Some More on Hildegard
As soon as Robert said "twelfth century" I KNEW he was going to be talking about Hildegard. These days I'm a food historian; but when I went back to uni my original plan was to be a Hildegard scholar. Primarily, she's known as a Prophet; this doesn't mean someone who tells the future, it means someone who God talks to so they can tell everyone what God thinks. She wrote three books of prophecy (TL:DR world is going to shit), and also books about healing and natural history.... and letters. Loads and loads of letters. I had an Honours thesis and masters/doctorate thesis all laid out, but I realised I'd need to read a lot more about 12th century theology, and probably even learn medieval Latin, and neither option was interesting. (Plus I could not shut up about puddings and candy making.)
As well as the types of men and female orgasms, Hildegard was also a lot more clued up about actual conception than many contemporaries and people who came after her. She was aware of male seed and female seed, for starters, and she gave men some quite accurate advice about how to produce "strong seed" if they wanted sons, because it was the male seed thar determined the sex of the baby.
She was also a great believer in men being kind to their wives. Because if they weren't, the womb would turn sour, and the seed would turn sour, and the resulting child wouldn't be a good person.
She was definitely a Cool Person. I'm not quite sure if she did enough Cool Stuff to warrant the Margaret treatment, but maybe one day I'll dig out those thesis plans again and wax nostalgic about it.