Sex in the Middle Ages

Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And we're just popping up here to tell you some insider info. If you would like to listen to Gone Medieval ad-free and get early access in bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With the History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries. Such as my new series on everyone's favourite conquerors, the Normans. Or my recent exploration of the castles that made Britain.

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Hello, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. Now, in a podcast about the Middle Ages, you're likely to hear a lot about kings and queens, battles, armies and castles.

Things you might have learnt about at school, and we've had plenty of those excellent topics here on Gone Medieval already. But for a lot of people in the Middle Ages, everyday life would have been concerned with quite different things. Work, family, worrying about what to cook for your next meal, the sort of things I'm...

thinking about right now and of course people had relationships they fell in love and they had sex but I imagine you didn't learn much about medieval sexuality at school and this is a topic that's surrounded by rather a lot of myths Sex was of course a key part of society and everyday life.

But how much do we really know about those very private aspects of medieval life? To find out more, I have invited medieval historian Dr Eleanor Janega from the London School of Economics to Go Medieval because she specialises in, among other things, medieval secularism. sexuality.

Also the apocalypse, but we're going to leave that for another day. So Eleanor, thank you so much for joining me here today. Thank you so much for having me. It's a very big pleasure as always. Now, I do need to point out right now that Eleanor has just published a really...

brilliant new book that I really want you to check out. It's called The Middle Ages, A Graphic History, which is a sort of illustrated myth-busting history that I would highly recommend to everyone. It's highly readable, entertaining, filled with really state-of-the-art research and some of the...

topics that you might not normally think about when you learn about the Middle Ages. So that is really quite an achievement. So congratulations on that. Oh, thank you so much, Kat. And she's a part of our History Hit family. So she's got her own series about the Middle Ages on History Hit TV.

be. But now let's get to it and before we start properly I should probably warn our listeners, although this might not come as a surprise, that today's episode contains adult themes and language. Now I've...

I wanted to talk to you about all of this for a long time because I'm really intrigued about it. I mean, when you say you're a medievalist, sex might not be the first research topic that comes to mind. But why is that important to study today? Well, I think that one of the reasons why is... sexuality in the medieval period is so interesting and important for us to study is because actually medieval sexuality and the way that medieval people talk about or conceptualize sexuality

differs massively from our own conceptions of sexuality now. And by that, I don't mean the idea that sex is necessarily always bad and evil and you shouldn't be doing it. And so medieval people were completely disinterested in it and attempting to ignore it constantly. What I mean by that is that

People's ideas about sex were very different. Their ideas of how desire works, who was more interested in sex, the things that sex could do, or even the way that sex was conceptualized as a part of a healthy body are totally... different from how we think about it now.

So when we think about sexuality in the medieval period, what that kind of helps us do is pick apart our own ideas about sexuality or our own assumptions. And people tend to think about sex as this concrete something and sexuality is something that always stays. is exactly the same and it's always completely determined by biological forces. And that's simply not the case. So if we look at sexuality over time, it can sort of help us to unpick our own societal biases.

You're mainly researching Europe, aren't you? And that's sort of the second half mainly of the medieval period. But in that period, how... much do we actually know about this topic and quite crucially how do we know well this is a really great question because a big part of the way that we learn about medieval sexuality is actually through what i would call hostile witnesses so we learn

lot about sex actually from theologians and you know this is one of these things where it's kind of difficult to say exactly what is going on because you know people don't tend to write down about all of the sex that they're having in the medieval period and you know keep that

very close run diary and then that doesn't get handed down from person to person so one of the ways that we look about and think about sexuality is by going to intellectuals and saying okay well what do they have to say about it and medieval theologians have rather lots

unsurprisingly and actually a lot of kind of medieval conceptions of sex comes from the late antique period so we see rather a lot of input from saint augustine for example by the high medieval period however we've got thomas aquinas chiming in but you also

We also have any number of physicians who have things to say about it as well. So, you know, Avicenna has a lot to say about sexuality, these sorts of things. We also see a lot about sexuality, for example, in the extraordinarily hostile witness. of penitential literature. So penitentials, for those who don't know, are essentially guidebooks for priests who are doing convention in church.

And what they do is a couple of things in the first place. They give priests ideas of things that they can ask people when they come to confession so that they can just kind of spur the conversation along. And they also give priests an idea of what inappropriate... penance would be for sin

And so you can see what priests are kind of concerned with what they think sexual sin is. And so that does two things, because on the one hand, it shows us what they think is inappropriate sexuality and what shouldn't be happening. But at the same time, it kind of tells us what... is happening despite the best efforts of the church. Because the point is you wouldn't be asking about it if you didn't think that people were doing it.

So we know a lot about sexual practice because what priests are called in to ask their parishioners about. So that's certainly the case. We also do find some indications about sex that people are having in their own words. For example, we know that Peter Abelard, who was the famous 12th century philosopher, he writes down a lot about his sexual relationship with Eloise of Montreal, his eventually wife. And Eloise writes about it pretty eloquently as well.

they write a lot about the relationship back and forth we have correspondence between each other where they reference their sex lives and we definitely have Abelard you know going on and on and on about all of the sex that they have as well so it's not that we lack those sources completely

So essentially, we get a kind of patchwork that we put together. So it could be that some instances are religious or extraordinarily high-level intellectual discussions, but it can also just be kind of looking at what's happening on the ground.

from various reports. But is there a bit of a bias there? If we're getting a lot of, it seems slightly contradictory, that we're getting so much of that information from the people who aren't having a lot of sex, like those who are in monasteries, for example, and they're sort of slightly...

higher elements of society does that give us a bit of a bias towards those elements do we still get the sort of everyday people it's interesting because yeah i mean certainly there is a bias that we have to control for and i think that most medieval historians are doing that all the time right

Because unfortunately for us, the way in the first place, just who is literate comes into play. And of course, that's higher level people more generally. And of course, the church is a pretty hostile witness. And, you know, they're of the opinion, the church's generalized opinion is that the only... time that sex is acceptable is if it happens between two married people and it's specifically happening for the purposes of procreation.

So we know that's not something that happens, right? Because there are all these other kind of stringent rules that get applied on top of that. For example, you shouldn't be having sex on Sundays because you were supposed to be going to church. You shouldn't be having sex on any saints feast days because that's a holy day.

shouldn't have sex during christmas you shouldn't have sex during lent you know there are all these prohibitions about it and we know that people don't follow those rules because otherwise no one would have ever been born in september in the medieval period that's a good point So, you know, we know that's not necessarily what's happening, what's going on. But sometimes also the way that the things that we have are just incredibly socially.

hostile to individuals about sex. So for example, a source that I'm really obsessed with and love working with is On Courtly Love, which is by Andreas Kapalanis. And it's, you know, ostensibly about... courtly love which is a form of romance basically practiced by rich people where they sit around and write love letters to each other especially with considering that the woman is married and the man is not and they attempt to have sex and it's all very incredibly highly formalized.

But on courtly love, Andreas Cappellanos, who writes it, he's specifically writing for a courtly audience. And when he's talking about common people, he specifically says that common people aren't even capable of love and that they copulate like animals. is what he says about them. You're not supposed to bother, for example, if you are a person of the nobility with attempting to have a love relationship with a peasant person because they are talked about and seen as though they are lower.

Like almost a different species to rich people. So he considers the people who are capable of love to be sort of like the middle classes, so people who would come from the guilds, for example, and the higher and lower nobility and royalty. Those are the people who can actually love. Those are the people who have some kind of romance behind the sex that they're having.

But common people then are supposedly running about in the dirt. To be fair to him, like sometimes when we get to hear from lower class people, we do see that, you know, they kind of are having sex in the dirt. There, for example, we have like body rhymes. There is a body rhyme called A Serving Girl's Holiday from late medieval England. And it is written from the point of view of a young serving girl who goes to the ale festival with her boyfriend, Jack. They then have sex in a field.

she becomes pregnant and she's worried about telling her boss that she's pregnant. So it's, you know, those things certainly happen, but... In a world without privacy and in a world where people don't own their own homes, sexuality becomes a much different thing than it would be for us. We see it as something that really necessarily happens behind closed doors, but in a world where there aren't even necessarily...

closed doors. How do people get around that? So we certainly can hear from ordinary people, but you have to get through a lot of muck and a lot of kind of bias-rich people in order to do it. So you mentioned earlier...

about the church how much control then really did the church have over people's sex lives I mean Do you think that was a genuine way that it would rule most people's lives? Well, see, this is a great question because one of my absolute bugbears about the medieval period is how people tend to think that the church is hiding underneath everyone's beds. any moment they're going to come for them you know and there's like church police out to get you if you're having the wrong kind of sex

And actually, one of the things that I really encourage people to think about when we talk about medieval sexuality from the point of the church is that it's actually a history of the church being like, stop that. Stop that right now. I know you're having sex in all these ways and you need to knock it off. And people saying...

no essentially you know so again you know you have people who are having sex at times that they're not supposed to be we know that there are people having sex in ways that they're not supposed to be because you know we'll see it in for example like marginal we will see people making images of like, for example, oral sex, which is prohibited by the church.

You know, any number of these things, the fact that it's coming up in penitentials, you know, penitentials might be a way of attempting to control people, but fundamentally they are an after the fact form of control, right? So it's very much closing the barn gate after the horse is bolted. So, you know, if you're asking someone, for example, as Bouchard of Worms encourages his priestly audiences to ask women if they have been making strap-on dildos and using them on each other.

And, you know, you can go ahead and ask about that. But if it's already been done, it's already been done. So, you know, you might, if a really devout person admits to that and then does the peasants, that's fine. But fundamentally, they've already done it. So this attempt at control is something that I find really interesting because in a way, when we think about sexuality in the medieval period, it's a history of the church trying to get people to only have procreative.

of penis and vagina sex and to only consider that the only type of sex that is worthwhile or acceptable. And what I think is quite funny about that is medieval people don't seem to have an interest in that at all whatsoever. They want to have a lot of non-procreative sex.

They seem to be considering that the good stuff. But at this point here in the 21st century, we've sort of internalized the church's view on sex, which is that quote unquote real sex is penis and vagina sex. And anything else is just kind of. know foreplay or it doesn't really count whereas medieval people seem to be really interested in the kind of sex that we call foreplay or not real so it's it's interesting because the church tries really hard but they seem to be doing a better job with us

than they did with medieval people. That's a really interesting perspective, I think. So there was really a lot of variety then. And clearly then, even though this might be what the church was trying to get across, sex didn't just relate to procreation. I know you've got some really quite good sources on that as well haven't you what sort of other acceptable reasons and what other sort of

insight we can get into that. It's interesting because I already mentioned courtly love and there is one kind of way of relating to courtly love literature and like all the high sexual innuendo in terms of courtly love I mentioned already.

that it is about kind of married women a lot of the time and unmarried men being in love with each other. And the conceit there is that marriage has absolutely nothing to do with love. It's something that you do for political reasons or because your family got you into it. So you don't necessarily... love your husband or wife, you just have children with them because that's what's expected of you.

So there is this conceit within courtly love that the kinds of sex that they are aiming to have are the kinds where you can't get pregnant. So you can go ahead and have penis and vagina sex with your husband or wife, but with your love. you would be having...

For example, you know, oral sex. And there's one reading, for example, of the medieval equivalent of a bestseller, the Romain de la Rose, which is that the rose in question that they're talking about the whole time is a way of talking about women's vulva. So it's actually just like a really high and extended metaphor for kind of like external sex with a woman, which is the kind that, yeah, you would probably be trying to have if you were in love with someone, but you didn't want to get them.

So we certainly know about that. We definitely know about certain kinds of sex from love letters and that sort of a thing. So, you know, yeah, it's true that the clergy were spending a lot of time telling people about the types of sex they shouldn't be having. But we know that the clergy are also having sex with each other.

of a high rate. So we have a lot of love letters back and forth with monks and nuns, for example. There's a really lovely love letter from the German lands between two nuns. And one of them has moved convents and the other one's riding turns. saying that when she thinks of her and the way she used to hold her little breasts, she wants to die.

You know, and so we know about all these kinds of sex that are kind of happening in these circumstances. But again, it's really interesting. I've already mentioned Tilda's one, so I'll go ahead and do it again. Why not?

And we know, for example, that a lot of dildos exist because we have things like receipts for them. So leather workers who would make really intricate... dildos for people that's a thing and we do tend to think that they are used in what we would call lesbian circumstances a lot of the time we know that they can be sold with harnesses and things like that of course medieval people don't really see themselves as being Gay.

in the way that we would because for them there's no such thing as homosexuality or heterosexuality instead you're either a sodomite or you're not and for them of course sodomy is defined by any kind of sex that can't get you pregnant so all those things i was just mentioning

That's all sodomy. You know, if you give your husband a hand job, that's sodomy, irregardless of whether or not you're married, because the only kind of acceptable sex is penis and vagina. So as a result, there isn't necessarily... from a functional religious definition, a difference between married people being sodomites if they engage in particular sex acts and to gay people. It's just that...

to gay people are necessarily committing sodomy. They don't have any way of having the, you know, church approved sex, whereas what we would call heterosexual people do. So it's kind of about like who's got recourse to what. it is interesting because even

You know, in a world that's particularly hostile to sex and in a society that's hostile to sex, which, you know, to be fair, we are still to a certain extent. We still have these instances leak through where even though people are trying to hide it or they don't necessarily want to talk about their sex. lives in front of everyone we still know a fair amount about what was going on that's so so fascinating

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What really strikes me as well is that there is this clear then distinction between reproduction and sort of sex for other reasons. But just going back a little bit again to the sort of misconceptions that people have about the Middle Ages.

How much did people really understand about the reproductive system and what sort of ideas were prevalent around that? Oh, that's a great question. So there are kind of two competing theories in the medieval period and they are based... of course on classical medicine so the Hippocrates Galen the same kind of places that any ancient Greek or ancient Roman would be thinking about things they move on slightly in the medieval period but there is a major way of thinking about

things which is what we call the two seed theory the two seed theory is the more prevalent in the medieval period and the idea is that during sex when men or when men orgasm yes they release their semen which is their seed right? So the idea is that well women must be doing the same thing.

So they then release a kind of semen inside themselves and is often referred to as semen or seed. So when a woman orgasms, she will then release her seed and then those two seeds will mix together in the woman's womb and that. is how you get a baby and you know this is one of these things where they point to for example the fact that children often look like composites of their parents so that's how you can tell that there are two seeds interaction the other theory which is

more Aristotelian in nature, so this was how Aristotle thought about things, is the one seed theory. And that is that, well, men have sperm and women are essentially an inanimate field in which that seed has grown. So men are active. Women are passive. And so therefore it's like the men who are kind of doing procreation at women and then women incubate seed. But there isn't any kind of buy-in on their part. Of course, you know, both of these are wrong and we know all about OVA now.

but they just weren't so sure of it at the time. What is interesting about... The two seed theory, though, which, as I say, is dominant, especially in the later medieval period, is that it leads to thinking about sex in a really different way than we do. Because...

As a necessary part of this, the idea then is that, well, sex must necessarily be mutually pleasurable for both parties involved, or you're not going to have a baby, all right? And if the only way that it's acceptable to have sex is if you were trying for a baby,

then that means that it can't just be like oh very one-sided on the man's part and it can't just be like well you know he ejaculates and you're good to go there is this idea that there has to be some kind of pleasure involved interestingly the church

a lot of time grappling with that is because the church is not happy about that fact. So St. Augustine, for example, writes about this, you know, the kind of pleasure that people experience during sex as a result of the fall of man. To his way of thinking. Ideally.

what would happen in sex, you know, in the Garden of Eden if Adam and Eve have never been kicked out and they decided that they were going to be fruitful and multiply as they were commanded to do so. As that a man would simply think, I will make my penis hard now. think I am going to make my vagina wet, they would kind of insert tab A to slot B. And then, hey, presto, like mutual ejaculation, they wouldn't feel anything. And then they would be done.

And then you would have a baby. And then that would be ideal. That would be really ideal. And so the way that St. Augustine talks about the fall is that, well, yeah, women experience pain in childbirth and that sort of thing as a consequence of the sinfulness of man. but also we experience pleasure during sex as a consequence of this fall because

It's a form of temptation. It's not strictly logical. Our bodies do things that we don't necessarily want them to do. Like there's a lot of hand wringing on the part of theologians about, for example, what we would call wet dreams and what they call nocturnal. admissions and they're like oh have I sinned sexually you know my penis did this thing in the middle of the night and I didn't want it to do it and it did it anyway you know and so there's

this real concern about having too much pleasure. So what the church decides about all of this is you have to have like exactly the right amount of pleasure during sex, which is that both people need to achieve orgasm in order to. ensure that a baby is produced, but you're not supposed to be having too much more fun.

Other than that, it's like you're not supposed to be making out a lot. So, for example, Thomas Quintus, he specifically prescribes against what he calls lascivious kissing. So it's like you're not supposed to get too turned on. You're not supposed to be...

doing too many things. You need to do just exactly the right amount, be done with it and have the baby. So there's a lot of kind of like gauging what the appropriate amount of sexual pleasure is because otherwise the sexual pleasure is kind of seen as dangerous.

That's actually probably quite surprising to a lot of people, I think. I think that's not really the attitude that most people would think the judge had. But no, so... Another implication though, I think, about all these rules and regulations, if you're only really meant to be having sex with the person you're married to and under those very specific circumstances, that's obviously not going to suit a lot of people. So that would have implications for...

society. And I know you worked a lot on looking at studying sex work in the Middle Ages. Can you say something about that? I mean, was that accepted as a consequence? Yes. So this is another one of those things that people don't really realize is that sex work basically...

it's a really interesting area in the medieval period. And in that is that it's considered absolutely necessary to the functioning of a peaceful society. So it is what we would call legal, which is to say that there are particular rules and regulations about how and where and when sex work can occur and this is signed off for and stamped by theologians so again thomas aquinas again saint augustine they are the guys who just come up whenever you're talking about sex

And basically what St. Thomas Aquinas says about sex work is that it's the cesspool which keeps the city of God clean. And the idea here is that sexuality is something that can kind of build up, especially in men. And because men are hot and dry, they sort of expel some of their hotness and dryness when they have sex.

is kind of part of the sexual act, right? If they aren't having sex, however, then that means that that can build up and it might explode violently. So there's a specific concern, especially in cities, that if men... Unmarried men, more specifically, don't have access to sex. They will become violent and you will have rioting.

so sex work then exists in order for these unmarried men to have sex with someone and this is an interesting thing because so basically on the hierarchy of how they think about sex in the medieval period partnered Penis and vagina sex with a sex worker is more acceptable than masturbation or what they would call onanism because there's absolutely no way for anybody ever to get pregnant if you're masturbating. So like it's a form of sodomy and it's bad. I mean, you shouldn't be.

doing it you know there are odds are maybe you might make a human with a sex worker who knows so it seemed as more acceptable

Because it's legal, though, there are all these rules and regulations about how it can shake down. So in the Holy Roman Empire, for example, it's very common for cities to explicitly legislate who the brothels are, and you'll get a municipal charter in order to... be the brothel in your city here in london where i am that is not the case but there are rules about where sex work can take place and in general across christendom

The idea of sex work is that it can take place, but it has to be happening kind of either outside of the city walls, because all cities are walled at the time, or it needs to be right up at the edges of the city because nobody wants a brothel just smack dab in the middle of the town because it's acceptable.

but nobody likes it. It's one of those kind of gray area sort of a thing. So here in London, all sex work takes place across the Thames. It all happens in Southwark. In Prague, for example, it takes place. in places like very near to the city walls in the castle or over by the river, just kind of on the edges of town. And basically sex work has to stay there. Sometimes sex workers also have to mark themselves out as sex workers. So in London, sex workers are...

obliged to wear what is called a hood of ray, which is kind of a black and white striped headdress so that everybody knows that you're a sex worker. So there are all these kind of rules and regulations about what you can and cannot do in terms of sex work. The interesting thing about it, though, is...

unlike our society people don't tend to think of sex work as something that like destroys women completely and it completely ruins your life and it's really awful it's like well maybe you are a sex worker and you don't want to be a sex worker anymore

What you need to do is you need to go to your parish priest, say, bless me, father, I've sinned. I've been a sex worker. I don't want to be that anymore. And he'll say, OK, great, my child, your penance is to go get married. And then if you go get married to start a family, then that's it. You're off the hook. Like, it's completely done.

Having said that, there are also other ways of exiting sex work. Like, for example, there's an entire order of nuns, the Magdalens, who were set up expressly to take what they call quote-unquote reformed sex workers into them. Although eventually the Magdalens just becomes an order. order like anything else. So there are all these kind of ways to sort of resume life.

But it is seen as a resumption of life. Like, I try to be really, really careful here and say, like, it's not as though it's some paradise where sex workers are treated really well. They're definitely seen as kind of like on the outskirts of society. But the point is that they can come back in at any time.

However, if you do not come back in and you don't repent of being a sex worker, which is, you know, also I have so much to say about, you know, you need to repent from this thing that we said is an absolutely necessary job.

you know, whatever. If you don't repent, then you will, in general terms, kind of die outside of communion with the church. So for example, here in London, we have an entire graveyard, the Crossbones Graveyard, which... is kind of near to borough market in southwark it is where a bunch of unrepentant sex workers are all buried because since they died in sin they aren't allowed to be buried in consecrated ground

So it's a really kind of complicated and complex issue in the medieval period. But on the whole, the treatment of sex workers as people is a little bit... calmer than the way that we tend to treat it now. We have a tendency to panic. the minute that we are kind of introduced to the concept of sex work at all. Whereas medieval people were like, well, you know, it's something that's going to kind of happen. So we treat it in this very particularized and specialized way.

Okay, so you sort of busted quite a few myths there. But the final thing I think we should probably talk about as well is you talked a little bit earlier about who were the sort of active parts in those different theories about reproduction and sex. Can you say something really about...

interest in sex as well was it really something that only men was interested in in middle ages was that the belief or was it something different so this is a really kind of funny way where you know medieval people differ from us immensely because as far as they are concerned sexual desire and interest in sex is a feminine trait so men are kind of

during sex but they are seen as being more rational and more logical and holier and so therefore they're better at saying no we should not be having sex all the time we shouldn't be thinking about sex all the time sex is something that only happens in order to make babies whereas

Women are kind of conceptualized as much more passive, but also kind of like passively sexual. So they're just turned on by anything they see. They're interested in any kind of sex that might be going and floating around nearby. So we see a much... more common idea of women as kind of sexual aggressors, people who are really actively chasing sex, really looking for sex. And they are the ones who are seen as kind of going out and making sex happen in the medieval period.

even though it's supposed to be from a kind of passive position. So essentially, more or less, they're seen as tricking men into having sex with them. And there's this conception, very funnily, that if men are too interested in sex, then they've kind of become feminized. So there are sort of warnings against having too much sex with women in general because, oh, if you have too much sex, then you're going to start thinking about sex even more.

And you're going to become like one of those terrible horny women who can't think about anything other than sex. So you have to really limit the amount of sex that you have as a man so that you don't become feminized and become just absolutely sex addled and have sex on the brain all the time. because that is something that happens to women and it is a feminine specific thing.

and that is probably not the expectation i think that most people had of medieval attitudes to sex yeah yeah yeah fantastic i don't know we're gonna round it up here you've been absolutely brilliant thank you so much again for sharing your expertise on this thank you

so much for having me it's always a pleasure to make people feel weird about sex by talking about the middle ages fantastic just to remind people again highly recommend Eleanor's book The Middle Ages A Graphic History which is out now do check that out

I hope you've enjoyed this slightly more unusual episode of Gone Medieval. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes and do feel free to leave us a review. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, thank you for listening and I'll be back again next week.