In 2008 Sara Read wrote a fascinating article about early modern women’s menstrual practices. In it she referred to a version of the story told about the late antique philosopher Hypatia. Hypatia threw her menstrual cloths – in Jacques Ferrand’s early seventeenth-century version...at an unwanted suitor, presumably to put him off his idealised image of her by confronting him with the realities of the female body.