The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages

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It’s so tempting to think we’ve advanced as a society, but so many of the things I thought of as backwards in this book are still held as “true” by a good number of people these days. The book is then split into different topics, explaining each one by drawing on details from real life cases and incidents drawn from legal and church records and chroniclers and so on in a simple fashion, very often with little extra interpretation or influence of her own personal thoughts. The medieval Magdalene was a composite of several biblical Marys and bore little resemblance to the woman depicted in the Gospels. 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. There is no better guide to what occurs betwixt the sheets of the medieval bedroom than Katherine Harvey.

Learned, fun and full of surprises - a fascinating, wide-ranging guide to medieval sexual attitudes and experiences. 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. With unabashed directness, a delicate touch of wit, and constant humanity, Katherine Harvey surveys the world of medieval sex and sexuality.History is written by the victors, but not so for the history of sex: most of what we know of sex in the middle ages comes from court records in which sexual crimes are judged, and medieval literature, which is filled with sexual innuendos. 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. Content Warnings: References throughout to violence, executions, torture, public punishments, public humiliation, intimate partner violence, murder, murder of a spouse, homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, war crimes, war, sexual violence, sexual assault, rape, gang rape, wartime rape, pedophilia, child sexual abuse, child prostitution, child marriage, forced prostitution, incest, bestiality. As I mentioned earlier, it humanizes medieval citizens, allowing us to understand their thought processes in a way beyond “this: bad.

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. The popular suspicion was that priests, having no wives of their own, copulated with the wives of others.

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.

What all of these individuals had in common, besides their sexual transgressions, was a genuine contrition for their sins. The obvious problem haunting such a discussion is how accurately the sex lives of ordinary people can ever be recovered. 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. However, at times its detail is overwhelming, with a barrage of a names and dates that seemingly have little importance to the overall narrative.I would warn anyone looking at this book to check content warnings below before proceeding as it does contain some heavy, dark subjects. 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. Her book deals mainly with the years 1100 to 1500, leaving out the first five hundred years of the Middle Ages with the evidence tending to privilege the later part of her period. Like us, our forebears were troubled by sexual violence, but they also shared our tendency to handle it badly’. Harvey is careful to balance her story: Christian Europeans ‘othered’ non-Christians, believing preposterous stories about their bodies and sexuality, but Jews and Muslims did the same to Christians.