Writing exploded in fourteenth-century Europe, and print followed from the end of the fifteenth; learned men became increasingly interested in the workings of women’s bodies. This chapter considers the relevance of debates about script and print to understandings of human generation. It focuses on the fortunes of ‘experimenta’, a medieval Latin term referring to useful practical techniques for healing, influencing natural processes and foreseeing outcomes. They took the form of remedies or recipes, prayers or charms, and prognostications that had passed the test of experience. Situating recipes about generation within the broader category of experimenta draws attention to the gendering of knowledge. While the content of prayers, charms and prognostications was constrained and broadly stable through the seventeenth century, the producers and consumers of recipes grew in number and variety with innovations in writing, translating and printing. The advent of a commercial market in printed books of secrets bought mainly by men included experimenta in the form of prayers and charms, prognostications and recipes to address matters of generation from conception to nurturing children. As women increasingly wrote remedy-books, by contrast, experimenta for generation tended to be cast in terms of women’s health more often than the promotion of fertility.