Scholastic writers and physicians in the late medieval period popularized the idea of menstruation as 'the curse of Eve,' a divine punishment requiring women's isolation or penance. This built on biblical sources and humoral medicine, affecting social practices like churching rituals and marital avoidance. It reinforced broader gender hierarchies across Europe.

This framing permeated religious poetry, morality plays, and Renaissance literature, where female characters' 'impurity' symbolized moral or physical weakness. It influenced the language of affliction in works by Shakespeare and Milton, and was later critiqued or subverted by Romantic and Victorian women poets who reimagined female bodily experience as source of strength or creativity rather than curse.