility drinks should be considered as homicide. [Noonan, c 167] Although this belief was not held consistently by the Church, it is again doctrinal since the 20th century.

"Infanticide of newborns, especially female babies, has been tracked in early medieval baptismal records and other documents. The unrecorded roster of missing females, already known from Greco-Roman times, continued vanishing into time. Saints’ biographies such as the Vita of St Liudger (c. 800) refer to infanticides by pagan Germans. Their custom, however, forbade killing a baby who had taken any food. [Schulenberg, 245]

"Remembering that the feudal codes gave men legal control over their wives, it is not surprising to find that women resorted to magic to better their lot. They practiced love spells to attract desired partners, but once hitched other concerns came to the fore. The author of the Pseudo-Bede penitential also condemned “offenses in marriage and magical arts practised by women.” His chapter “On the Devices of Women” shows his disapproval of women who actively undermined their official inferiority to men through “magical arts.” [McNeill / Gamer, 209ff] Ligatura, the witchcraft of male impotence, was one weapon in the subversive female arsenal.

"Churchmen’s pronouncements backed up the sexual double standard and women's degraded legal status. Priests failed to take a stand against battery and mutilation of wives. But they condemned sexual intercourse with the woman on top. [Ranke-Heinemann, 150, t.o.] The Pseudo-Egbert penitential allowed men to repudiate adulterous wives, but women could remarry only in the unlikely event that their promiscuous husbands decided to enter a monastery. [McNamara / Wemple, 103]

"Pseudo-Theodore (XII, 5) also withheld women's right to divorce adulterous husbands. The author's attitude toward women accused of adultery is punitive in the extreme. Even when the wife wants reconciliation with her husband, he is given the privilege of doing to her whatever he likes: she “is in the power of her husband.” [McNeill, Gamer, 208-9] This phrase originates in Roman law, and is also found in early Christian legal codes like the Spanish Forum Iudicum.

"The English penitential known as Pseudo-Theodore set a harsher penalty for oral or anal sex than for premeditated murder. [Ranke-Heinemann, 149] It severely limited even approved, missionary-position marital sex, with a calendar that "provides for over 300 days of abstinence" a year -- not counting those required during menses and pregnancy. [See Charon] Psuedo-Theodore allowed a man who had accepted baptism to put away his pagan wife and remarry, without any further obligation to her, on religious grounds. He upheld slavery, going so far as to declare a freedwoman's child still a slave. The old Irish penitentials also stood by the slave system, and later confessional books on the continent offered no challenge to the degradations of serfdom. [McNeill/ Gamer, 36-7]

"Witchcraft remained the primary female recourse to power, whether it was the power to attract love, to enjoy sex, to avoid unwanted sex, to conceive or not to conceive, or to protect against rape and battery. Folk culture offered young women a subversive power to act in their own lives, a power that grew out of the old pagan ways."

own above: Shown: Egbert of York penitential book

"By 700 priestly writers had begun to call women who were herbalists and witches “poisoners” (veneficae). The Homilia de Sacrilegiis used this charge to denounce the witchcraft of contraception and abortion, which it called pagan acts. [Flint, 236; and fn 132] Bishop Gerbold of Liège used the term “poisoner” to denounce women who performed abortions or who “make magic so that their husbands will love them more.” Regino of Prum conflated contraception with poisoning of husbands, saying that giving males or females sterility drinks should be considered as homicide. [Noonan, c 167] Although this belief was not held consistently by the Church, it is again doctrinal since the 20th century.

"Infanticide of newborns, especially female babies, has been tracked in early medieval baptismal records and other documents. The unrecorded roster of missing females, already known from Greco-Roman times, continued vanishing into time. Saints’ biographies such as the Vita of St Liudger (c. 800) refer to infanticides by pagan Germans. Their custom, however, forbade killing a baby who had taken any food. [Schulenberg, 245]

"Remembering that the feudal codes gave men legal control over their wives, it is not surprising to find that women resorted to magic to better their lot. They practiced love spells to attract desired partners, but once hitched other concerns came to the fore. The author of the Pseudo-Bede penitential also condemned “offenses in marriage and magical arts practised by women.” His chapter “On the Devices of Women” shows his disapproval of women who actively undermined their official inferiority to men through “magical arts.” [McNeill / Gamer, 209ff] Ligatura, the witchcraft of male impotence, was one weapon in the subversive female arsenal.

"Churchmen’s pronouncements backed up the sexual double standard and women's degraded legal status. Priests failed to take a stand against battery and mutilation of wives. But they condemned sexual intercourse with the woman on top. [Ranke-Heinemann, 150, t.o.] The Pseudo-Egbert penitential allowed men to repudiate adulterous wives, but women could remarry only in the unlikely event that their promiscuous husbands decided to enter a monastery. [McNamara / Wemple, 103]

"Pseudo-Theodore (XII, 5) also withheld women's right to divorce adulterous husbands. The author's attitude toward women accused of adultery is punitive in the extreme. Even when the wife wants reconciliation with her husband, he is given the privilege of doing to her whatever he likes: she “is in the power of her husband.” [McNeill, Gamer, 208-9] This phrase originates in Roman law, and is also found in early Christian legal codes like the Spanish Forum Iudicum.

"The English penitential known as Pseudo-Theodore set a harsher penalty for oral or anal sex than for premeditated murder. [Ranke-Heinemann, 149] It severely limited even approved, missionary-position marital sex, with a calendar that "provides for over 300 days of abstinence" a year -- not counting those required during menses and pregnancy. [See Charon] Psuedo-Theodore allowed a man who had accepted baptism to put away his pagan wife and remarry, without any further obligation to her, on religious grounds. He upheld slavery, going so far as to declare a freedwoman's child still a slave. The old Irish penitentials also stood by the slave system, and later confessional books on the continent offered no challenge to the degradations of serfdom. [McNeill/ Gamer, 36-7]

"Witchcraft remained the primary female recourse to power, whether it was the power to attract love, to enjoy sex, to avoid unwanted sex, to conceive or not to conceive, or to protect against rape and battery. Folk culture offered young women a subversive power to act in their own lives, a power that grew out of the old pagan ways."

Shown: Egbert of York penitential book

y 700 priestly writers had begun to call women who were herbalists and witches “poisoners” (veneficae). The Homilia de Sacrilegiis used this charge to denounce the witchcraft of contraception and abortion, which it called pagan acts. [Flint, 236; and fn 132] Bishop Gerbold of Liège used the term “poisoner” to denounce women who performed abortions or who “make magic so that their husbands will love them more.” Regino of Prum conflated contraception with poisoning of husbands, saying that giving males or females sterility drinks should be considered as homicide. [Noonan, c 167] Although this belief was not held consistently by the Church, it is again doctrinal since the 20th century.

"Infanticide of newborns, especially female babies, has been tracked in early medieval baptismal records and other documents. The unrecorded roster of missing females, already known from Greco-Roman times, continued vanishing into time. Saints’ biographies such as the Vita of St Liudger (c. 800) refer to infanticides by pagan Germans. Their custom, however, forbade killing a baby who had taken any food. [Schulenberg, 245]

"Remembering that the feudal codes gave men legal control over their wives, it is not surprising to find that women resorted to magic to better their lot. They practiced love spells to attract desired partners, but once hitched other concerns came to the fore. The author of the Pseudo-Bede penitential also condemned “offenses in marriage and magical arts practised by women.” His chapter “On the Devices of Women” shows his disapproval of women who actively undermined their official inferiority to men through “magical arts.” [McNeill / Gamer, 209ff] Ligatura, the witchcraft of male impotence, was one weapon in the subversive female arsenal.

"Churchmen’s pronouncements backed up the sexual double standard and women's degraded legal status. Priests failed to take a stand against battery and mutilation of wives. But they condemned sexual intercourse with the woman on top. [Ranke-Heinemann, 150, t.o.] The Pseudo-Egbert penitential allowed men to repudiate adulterous wives, but women could remarry only in the unlikely event that their promiscuous husbands decided to enter a monastery. [McNamara / Wemple, 103]

"Pseudo-Theodore (XII, 5) also withheld women's right to divorce adulterous husbands. The author's attitude toward women accused of adultery is punitive in the extreme. Even when the wife wants reconciliation with her husband, he is given the privilege of doing to her whatever he likes: she “is in the power of her husband.” [McNeill, Gamer, 208-9] This phrase originates in Roman law, and is also found in early Christian legal codes like the Spanish Forum Iudicum.

"The English penitential known as Pseudo-Theodore set a harsher penalty for oral or anal sex than for premeditated murder. [Ranke-Heinemann, 149] It severely limited even approved, missionary-position marital sex, with a calendar that "provides for over 300 days of abstinence" a year -- not counting those required during menses and pregnancy. [See Charon] Psuedo-Theodore allowed a man who had accepted baptism to put away his pagan wife and remarry, without any further obligation to her, on religious grounds. He upheld slavery, going so far as to declare a freedwoman's child still a slave. The old Irish penitentials also stood by the slave system, and later confessional books on the continent offered no challenge to the degradations of serfdom. [McNeill/ Gamer, 36-7]

"Witchcraft remained the primary female recourse to power, whether it was the power to attract love, to enjoy sex, to avoid unwanted sex, to conceive or not to conceive, or to protect against rape and battery. Folk culture offered young women a subversive power to act in their own lives, a power that grew out of the old pagan ways."

"In Spain, the Visigoths also outlawed ligatura and other sexual magic. Lawmakers feared that "certain women" were able to use herbal filtres to control their husbands so that they would not be able to accuse them of adultery in court, or to leave them, even if the women were having affairs with other men. [McKenna, 122] Once more, as with the Bohemian witches, the fear was that women would find magical ways to overcome social restrictions and assume privileges reserved for men.

Rulers harshly discouraged female sexual self-determination in other ways. Secular Bavarian laws imposed on obstetrical witches the same penalties we have seen elsewhere assigned to "sorcerers": heavy scourging and enslavement:

'VIII 18. If any woman gives a drink so that she causes an abortion, if it is a maidservant, let her receive 200 lashes, and if it is a freedwoman, let her lose her freedom and be assigned to slavery to whomever the duke orders.' [Rivers, 141]

"Two hundred lashes is the most severe penalty short of execution, and actually amounted to it in some cases. Such a vicious lashing inflicted on a bondswoman could easily be fatal, depending on the zeal of the men who flogged her.

"The Alemannic laws of 700 fined "anyone who causes abortion in pregnant women." [XXXXVIII, in Rivers] In Spain, the Visigothic Forma Iudicum (654) ordered the death penalty for women who prepared abortifacient potions. A freewoman who sought to obtain the herbal drink was to be enslaved to whomever the king named, while a female slave was flogged with 200 lashes. [McKenna]

"The near-uniformity of these laws points to priestly pressure on rulers to criminalize previously lawful acts that were previously lawful, setting criminal penalties on canonical offences. Long before the Spanish and Bavarian laws were enacted, monks and bishops had declared war against women's traditions of birth control."

Spain, the Visigoths also outlawed ligatura and other sexual magic. Lawmakers feared that "certain women" were able to use herbal filtres to control their husbands so that they would not be able to accuse them of adultery in court, or to leave them, even if the women were having affairs with other men. [McKenna, 122] Once more, as with the Bohemian witches, the fear was that women would find magical ways to overcome social restrictions and assume privileges reserved for men.

Rulers harshly discouraged female sexual self-determination in other ways. Secular Bavarian laws imposed on obstetrical witches the same penalties we have seen elsewhere assigned to "sorcerers": heavy scourging and enslavement:

'VIII 18. If any woman gives a drink so that she causes an abortion, if it is a maidservant, let her receive 200 lashes, and if it is a freedwoman, let her lose her freedom and be assigned to slavery to whomever the duke orders.' [Rivers, 141]

"Two hundred lashes is the most severe penalty short of execution, and actually amounted to it in some cases. Such a vicious lashing inflicted on a bondswoman could easily be fatal, depending on the zeal of the men who flogged her.

"The Alemannic laws of 700 fined "anyone who causes abortion in pregnant women." [XXXXVIII, in Rivers] In Spain, the Visigothic Forma Iudicum (654) ordered the death penalty for women who prepared abortifacient potions. A freewoman who sought to obtain the herbal drink was to be enslaved to whomever the king named, while a female slave was flogged with 200 lashes. [McKenna]

"The near-uniformity of these laws points to priestly pressure on rulers to criminalize previously lawful acts that were previously lawful, setting criminal penalties on canonical offences. Long before the Spanish and Bavarian laws were enacted, monks and bishops had declared war against women's traditions of birth control."

https://www.suppressedhistories.net/secrethistory/kingsvswitches.html