• Piss Prophet seems a derogatory term. What would these people actually have been called? and what would they have done when not performing pregnancy tests?
• The prophet uses the phallus bone of a goat, rusty pins and blood to determine whether she is pregnant. Is this an accurate depiction of methods that would be used in 14th century Europe? What other tools/methods would they use to determine pregnancy?
• The Baroness "fools" the 'Piss Prophet' with the urine of a pregnant Wolf. Is this just Hollywood silliness or was this a method of falsifying a pregnancy?
This is from season 1 episode 5 if anyone needs/wants it as reference.
Using urine as a diagnostic tool for pregnancy is an incredibly ancient practice that was used in Ancient Egypt and Hellenic Greece. Keep in mind that at this time the body was considered to exist in a state of perfect balance, particularly with regard to solids and liquids, with maladies and illnesses caused by this balance being disturbed. By this logic, the urine of the individual could be tested by taste or smell to determine the cause of the imbalance. Pregnancy was included in this. As well as testing urine, there were other (less unpleasant?) methods used to try and detect the imbalance, such as taking note of the patient's character - eg a patient presenting with certain symptoms would be attributed to an imbalance in a certain humour (more on that below!).
Doctors in Europe in the Middle Ages similarly believed that the body existed in a state of balance between the four humours (black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm) which was a school of thought dating back to Ancient Greece. According to this theory, urine, as a waste product of these humours, could be a diagnostic tool for pinning down the imbalance. Other pregnancy tests included noting the appearance of the urine, paying attention to the colour, consistency or amount, or mixing urine with certain other materials to see the effect on the solution (eg water). Obviously, the former was probably not that effective because the appearance of urine changes depending on the recent water intake of the patient, but the latter may have produced some useful effect.
The term 'piss prophets' is indeed a Middle Ages term used to describe the people who undertook these practices, usually physicians. I'm not sure that it's entirely a derogatory term in its original context, as I think that a lot of our modern idea of it as an insult comes from the fact that 'piss prophet' now refers to a quack doctor, the etymology of which is because we now know that these methods employed by Middle Ages physicians just didn't really work. I'm not particularly hot on linguistics though, so that's a question to ask someone else!
I've never heard of the actual practices above being used apart from the pin - Jacob Rueff, a 16th century physician, described the process of dropping a needle into a pot of urine and seeing what colour it turned when it rusted.
I've not personally heard of any ways of falsifying pregnancy from that time, and I'm not a doctor, so I have no idea if that would be any useful method at all.
Also, random note - I did some work on The Bastard Executioner and researched all this myself when I read the script for the first time, so I'm glad to be able to put this random knowledge to good use, because I don't think it'll go down a treat at the wrap party somehow.
(Edited because I'm a dope who gets things confused when it's just before midnight, like some sort of fact gremlin)