In a
medieval French poem called The Four Wishes of St Martin, a Norman peasant is
granted four wishes by his favorite saint. Such good fortune should transform
the poor man’s life—but his wife persuades him to let her make one of them, and
promptly announces that she would like her spouse to be covered in penises.
Immediately, his “whole body was a mass of pricks,” to the delight of his wife,
who hopes that he will now be able to satisfy her.
He
retaliates by wishing that she “may have as many cunts / As I have pricks,” and
the woman is immediately covered with “cunts of every kind”—hairless and bushy,
“virginal and splayed,” “cunts well used and cunts well made / and little
cunts, cunts big as bowls.” Now they are both unhappy, so the peasant asks:
“for him no pricks, for her no cunts.” But now the foolish pair have no
genitals at all, and so their final wish is to be made as they were before: “a
prick for you, a cunt for me,” as the wife puts it.
As anyone
who has read The Canterbury Tales or The Decameron knows, sex appears
frequently in medieval literature, usually in the form of bawdy tales featuring
stock characters who find themselves in humorous situations. This ridiculous
couple embodies two common medieval stereotypes: The husband is a fool (not
least because of his willingness to trust a woman’s judgement), and the wife is
sex-mad and obsessed with male genitals. Women like her are found throughout
medieval literature, especially in the shockingly explicit fabliaux (a group of
verses which were composed in France between the twelfth and fourteenth
centuries), and other lesser-known collections.
In A Talk
of Ten Wives on Their Husbands’ Ware, for example, the title characters complain
in graphic detail about their husbands’ penises; one claims that her partner’s
“penis peeps out before / Like a maggot.” The wife of The Fisherman of
Pont-sur-Seine rejects her husband’s suggestion that she is only with him for
the sex, but when he claims to have cut off his penis (and shows her one he has
removed from a corpse), she is ready to leave him. Arguably this husband is one
of the lucky ones: at least his wife wants to have sex with him, unlike the man
whose wife tries to betray him with his friend, an innkeeper who is endowed
with both “the most finely crafted, handsome, and thickest member in the whole
region” and remarkable sexual stamina. Unbeknown to her, her spouse has
arranged to take the innkeeper’s place, and so she has an extremely
disappointing night.
The
Blacksmith of Creil’s wife is similarly thwarted by her scheming husband. The
blacksmith notices his young servant has an enormous penis and knows that his
wife would “sooner have been dead and buried / than not secure herself a
share.” So he tells her about it, claiming that “I’ve never seen a larger
member.” She pretends to be disgusted, but when her husband goes out (or so she
thinks), she propositions the youth. At this point, the husband emerges from
his hiding place to dismiss the servant and beat his wife.
If some
medieval authors favored matter-of-fact descriptions and explicit language,
others delighted in constructing elaborate euphemisms for sex and the genitals.
(Although it is worth noting that much of this anatomical language would have
been considerably less offensive to medieval readers than it is to us—during
the later Middle Ages “cunt” was a widely-used term for the female genitals,
found even in medical textbooks—so such creative decisions are likely to have
been motivated by a desire to make people laugh, rather than prudishness.) Many
of these extended metaphors involve animals.
In The
Squirrel, an extremely innocent 15-year-old girl meets a young man named Robin,
who approaches her with his erect penis in his hand. She asks what he is
holding; he claims that it is a squirrel and invites her to stroke it. He tells
her that the squirrel likes to eat walnuts, which saddens her because she ate
some yesterday, but has none left. He reassures her that the squirrel can get
the nuts from her stomach, which he can access “par vostre con.” So they have
sex, which is described in great detail: The girl cheers on the squirrel as it
hunts for its nuts, and eventually the animal feels queasy and vomits copiously
inside her. Similarly, The Maiden Who Could Not Abide Lewd Language is seduced
by her father’s servant Davy, who convinces her that his hungry and thirsty
“pony” would like to graze her “pasture” and drink from her “spring.”
Others
employ the language of construction. In one of The One Hundred New Tales
(written in the 1450s for the Duke of Burgundy), a knight convinces a miller’s
foolish wife that her private parts are falling off; the only solution is to
hammer them back on as quickly and as frequently as possible. On several
occasions the knight uses his “special tool” to perform this task. Her husband
finds out and responds by visiting the knight’s wife, offering to use his own
special tool to look for a lost ring. It takes several goes, but eventually he
finds it. When the knight’s wife tells him what happened, he realizes that the
miller has had his revenge. In a fabliau called The Girl Who Wanted to Fly, a
student takes advantage of a foolish girl, telling her that he is grafting on
the beak and tail she will need to achieve her ambition. Only when she falls
pregnant does she realize she has been deceived; her seducer says that it
serves her right for being too proud, and the narrator agrees.
Elsewhere,
sex is described in medical terms, as in the story of a monk who wants to have
sex with a young wife and realizes that he will only achieve this by deception.
So he pretends to have a sore finger, and claims that it can only be cured if
he “insert[s] my ailing finger into the secret recesses of an honest woman…and
let it remain there for a reasonable length of time.” Although his profession
does not allow him to do this, she insists that he must, and that she will help
him. When they repair to bed, “He lifted up her undergarments and, instead of
his finger, inserted his hard, stiff staff.” When she asks why his finger is so
large, he explains that it is swollen because of his illness; when she queries
that ‘sensation’ she feels, he says that the boil on his finger has just burst.
His cure gives her so much pleasure that she insists he must come back if he
has any more finger problems.
Even more
bizarre are the stories which anthropomorphize their protagonists’ private
parts. In Guèrin’s The Chevalier Who Made Cunts Talk, a gallant knight comes
across three maidens swimming in a woodland pool and preserves their modesty by
finding their stolen clothes. For this good deed, he is rewarded with a rather
bizarre power: he will never meet a female creature “whose cunt will not, when
spoken to / be honour bound to answer you.” After testing his new skill on a priest’s
mare (he learns that the priest is on his way to see his mistress), he pays a
visit to a count’s castle. Various shenanigans ensue, and soon the countess
learns of her guest’s curious talent. She thinks she can outwit him by stuffing
her vagina with cotton wool, and she bets 40 pounds that her genitals will
remain silent—but is publicly humiliated when the knight addresses her anus,
which reveals the trick she has played.
In The Rose
Thorn, a beautiful young virgin bathes daily in her garden, as the poem’s male
narrator spies on her. One day a magic root that bestows speech somehow comes
into contact with her vulva; it complains of feeling underappreciated, and so
the lady and her genitals part company. But when the suitor finds that he
cannot have sex with his love, he rejects her, and the community mocks “the
cuntless woman.” Meanwhile, the vulva offers itself to a young man, but he
mistakes it for a toad, and kicks it away. Eventually the vulva returns to the
lady, and the narrator helps by “nailing” it back into place.
Medieval
poets were, it seems, as obsessed with the human sexual organs as the foolish
men and women they mocked in their verses—but why? For a twenty-first century
reader, these stories are amusing, but there is often a sense that we are
laughing at their medieval authors, rather than with them, so that they
emphasize how humor changes over time. We might wonder if these tales were
intended to be erotic, but it is probable that they were designed to shock
rather than to arouse, not least because pornography in the modern sense does
not seem to have existed in the Middle Ages. (Although it is, of course,
possible that some readers did find them titillating.)
Perhaps we
should instead understand them as a product of a world in which sex was a
source of pleasure but also of fear, lust being an unruly natural force that is
not fully under human control, and which leads otherwise virtuous people to
defy social norms and commit mortal sin. But we should not ignore the
possibility that, like us, medieval people simply enjoyed laughing at the
ridiculous—and what could be more ridiculous than a man covered in penises?
Excerpted
from The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages by Katherine Harvey. 2022. Available from Reaktion Books.
A Plethora
of Penises: How People Wrote About Sex in the Middle Ages. By Katherine Harvey.
LitHub, November 17, 2022.
Since
virginity has always been particularly valued as a feminine virtue, it is
unsurprising that it was particularly associated with female saints, to the
extent that some historians have argued that it was almost impossible for a
non-virginal woman to be considered truly holy. The most obvious embodiment of
this ideal was the Virgin Mary, to whom many medieval Christians of both sexes
were passionately devoted. It was widely believed that she remained a virgin
after the conception and birth of Christ, and indeed for her entire life; some
even suggested that she had been impregnated by a ray of pure light, possibly
through the ear. There was a strong desire to separate the Virgin from not only
the indignities of sexual intercourse, but the related contaminations of the
female body, so that it was widely believed that the birth of Christ was free
from pain and from the polluting effects of afterbirth. Some authorities
suggested that, thanks to her Immaculate Conception, Mary would not have
menstruated.
Although Mary was pre-eminent among the medieval
virgin-saints, she had numerous popular counterparts, notably the Virgin
Martyrs. These Roman girls were the heroines of highly formulaic tales in which
they converted to Christianity against the wishes of their pagan families and
died in defence of their faith and their virginity, often after undergoing
extreme physical and mental trials. One of the best known was St Agnes, a
thirteen-year-old girl who faced torments including imprisonment in a brothel
and a miraculously unsuccessful burning before she was eventually stabbed to
death. Moreover, such powerfully disturbing stories were not confined to the
history books. When Oda of Hainault’s (d. 1158) parents arranged a marriage for
her, she insisted that she intended to preserve her virginity for her heavenly
spouse and cut off her nose with a sword. Although Oda lived as a nun for many
years after this incident, her hagiographer presented her as a martyr for
virginity.
The medieval Church also placed considerable
value on male virginity, a virtue embodied by Christ. The Golden Legend notes
that John the Baptist was also a lifelong virgin, while St George was ‘like
sand . . . dry of the lusts of the flesh’, and John the Evangelist abandoned
his wedding feast at Cana to follow Jesus and live a life of perpetual
virginity. Again, such figures were not restricted to the distant past. In the
eleventh century, the virgin king emerged as a significant figure; Edward the
Confessor, the English king whose death without issue in 1066 led to the Norman
Conquest, is probably the best known. Many bishops were similarly celebrated
for their sexual purity: St Wulfstan of Worcester (1062–95), for example, was
‘so exceptionally chaste that when his life was ended, he displayed in heaven
the sign of his virginity which was still intact’.
Despite its high ideals and strong rhetoric,
medieval Christianity was ultimately a religion that offered hope and the
possibility of forgiveness. The Virgin Mary seemed to have a particular
weakness for sexual sinners, and collections of her miracles often include
stories of fornicators who were saved by her intervention; the Castilian priest
Gonzalo de Berceo (c. 1197–c. 1264) included three examples in his Miracles of
Our Lady. The first concerned a sexton who left his abbey at night, in search
of sexual adventures. As he returned, he fell into a river and drowned. Devils
tried to carry off his soul, but the Queen of Heaven came to his rescue and the
monk was restored to life. Henceforth, he was a changed man – although he
remained devoted to Mary. She also saved a Cluniac monk who had sex with his
mistress before going on pilgrimage, and an abbess who found herself pregnant
after a single lapse. This woman’s sin was nearly uncovered, but Mary
intervened by spiriting her baby away to be raised by a hermit and eradicating
all physical signs of her ordeal.
What all of these individuals had in common,
besides their sexual transgressions, was a genuine contrition for their sins.
Perhaps the ultimate embodiment of such penitence was Mary Magdalene, whose
cult exploded in popularity around 1200. The medieval Magdalene was a composite
of several biblical Marys and bore little resemblance to the woman depicted in
the Gospels. According to The Golden Legend, she was ‘a woman who gave her body
to pleasure’, until she met Jesus. He forgave her sins, and she became one of
His most devoted followers. She received many ‘marks of love’ from Christ, who
resurrected her brother and allowed her to do the housekeeping on His travels.
If Mary Magdalene’s sexual sins did not bar her from Christ’s inner circle,
they also offered medieval Christians hope that they too might be redeemed.
Consequently, they celebrated her enthusiastically: her feast was one of the
most important in the Christian calendar, professions and institutions adopted
her as their patron saint, and everything from Oxbridge colleges to daughters
were named after her. As Humbert of Romans, the head of the Dominican order,
preached in the mid-thirteenth century: ‘no other woman in the world was shown
greater reverence, or believed to have greater glory in Heaven.’
Excerpt from The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages by Katherine Harvey.
The University of Chicago Press
The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much - or too little - sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. Other experiences are more familiar. Like us, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner and trying to get pregnant (or trying not to). They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalised. Above all, they shared our fondness for dirty jokes and erotic images. By exploring their sex lives, Katherine Harvey, historian and author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, brings ordinary medieval people to life, revealing details of their most personal thoughts and experiences, and providing us with an important and intimate connection to the past.
The Fires
of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages - Katherine Harvey. York Ideas, June 24, 2022.
By exploring their sex lives, The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages brings ordinary medieval people to life, revealing details of their most personal thoughts and experiences. It was possible, some believed, to die from having too much—or too little—sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. Other experiences are more familiar. Like us, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner or trying to get pregnant (or trying not to). They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalized. Above all, they shared our fondness for dirty jokes and erotic images. Justin Bengry sat down with Katherine Harvey to discuss the ways in which her book provides us with an important and intimate connection to the past.
The Fires
of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages. Notches, February 24, 2022.
When one thinks of medieval sex, images from classic movies tend to come to mind: John Boorman’s Excalibur, where a sexy Morgana Le Fay (Helen Mirren) in a breastplate seduces Arthur, Sir Gawain (Liam Neeson) and Merlin; Adso the novice’s (Christian Slater) first time with Valentina Vargas’s peasant girl in The Name of the Rose; the torrid relationship between the Norman Chrysagon de la Cruz (Charlton Heston) and the maiden Bronwyn, who captivated Cirlot, in The Warlord; Eric (Tony Curtis) tearing Janet Leigh’s dress so she would row better in The Vikings.; and the student Heron of Foix (Assi Dayan) and the noble Claudia (Anjelica Huston) consummating their (free) love in a deserted abbey amid the jacquerie in the rapturous A Walk with Love and Death, a curious mixture of marxism and hippie culture (it was released in 1969).
For better
or for worse, some recent films – Kingdom of Heaven and The Last Duel come to
mind – have probably made us reflect on what Middle Age sexuality was like. In
the former movie, the amorous encounters of Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom)
with the Orientalized Sibyl of Jerusalem (Eva Green) were a paean to the fusion
of cultures, while the violence that the latter movie radiated, in which the
contest seemed to begin in bed, made one think that people always wore armor
during the medieval period, even when they were at home.
In reality,
we only have vague and contradictory ideas about sex in medieval times. That’s
why British historian Katherine Harvey’s book The Fires of Lust: Sex in the
Middle Ages is so interesting. Harvey begins by debunking some persistent myths
about sex in the Middle Ages, such as beliefs that medieval times resembled a
Game of Thrones-like “anything goes” scenario; that the period was defined by
the droit du seigneur (as in Warlord); or that it was governed by the chastity
belt (which calls to mind Monica Vitti in On My Way to the Crusades I Met a
Girl Who…. In the scene, she sits down in a rage with a clanging sound after
her husband – who is leaving to join the Crusades – puts the contraption on
her. But the historian also warns that it would be a mistake to believe that
Europeans between 1100 and 1500 had sex in the same way we do, even if sex is a
universal human impulse. While the human body and its physical capabilities
have not changed much over the past millennia, she argues that there have been
significant transformations in how people view, understand and experience sex.
One
fundamental distinction is the medieval tendency to emphasize active
(implicitly male) and passive (female) sexual roles. Sex was something that men
did to women. That doesn’t mean that the medieval woman was just expected to
lie on her back and think of England, although it was significant that the man
did the penetrating while the woman was penetrated. In fact, sex between women
was only considered to be sex if one of them used an object to penetrate the
other. Other forms of sex between women were legally unknown, and it appears
that many people did not really understand what they could do with each other.
Back then,
people knew less about sex than we do now. These days, we have the internet. In
the Middle Ages, men had yet to discover the clitoris (they found it during the
Renaissance period). Apparently, people masturbated very little during the
Middle Ages; there is almost no evidence of it (although one cannot imagine Ivanhoe
or Richard the Lionheart talking about such things).
Other
sexual practices that are relatively commonplace today are similarly absent
from the historical record, indicating that they were very rare during the
Middle Ages. Harvey notes that there are no traces of oral sex in the
documents. “It may be that it seemed especially repugnant to a society that
associated the upper body with God and morality, while the lower body was
linked to filth and sin. To put the mouth in direct contact with the genitals
was to defile an organ [the mouth] made for better things.” It is possible that
a lack of hygiene played a role here. It seems that interfemoral intercourse –
sex with the penis between the woman’s legs but without penetration – was very
popular. That method, however, was frowned upon in homosexual male sex: in
1357, Nicletus Marmanga and Johannes Braganza were sentenced to death at the
stake for engaging in the practice.
Informed by
Roman Catholic Christianity and Galenic medicine, medieval sexual knowledge was
concerned about questions such as whether Adam and Eve had sex in paradise,
whether she menstruated before the Fall, and whether he had wet dreams. These
weren’t minor issues; they were of great concern to the abbess and scholar
Hildegard of Bingen and especially to St. Augustine, who believed that all sex
was sinful, and that orgasms made you stupid. The obsession with (female)
virginity was such that the mystic Margery Kempe thought only of being a
virgin, despite having birthed 14 children. However, from a health perspective,
it was thought that some sex was good for a woman. According to the medieval
theory of humors, women were cold by nature, and sex provided a woman with
warmth. Defloration was a critical moment. Women were subject to virginity
tests, and women devised ingenious methods to bypass them, such as putting
leeches in their vagina the day before the wedding to deceive their husbands
with the flow of blood that night.
If properly
performed, marital sex was not considered an obstacle to salvation; wisely, it
was understood that total abstinence would mean the end of the human race. But
there were certain rules people needed to obey. For instance, men had to avoid
excessive effort during sex; that was considered adultery with one’s own wife. Women
had to comply with their marital duties and could only refuse sex in certain
cases, such as when the husband was crazy, to avoid having intercourse in a
sacred place (if one had sex in a church, one had to re-consecrate it), or when
the husband wanted to commit sodomy. If a woman’s husband was crazy and wanted
to take her from behind in a church, the law supported her decision not to
participate. However, if a woman’s husband was a leper, she had no excuse for
not meeting his sexual needs. The concept of marital rape did not exist in the
Middle Ages.
Harvey
notes that the confluence of all these ideas must have caused many women to
suffer. For example, the author cites a special dispensation to remarry that
Pope Alexander III gave one man after he hurt his wife so badly on their
wedding night that she was rendered permanently unable to have sex again.
Surprisingly,
penalties for sexual violence did exist in the Middle Ages, but, as Harvey
emphasizes, they were not widely enforced. For example, in many jurisdictions,
rape was punishable by death. However, there are no known cases of any
Englishman being executed for that crime during medieval times. In fact,
marriage between the rapist and the victim was regarded as a good solution.
Medical
theory considered women to be defective men. Menstruation was seen as
disgusting and dangerous, but menopause was even worse; it was widely believed
that bad substances remained in the body after women’s periods ended. For its
part, semen was associated with brain matter.
Magic was
thought to make men impotent, a matter the authorities took very seriously.
Indeed, in 1390, two Parisians, Margot de la Barre and Marion la Droiturière,
were sentenced to be burned at the stake for rendering the latter’s former
lover useless with his new wife.
People
generally believed that women could only get pregnant through sex in the
missionary position. It was commonly suggested that a man should stay on top of
the woman for at least an hour, even if he (or she) was bored. Women were
believed to produce a seed when they orgasmed. Common wisdom in the Middle Ages
held that men and women needed to climax almost simultaneously (ladies first)
for conception to occur.
More interesting positions during sex could cause physical defects in the babies; some circumstances could even cause a woman to give birth to a toad. Sex with the woman on top and sex from behind were regarded as particularly egregious positions; the latter was associated with animals. Women who had twins were believed to have been with two men. Sometimes, adultery was punished with severe penalties, including death.
In the
early Middle Ages, bestiality was considered a minor crime, the equivalent of
masturbation. But as the belief in witches and their dealings with the devil in
the form of an animal became official thought, sex with an animal came to be
both a sin and a crime of heresy. At that point, it was customary to execute
both the sinner and the animal.
For
example, Harvey cites the interesting case of a Venetian artisan who was
accused of having carnal relations with his goat. To mitigate his guilt, the
man claimed that an accident had left him unable to have intercourse with a
woman or masturbate. A team of doctors examined him, while a judge authorized
two prostitutes to perform a number of experiments on him. Between them, they
concluded that he could get erections but did not feel anything from them. He
was declared to be a sodomite with extenuating circumstances. He was branded,
bludgeoned and had a hand cut off but escaped the death penalty. Harvey notes
that “the fate of the goat is unknown.”
Medieval
Europe had clear ideas about feminine beauty: among the desirable features were
blond hair, fair skin, rosy cheeks, a small red mouth, long limbs and a narrow
waist. Although some have suggested that the bosom was purely maternal,
evidence shows that people saw breasts in sexual terms: the aesthetic ideal was
small, round, firm breasts. For example, Bathsheba - with whom King David
committed adultery after he saw her bathing - represented the period’s ideal of
female beauty; she was depicted with those characteristics. In contrast, an
ample bosom gave women a bad reputation. Medieval medical texts explain methods
for reducing breast size, such as rubbing it with blood from piglet testicles,
but they never offered strategies for becoming more buxom. Additionally,
evidence shows that medieval women wore undergarments that made their breasts
appear smaller.
The ideal
man was tall, strong, well-proportioned and pale-skinned. Hair was considered a
sign of virility to such an extent that some men wore false beards and few
shaved. It was generally assumed that women liked well-endowed men, and
literature is replete with ladies obsessed with male genitalia.
No oral sex
in the Middle Ages. By Jacinto Antón. El País, November 15, 2022.
Every generation likes to imagine it discovered the joys of sex. Their parents might have indulged, but it was passionless employment for the sake of procreation. The Victorians put up considerable barriers against coitus, believing that buttons, buckles, and corsets would frustrate physical intimacy — lovers were supposed to be kept at bay until matrimony. The strategy’s success was … problematic. So, what of the Middle Ages? In those days they must have known how to squash desires of the flesh? Medieval historian Katherine Harvey concludes in her well-researched and lively book that, like today, lust, in all its myriad forms, had its way. Big time.
Garden
variety lust is well surveyed because it occurs in marriage as well as before.
As a rule, medieval people married young — it was the only acceptable way to
channel urges. Is it any surprise that the double standard was up and running?
Girls were expected to be virgins up until marriage, while boys, well, boys
will be boys. Courtship was a family matter: the wealthy and titled wanted
their children to marry into the same class but, even among the common folk,
clan approval was vital. That meant that others had a say in who you were going
to have sex with, not you alone. A late 15th-century Londoner, Margery
Sheppard, clearly articulated the restriction: “I will do as my father will
have me; I will never have none against my father’s will.”
Attraction
was not unimportant, of course. Breasts were featured performers. Interestingly
enough, men of the time preferred small, firm breasts. The French poet Eustache
Deschamps (1346-1406) favored tight dresses with wide necklines that pushed the
bosom and throat forward. Harvey cites a German poem in which a stepmother
advises her daughter on how to seduce a man: leave her bodice unlaced, thus
“causing his courage to rise” (among other things!). Large and loose breasts
suggested ample sexual experience and that impression might damage a single
woman’s reputation. A Spanish text insists that moist armpits were a desirable
feminine feature. Of course, the ladies had their preferences. Tall, strong men
with fair skin were generally thought to be superior. Body hair and a mane were
marks of masculinity (Oh, Fabio, you missed your moment). Large and hard
penises were preferred because they were signs of abundant sperm.
Celibacy
requirements for the clergy were in force. They were not only barred from
marriage but encouraged to remain chaste. Was it Bertrand Russell who opined
that, of all the sexual possibilities, the most perverse was abstinence? Harvey
provides evidence that priestly chastity was honored as much in the breach as
the observance. Some priests bribed bishops to turn a blind eye to their
behavior. In 1072 the Archbishop of Rouen had to flee a synod when the
assembled clerics stoned him because he attempted to take away their
concubines. Living up to the no-sex standard was difficult. The popular
suspicion was that priests, having no wives of their own, copulated with the
wives of others. When a woman complained of her husband’s impotence to St.
Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, he allegedly quipped, “Let us make him a priest and
the power will immediately be restored to him.”
The church
(then or now) hasn’t dared to admit just how blatantly ineffective it is to
deny basic human needs and inclinations. Harvey notes that “few flouted the
rules quite so blatantly as Jean de Heinsberg, Bishop of Liège (1419-1456), who
reportedly had 65 children.” She adds that, at the turn of the 16th century,
somewhere around 45 to 60 percent of the clergy in Brabant were fined for
sexual offenses at some point in their career. Despite the prohibition on
clerical marriage, many priests continued to have sexual relationships and even
formed long-term partnerships. Monks also enjoyed the intimate company of women.
One, the prior of Sant Joan les Fonts, kept a woman named Ermesenda and refused
to comply when the bishop ordered that she must go. Harvey notes that
“According to the other monks, the elderly pair spent much of their time
reading in the kitchen. This relationship was clearly about much more than sex:
there is something rather touching about this image of a long-term couple
keeping each other company in their old age.”
Fornication
was forbidden, though tolerated given what all accepted as the wayward passions
of youth. Adultery was a more serious offense, calling for public condemnation
and public whippings. Forms of retribution could be over-the-top sadistic: one
punishment associated with adultery demanded that the errant couple be stripped
naked, bound together around their genitals, and then flogged as they were
paraded through the streets.
Fornication,
adultery, and incest were plainly off limits, but bestiality was the worst. In
Castile Spain both the human and the animal involved in such acts could be
punished by death. (The demise of the poor beast eradicated the memory of the
sin.) In Venice, a man was accused of bestiality, but in his defense claimed
that he had been unable to have relations with a woman or even masturbate. “The
judge … required two prostitutes to do ‘numerous experiments’ in order to test
(his) claims, … (and this) medical evidence meant that he escaped the death
penalty.” Harvey drily tells us that the man was branded, beaten, and lost a
hand. The fate of the goat is unknown.
Prostitution,
the oldest profession, was subject to condemnation mitigated by understanding.
The church was concerned that, because a woman’s clients were not always known,
it was impossible to determine if some of the transactions were adulterous. On
the other hand, the sex worker’s wages were earned through bodily labor so she
was allowed to keep them. A distinction was also made between a woman who had
sex for pleasure and ones who did so for financial need and desperation. The
latter could be granted forgiveness and do penance. Mary Magdalene, in most
scholarly opinions, was a repentant prostitute who became a follower of Jesus.
Pope Innocent III asserted that men who married prostitutes in order to reform
them were doing good acts that counted toward remission of their own sins. Even
in medieval times it was acknowledged that sex work was often a last resort,
not a career choice.
As far as
same-gender relationships are concerned, they were forbidden and could be
punished by death. Still, same-sex attractions and persons born as one gender
who dressed and acted as another were not uncommon. Rolandino Ronchaia (in
14th-century Venice) might be described as intersex, a man who, because of a
hormonal imbalance, was more feminine than masculine. He was socialized as a
man, even though he had breasts and it was generally agreed that he looked more
female than he did male. He eventually dressed as a woman, was known as
Rolandina, and had sex with men, hiding as much of himself as would be
recognized and allowing penetration so the male partner was often deceived and
thought him a woman. This was not a survival strategy that could endure,
however, and he was tried as a sodomite and burnt to death. An Englishman named
John Rykener in the late 14th century sometimes went by the name Eleanor, lived
as a woman for long periods, and had sex with men and women, including priests
and nuns. Today he might be considered bisexual, given his activity, but
nonbinary, trans, or gender fluid as to his identity.
In her
conclusion, Harvey admits that written records about sex in the Middle Ages
focused on the sensational rather than the commonplace. As in the contemporary
media, the titillating garners the most ink. Most marriages were happy and
priests who observed their vows did not make news. The historian cautions that
her account of sexual crimes and punishments is somewhat bleaker than the
truth. “Just like today,” she writes, “medieval sexual experiences could be
horrifically violent or extremely funny, but most fell somewhere in between.”
What’s more, many of the period’s representations of sex in the popular culture
are suspicious, often not grounded in fact. When it came to copulation,
spinning a good yarn was preferred. Harvey’s The Fires of Lust is part of that
venerable tradition. She has written an entertaining but thoughtful study,
descriptive without becoming didactic or pedantic. Her message is, depending on
your perspective, reassuring: “then” is not all that different from “now” —
when it comes to sex, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Book
Review: “The Fires of Lust” — Copulation in the Middle Ages. By Thomas Filbin.
The Arts Fuse, September 13, 2022.
In 1354, a prostitute with a tragic background called Rolandina came before a Venetian court: she had been born a man, Rolandino Ronchaia, but with strong female characteristics.
He/she married a woman but the marriage was a failure: despite having breasts, Rolandino’s male genitalia was completely non-functioning. When Rolandino’s wife died of plague he/she eventually moved to Venice to become a prostitute, now working as Rolandina. Fellow prostitutes and clients were convinced Rolandina was a woman, for she concealed her penis and only practiced anal sex. What caused the Venetian judges most outrage was that she had seduced her many clients into committing sodomy, then considered an egregious crime. Although probably identifying as a woman and thus transgender, Rolandia was tried as a sodomite – a man who had had sex with other men – and was sentenced to death by burning.
Those who have watched Game of Thrones are forgiven for believing that life in the Middle Ages really was almost always this nasty, brutish and short. Poor Rolandia’s ‘crime’ and its punishment would seem to bear this out. We’re also encouraged to think of the medieval period (1000 to 1500) as one replete with every sort of sexual violence and oppression, a time when the strong could abuse the weak, when rape or droit de seigneur were prevalent; a time when if you were poor or of low birth and suffered sexual abuse, any recourse to justice through the courts of law was so meagre as to be pointless.
But the reality was far more complex – and interesting. From the very start of her magnificent The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, Katherine Harvey soon disabuses us not only of our Game of Thrones illusions about that period’s sexual mores but also about the social structures that contained them: the dynamics were very different. Men and women had to walk a tightrope of constraints that stretched tautly between Church and State, both of which did their utmost to foster a patriarchal and restrictive society. But at different levels, those who lived before and after Chaucer’s time faced many of the same social and sexual problems that we encounter today. Sometimes these were dealt with humanely and sensibly and sometimes not – certainly by today’s standards. Even so, sex crimes were taken seriously and were punishable by a whole raft of different laws.
Indeed, it is the medieval legal system and its chroniclers that have handed Harvey such a rich vein of history to explore and illuminate for us. She does so with a combination of authoritative writing and a delightfully engaging style. This lack of academic aridity makes for a really splendid read; I can’t think of a more brilliant Christmas book to give to one’s significant other if they have even a passing interest in medieval Europe or the rich and extraordinary sex life of its inhabitants.
The Fires of Lust. By Jamie Maclean. Erotic Review, November 10, 2021
In the popular imagination, the history of sex is a straightforward one. For centuries, the people of the Christian West lived in a state of sexual repression, straitjacketed by an overwhelming fear of sin, combined with a complete lack of knowledge about their own bodies. Those who fell short of the high moral standards that church, state and society demanded of them faced ostracism and punishment. Then in the mid-20th century things changed forever when, in Philip Larkin’s oft-quoted words, ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’
In reality,
the history of human sexuality is far more interesting and wild. Many
prevailing presumptions about the sex lives of our medieval ancestors are
rooted in the erroneous belief that they lived in an unsophisticated age of
religious fanaticism and medical ignorance. While Christian ideals indeed
influenced medieval attitudes to sex, they were rather more complex than
contemporary prejudices suggest. Christian beliefs interacted with medieval
medical theories to help shape some surprising and sophisticated ideas about
sex, and a wide variety of different sexual practices, long before the sexual
revolution.
The case of
the French cleric Arnaud de Verniolle illustrates the sophistication of
medieval sexuality. One day in the early 14th century, when Arnaud was a
student, he had sex with a prostitute. Several years later, he confessed this
lapse to the Inquisition, explaining that:
“At the time they were burning the lepers,
I was living in Toulouse; one day I did it with a prostitute. And after I had
perpetrated this sin my face began to swell. I was terrified and thought I had
caught leprosy; I thereupon swore that in future I would never sleep with a
woman again.”
Arnaud’s
tale is not unusual. Many medieval men found themselves with undesirable
symptoms after a brothel visit, and attributed their plight to their sexual
behaviour. Among the various medical miracles attributed to St Thomas Becket,
for example, was the cure of Odo de Beaumont, who became leprous immediately
after a late-12th-century visit to a prostitute. Much has been made of the
medieval tendency to interpret disease as a product of sexual sin. Too much. In
fact, the medieval tendency to see disease as sexual sin was not solely based
on moral judgments – there were also strong medical elements.
Concerns
about the sexual transmission of disease via prostitutes were often addressed
in an entirely rational manner. Sometimes, for example, local authorities took
preventative action: a set of regulations from 15th-century Southwark banished
women with a ‘burning sickness’ (probably gonorrhoea) from the local stews
(brothels). Moreover, the concerns of the people of Southwark were rooted in
medical theory. The Prose Salernitan Questions, a 13th-century medical text,
explained how a woman might be left unharmed after having intercourse with a
leper, but her next lover would contract the disease: the coldness of the
female complexion meant that the leper’s semen would remain in the woman’s
uterus, where it would turn to putrid vapour. When the penis of the healthy man
came into contact with this vapour, the heat of his body would ensure that it
was absorbed through his open pores. Sores would soon appear on his genitals,
before spreading around his body. Placed within the context of contemporary
medical ideas, Arnaud’s fears over his tryst with a prostitute made perfect
sense.
Fortunately
for Arnaud, and many others, it was often possible to treat sexually
transmitted leprosy. The 14th-century English physician John of Gaddesden
suggested several protective measures that a man should take after having
sexual relations with a woman he believed to be leprous. He should cleanse his
penis as soon as possible, either with his own urine or with vinegar and water.
Then he should undergo intensive bleeding by a phlebotomist, followed by a
three-month course of purgation, ointments and medication.
If such
prophylactic measures failed, then the patient might need one of the many
remedies for swollen, itchy or pustulent genitals found in medical treatises
and recipe collections. The 12th-century medical compendium Trotula noted that
there are men ‘who suffer swelling of the virile member, having there and under
the prepuce many holes, and they suffer lesions’. Such a man should use a
poultice to reduce the swelling. Then, ‘we wash the ulcerous or wounded neck of
the prepuce with warm water, and sprinkle on it powder of Greek pitch and dry
rot of wood or of worms and rose and root of mullein and bilberry’.
Such
preparations were undoubtedly unpleasant, but the surgical remedies recommended
by the 14th-century English surgeon John of Arderne were downright brutal. In
one of his recorded cases, ‘the man’s yard began to swell after coitus, due to
the falling of his own sperm, whereof he suffered great grievousness of burning
and aching as men do when they are so hurt’. Arderne treated this unfortunate
individual by cutting away the dead flesh with a blade, then applying quicklime
– a process that must have been extremely painful, but apparently produced a
cure.
Both
Trotula and Arderne describe symptoms that suggest a sexually transmitted
disease, and Arderne directly links sexual intercourse with his patient’s
symptoms. However, neither author explicitly identifies their remedies as cures
for diseases transmitted by sexual contact. The man with the swollen yard might
well have been viewed by his contemporaries as a victim not of infection, but
of overindulgence.
Medieval
physicians saw too much sex as a real medical concern. Conventional wisdom held
that several noblemen died of sexual excess. John of Gaunt, the 14th-century
first duke of Lancaster, allegedly ‘died of putrefaction of his genitals and
body, caused by the frequenting of women, for he was a great fornicator’.
Today, his symptoms would suggest venereal disease, but his contemporaries
would probably have seen parallels with the case of Ralph, count of Vermandois.
This 12th-century French nobleman had recently married his third wife when he
fell seriously ill. During his convalescence, he was advised by his physician
that he must abstain from intercourse, but disregarded this warning. When the
doctor detected from Ralph’s urine that he had done so, he advised him to set
his house in order, for he would be dead within three days – a prognosis that
proved to be accurate.
According
to medieval understandings of the body, based on the system of the four humours
(blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile), these men’s behaviour presented
problems. The humours system derived from the idea that health was based on an
equilibrium of the humours, and illness the product of imbalance. Humours were
balanced, and good health maintained, through the expulsion of various bodily
fluids, including semen. Regular sexual intercourse was thus part of a healthy
life for most men, but moderation was key. Too much sex would leave the body
depleted; in the most serious cases it could have fatal consequences, as Count
Ralph found to his cost.
On the
other hand, medieval medical authority held that too little sex presented a
medical problem: celibacy was potentially detrimental to health, particularly
for young men. Long-term celibacy meant the retention of excess semen, which
would affect the heart, which in turn could damage other parts of the body. The
celibate might experience symptoms including headaches, anxiety, weight loss
and, in the most serious cases, death. Although celibacy was highly valued as a
spiritual virtue in medieval society, in medical terms the celibate was as much
at risk as the debauchee.
King Louis
VIII of France, for example, insisted on remaining faithful to his wife while
fighting in the Albigensian Crusade of 1209-29. Conventional opinion attributed
his death to the resulting celibacy, making him the most famous victim of death
by celibacy. According to the 12th-century Norman poet Ambroise, abstinence
claimed many victims:
“By
famine and by malady
More
than 3,000 were struck down
At the
Siege of Acre and in the town
But in
pilgrims’ hearing I declare
A
hundred thousand men die there
Because
from women they abstained.
’Twas
for God’s love that they restrained
Themselves.
They had not perished thus
Had they
not been abstemious.”
For most crusaders, sexual abstinence was (at most) a temporary inconvenience, to be endured only until they returned home and were reunited with their wives. But for medieval Europe’s many priests, celibacy was a lifelong state, and this could leave them facing a difficult choice. Thomas Becket’s doctor urged him to give up celibacy for the sake of his health, telling him that the celibate life was incompatible with his age and complexion, but the saint disregarded the physician’s advice. Becket lived for many years after this (and ultimately died a martyr at the hands of an assassin), but other bishops were less fortunate. An unnamed 12th-century archdeacon of Louvain, having struggled to remain celibate for a long time, was promoted against his will to the bishopric of the same city. For a month, he abstained from all sexual activity, but soon his genitals swelled up and he became seriously ill. His family and friends urged him to secretly ‘take a woman to himself’, but he was determined to resist temptation. Within days, he was dead.
Non-saintly
celibates who faced the challenge of celibacy tended to favour the obvious
cure. Maurice, an 11th-century bishop of London, was rumoured to have been
advised by his doctors to ‘look to the health of his body by the emission of
humours’, and to have prolonged his life by breaking his vow of celibacy.
Others, hoping never to face this predicament, adopted behaviours (informed by
medical theory) believed to protect the health of a celibate man by promoting
alternative forms of excretion.
Humours-based medical theory held that all bodily fluids were processed forms of blood, and that their common origins rendered them interchangeable. Consequently, regular phlebotomy was deemed necessary for celibate men: routine bleedings were widely used in medieval monasteries to balance the monks’ humours and thus minimise the risk of involuntary emissions of semen. Weeping (for example, the lachrymose prayers favoured by pious individuals) could also serve as an alternative to sexual intercourse, with the blood that would have been converted into semen instead producing tears. Exercise and bathing, both of which produced sweat, were also useful for those who wished to practise long-term abstinence.
As well as
taking measures to encourage the excretion of superfluities, a celibate man
needed to be careful about what he put into his body. Diet thus directly
related to sexual health. The problem was threefold. Firstly, the proximity of
the genitals to the stomach meant that the former would be warmed by the food
or wine contained in the latter, providing the heat that defined the male body,
and was necessary for the production of semen. Secondly, semen was thought to
be the product of completely digested food, with nourishing foods such as meat
and eggs especially conducive to its production. Finally, certain windy
foodstuffs (including beans) produced an excess of flatulence, which in turn
produced an erection. Taken together, these factors made overindulgence at the
table a real problem for priests. Numerous medieval writers told tales of monks
who ate too well, and consequently experienced a violent desire for sex, along
with almost continuous emissions of semen.
On the
other hand, knowledge is power, and religious men could use fasting as a
practical strategy to protect themselves from the health risks posed by
clerical celibacy. A man who wished to avoid sex while maintaining his physical
wellbeing would be well advised to fast regularly, and to eat a diet that
consisted primarily of the cold foods and drinks that ‘impede, repress and
thicken semen and extinguish lust’. Salted fish, vegetables in vinegar, and
cold water were thought to be particularly suitable foods for monks.
In
addition, some medical writers recommended anaphrodisiacs for men who wished to
avoid sexual intercourse. The 11th-century physician Constantine the African
recommended rue, a strong and bitter tea made from an evergreen shrub. Drinking
rue, he wrote, would ‘dry out the sperm and kill the desire for intercourse’.
Two centuries later, Peter of Spain (the only practising physician ever to
become pope) was also recommending rue; alternatively, one could drink juice of
water-lilies for 40 days. Maino de Maineri (a 14th-century physician whose
employers included two bishops) included advice on anaphrodisiacs in his
Regimen Sanitatis: a man who wished to repress lust should make use of ‘things
which are cold’, such as lentils and lentil water cooled with cauliflower
seeds, and water-lily and lettuce seeds and lettuce water, strongly vinegary,
and also seeds of purslane. Being both celibate and healthy was difficult but,
for those willing to live a life in which one’s chief pleasures were prayer and
vegetable water, it was not impossible.
Although
the most famous cases of death by celibacy relate to male clerics, women were,
in their own way, equally vulnerable to this medical problem. According to
contemporary medical theory, both sexes produced seed that was necessary for
conception – and just like semen, the female seed needed to be expelled from
the body during regular sexual intercourse. In a woman who was not sexually
active, the seed would be retained within her body; as it built up, it would
cause suffocation of the womb. The symptoms of this condition included fainting
and shortness of breath, and in the most serious cases it could be fatal. For
women, as for men, the best way to avoid death by celibacy was to get married
and have regular, Church-sanctioned intercourse with one’s spouse. If this was
not possible, there were a range of useful remedies, including restricted diets
and vinegar suppositories. Some physicians, however, recommended a rather
startling alternative: masturbation.
Unsurprisingly,
the medieval Church took a rather dim view of this practice: most medieval
penitentials (handbooks for confessors) identified masturbation as a sin, and
imposed heavy penances for it – typically around 30 days of fasting, but
sometimes as much as two years. On the other hand, masturbation was usually
placed towards the bottom of the hierarchy of sexual sins, and confessors were
permitted to make some allowance for those (including unmarried youths) who
lacked another outlet for their desires. This caveat reflects the Church’s
awareness of contemporary medical teachings: it was impossible to ignore the
fact that medical authorities from Galen onwards had recommended masturbation
as a form of preventative medicine for both men and women.
Later
medieval physicians were rarely as explicit as Galen and other ancients. Late
medieval medical books rarely mentioned male masturbation. For women lacking
regular sexual relations, they offered a variety of treatments, including,
stimulation of the genitals (either by the patient or by a medical
professional). Such treatments were particularly suitable for women who were suffering
from suffocation of the womb. If such a woman could not marry (for example,
because she was a nun), and if her life was in genuine danger, then genital
massage might be the only solution, and could even be performed without sin.
The 14th-century English physician John of Gaddesden thought that such a woman
should try to cure her condition through exercise, foreign travel and
medication. But ‘if she has a fainting fit, the midwife should insert a finger
covered with oil of lily, laurel or spikenard into her womb, and move it
vigorously about’.
Other
medical writers, including clerics, echoed Gaddesden’s teachings. The
13th-century Dominican friar Albertus Magnus wrote extensively about human
health. He argued that certain women needed to ‘use their fingers or other
instruments until their channels are opened and by the heat of the friction and
coition the humour comes out, and with it the heat’. Albertus thought that such
a course of action would not only solve women’s health problems, but also
lessen their desire for sexual intercourse, since ‘their groins are cooled off
and they are made more chaste’. The view that female masturbation could prevent
less socially acceptable forms of female sexual activity helped some medieval
medical experts countenance it.
As with
sexual intercourse, masturbation was to be enjoyed in moderation. Albertus told
of a lustful monk who came to an unfortunate end: having ‘desired’ a beautiful
woman 70 times before matins, the monk died. His autopsy revealed that his
brain had shrunk to the size of a pomegranate, while his eyes had been
destroyed. The manner of his death reflected one of the terrible realities of
medieval life: sin was just one of many dangers associated with sex.
Long before
syphilis arrived in Europe in the late 15th century, sexual health merited
widespread concern. Prostitutes and their clients were thought to be at risk of
contracting leprosy, a fearsome possibility for Arnaud and many others. But
contagious disease was not the only problem. Arnaud vowed that he would never
sleep with another woman, but he didn’t simply give up sex. Instead, he
admitted that ‘in order to keep this oath, I began to abuse little boys’.
This
solution was as distasteful then as now. It also reflected the widespread
belief that sexual activity of some kind was medically necessary for most
adults, and echoed fears that clerical celibacy would force priests into the
same vice. When it came to sex, medieval people faced a dilemma: how to
preserve the vital bodily equilibrium without exposing themselves to either
disease or sin? The decline of humoural medicine and changes in religious
belief have removed some of the anxieties faced by Arnaud and medieval people.
But not everything has changed. Discourses about sex still revolve around
conflicting demands of health, social pressures and personal inclination. As it
was in the Middle Ages, sex in the 21st century remains both a pleasure and a
problem.
The
salacious Middle Ages. By Katharine Harvey. Aeon, January 23, 2018.
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