Most interesting time period for the rediscovery of silphium

[SpanishSpy]

This is an odd and frankly somewhat silly idea I had today, when I brought up the topic of silphium, the plant used as a contraceptive by the ancient Greeks and Romans before being driven extinct.

I then asked myself - what if the plant had been rediscovered at some later date, and widely cultivated?

Thing is, my European social history knowledge isn't good enough to pinpoint a time when this could be most interesting - when I do know things, modern birth control is already coming into being.

My gut tells me sometime around the French Revolution could be fruitful.

 

[JesterBL]

It comes down to whether silphium was really that much more potent than all of the other (mostly abortifacient) methods of birth control across Europe. I don't think we know that it was.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Let's grant the hypothetical that it was as potent as the popular imagination has it- I would definitely agree that the late 1700s would be the goer. Romanticism meets a proto-Sexual Revolution? Yes, that'll be fascinating.

 

[Alex Richards]

I'd actually argue for the late 1400s/early 1500s. It's basically the period where a lot of what we think of as traditional Catholic doctrines were firmly embedded.

 

[SenatorChickpea]

Or maybe even earlier, when Gregory is bringing in the reforms around clerical celibacy.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Remember though that, pre WW1, people would have had big families through necessity. Maybe not 13 or 15 as OTL, but prior to the modern welfare state children were effectively one's health insurance and old age pension. And pre antibiotics and later Victorian sanitation levels you had to assume that a certain number (roughly a quarter)would not reach adulthood (there would be trade-offs with slightly better nutrition and slightly less pressure on the rudimentary sewage system, but I would reckon on those numbers not falling beneath a fifth) and that a number of others would go off to the Wars or the Colonies and be effectively dead to you in terms of caring for you in your declining years. We might be talking fewer foundlings, bastards, baby farmers and abortionists and families of fifteen being thought excessive but a respectable married couple would probably be aiming for six or seven children up until at least the 1910s

 

[SenatorChickpea]

There might certainly be an interesting class dynamic at play. It's possible that it becomes a controlled substance- or rather, that it comes under sumptuary laws.

You might even need dispensation from a priest to use it.

 

[Francisco Cojuanco]

Remember though that, pre WW1, people would have had big families through necessity. Maybe not 13 or 15 as OTL, but prior to the modern welfare state children were effectively one's health insurance and old age pension. And pre antibiotics and later Victorian sanitation levels you had to assume that a certain number (roughly a quarter)would not reach adulthood (there would be trade-offs with slightly better nutrition and slightly less pressure on the rudimentary sewage system, but I would reckon on those numbers not falling beneath a fifth) and that a number of others would go off to the Wars or the Colonies and be effectively dead to you in terms of caring for you in your declining years. We might be talking fewer foundlings, bastards, baby farmers and abortionists and families of fifteen being thought excessive but a respectable married couple would probably be aiming for six or seven children up until at least the 1910s

I don't think families of more than 8 or so were exactly common even back then with some specific exceptions (the reason a seventh son of a seventh son was comsidered lucky was because while not unheard of, it wasn't that common)

That said, with more modest projections, available contraception is not likely to alter the birthrate much prior to the Industrial Revolution for the reasons you describe, at least for the vast peasant majority.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

I don't think families of more than 8 or so were exactly common even back then with some specific exceptions (the reason a seventh son of a seventh son was comsidered lucky was because while not unheard of, it wasn't that common)

That said, with more modest projections, available contraception is not likely to alter the birthrate much prior to the Industrial Revolution for the reasons you describe, at least for the vast peasant majority.

I am including the still births and deaths in infancy in my guesstimate of course, remember that a family of seven or eight was probably the consequence of ten or more births. My father (born in 1918) was one of eight children, but there was also a still birth and a death of a baby as well.