Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - What Happened On A Medieval Wedding Night?

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

We've been tying the knot for thousands of years in one way or another, but what did a medieval wedding look like?The church had very strict ideas around monogamy and sex in this period, which affected the rituals of a wedding day, AND night.What happened in the bed chambers of the newlyweds? Why was pleasure so important? And why were divorce courts so humiliating?Joining Kate today is author and historian Jacqueline Murray, to take us back to the Middle Ages.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am me, you are you, and you are listening to Bertwixter sheets. And we are all very, very relieved that you are doing so. But before we can go any further together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, pokerby adults,

to other adults, adulty things in an adult way, covering our age adults, so bricks and you should be an adult too. We call that the fair do's warning, because if you listen to that and then you keep listening to something upset you, well, fair do's, we did warn you. Right, on with the show. Don't you just love a wedding? All the traditions playing out the family bust-ups, the maid of honour crying into the cake.

It's such a beautiful sight. Here at a medieval wedding, though, we have got other things going on. Everybody has made their way into the couple's bedchamber and are now having a right old song and dance about the happy couple getting down to do it. There are people throwing stockings at the bride, a priest's chucking grain on the bedchamber. bed, I'm telling you, it's all kicking off round here. In fact, we'd better be on our way and leave the newlyweds to it. But what else

went down at a medieval wedding? Let's find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppents of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what's beautiful time. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal and society. With me, Kate Lister. Wedding ceremonies have long been steeped in tradition, or rather we like to think that they are. And let's be obvious, they're pretty patriarchal ones at that. But how different was a medieval wedding ceremony? What expectations were there for the wedding night?

Under what conditions could the couple get a divorce? Especially at the time when the church was all-state. and all-powerful. Well, joining me today to take us back to the medieval wedding is Jacqueline Murray, Professor of History at the University of Guelph in Canada. Elaborate hats and chastity belts at the ready. Let's do this. Hello, and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jacqueline Murray. How are you doing? Oh, Kate, I'm thriving, and I'm so excited to be here to talk to you about things between,

the sheets. Medieval sheets, because this is your area of expertise. You are the author of, well, many things, but you are the author of from texts to bodies, sexes, genders, and sexualities in pre-modern Europe. Yes. Oh, so as a first question, why medieval? What brought you to this area of study? Do you remember what your origin story is the first time you thought this is for me? Well, I was actually led to it. it by my sources for my dissertation. I was supposed to be looking at marriage and family, which remains one of my subspecialties. In manuals written how to teach priests to hear confession, and my supervisor and I thought we'd hear all kinds of things about the relationship between husbands and wives and how

to deal with your children and so on. Not so. Families were basically never mentioned at all. The sources only wanted to talk about marriage and how to create a legitimate marriage and human sexuality. And when it was legitimate and when it wasn't. And so the sources themselves drew me into questions of sexuality. I've moved further along from manuals for confessors. But that brought me into the history of sexuality in the Middle Ages. And I've tried to broaden my scope as a result. I love those, the penitentials, that's what they're called, right?

The texts, the kind of index, there's some insane stuff in there. Yes. And if you move into the early 13th century, they take on a different tone because they stop being lists and they start being authors writing about what they think and how you should greet a penitent and how to wiggle out of them confessions of their deep and darkest sexual sins like fornication or masturbation. You really get a glimpse into what churchmen thought people were doing and why it was bad. And so they're quite fascinating. Aren't they?

I'm going to get distracted if we start talking about this. So we should talk about marriage. Before we even get to marriage. It's always useful to remember that the medieval period is a phenomenally long span of history. How do you define it? What's the kind of cutoff dates? My middle ages runs roughly from around 500 to 1,500. But if we want to talk about marriage in the middle ages, it really needs to be given a small foundation.

And then we can look at it from about the year 1,200 to 1,500. as a kind of regularized institution. In the early Middle Ages, there were lots of different Germanic peoples coming into Europe, and there was the Christian Church and so on. They all had different ideas about marriage and sexuality. And the church spent roughly those years trying to convince Germanic peoples to follow Christian beliefs, in particular to stop practicing polygamy and divorce. And the church was promoting monogamy and indissolumal barriages.

Once it had been made, it was for life. And so that gets itself sorted out by around the year 1200. And the appropriate ceremonies and so on appear at that time and are widely embraced. When we think of marriage today and a wedding, we have loads of customs and it's very much a social norm. And we sort of need to remember it was very much not always the case. You know, the idea that you'd get married in a church, that a priest had to be there, that you had to announce these things. That all had to become formalized at some point, right? That's right.

And that's what was done in the late 12th century and we can see clearly in the early 13th century. And what is most remarkable is the ideas that were set down then, you still see reflected in contemporary marriage ceremonies. Wow. I know it's an incredibly stable practice and ideology. One of the things that we always think of is the exchange of the ring. Yes. That we have evidence for from the 9th century when Pope Nussbaum. Nicholas wrote to a king of the Bulgarians describing how marriage was practiced in the West

because the king was just converting to Christianity. And one of the things that he mentions in the 9th century is the exchange of rings. It's crazy. Like there could have been marriages where that wasn't happening. And of course that had to be introduced. I suppose a good place to start would be to ask, why did the church care about marriage? What did the church feel the need to get involved in marriage? The church wanted to get involved in marriage because the church was heavily involved in human sexuality.

There we go. Sex was considered problematic at best, sinful most of all. And the only legitimate context for male and female sexual intercourse was within a legitimate. legitimate marriage. St. Augustine said at a time when every early Christian writer was condemning marriage because it was the locus of sex and sex was sinful and we had to eradicate sin. Augustine said, wait a minute, there was the possibility of human sexual activity within the Garden of Eden where it would have occurred without sin. And he said there are three goods of marriage that make it an honorable institution. Faith, which is the couple agreeing to an indissoluble bond for life, children for the procreation

of the race and the extension of the Christian church, and sacrament, which is suggesting that marriage parallels the relationship of Christ and the church. That's kind of how marriage becomes a sacrament. the last and seventh of the sacraments is through these kinds of beliefs of indissoluble bond and the relationship of Christ in the church. And that takes a long time to take hold of. And then what we see in practice by the early 13th century is people agreeing a couple exchanges vows for an indissoluble marriage unless they can figure out how to get it annulled in the future. And so they worked very hard in figuring that out. And there were two easy outs. A marriage had to

have the capacity to have children. And so if a marriage could not be consummated, it was considered null. The main issue with marriage is the husband and wife consenting between them, but the marriage also had to be consummated. The medieval church seems to have got itself in a proper twist around sexual pleasure, which seems to be a relatively new addition. It's not that sex was a completely hang-up-free affair in the ancient world, but I think if you'd said to a Greek or a Roman person pre-Christianity that pleasure itself is bad, they would have been quite confused. But that seems to be something that the church, they get themselves into a right state

until they can only come up with, well, all right, but you can do it as long as you're married, and then only within these certain conditions as well. So one of the issues behind that is that the early church fathers were all educated as any elite Roman man would have been educated with the Greek philosophers and so on. And a lot of the early influences on asceticism that Christianity developed was in fact rooted in stoic philosophy. So the pagans gave it to us. And then it was incorporated and they had to figure a way out. So there's a lot of debate about whether if a husband and wife are having sex, whether or not it's allowed for them to have pleasure. And one of the prevailing medical views at the time insisted that both the man and the woman had to experience pleasure and an orgasm.

order that they both release their seeds so that procreation could occur. So the idea was, lie back, think about procreating children, and if there's a little bit of fun in the process, well, so be it. So marriage kind of develops as this formulated panic around sex, really, in the Middle Ages. Yes, and it's formulated then and it's preserved and reified then. at a time when they're also, for example, denouncing unnatural sexual activities such as masturbation or bestiality and so on. So there's a kind of flip side. They try and make marriage a lovely institution. There's writers who say that husbands and wives should love each other with marital affection, almost be like best friends. You know, they're a partnership in it together. And indeed they were because they were an economic partnership as well as a kind of a spiritual partnership.

I was just about to ask you about the economics of this because it's, there seems to be so many different strands to the idea of marriage. On the one hand, you've got the church talking about spiritual salvation and procreation and all of these things and how important it is to God. But on the ground, it's also an economic necessity, especially for women who are going to struggle to earn their own money and support themselves, that they sort of, they have to get married, right? And it's been that way for a very long time in our history. Yes, it has a very few options for women of any rank. At the highest levels of society, they were a means by which economic and political relationships were. grounded, two great families would marry and together and be allies. It was actually one of the only reasons that theologians believed that consent was expendable between the couple, was if it was for a peace treaty between warring nations. So even the elites, and men, as much as women in the elites were kind of used as pawns in marriage. And at the lower levels,

quite right, the economy was based on the family as the economic unit. If you lived in rural society in particular, it was a wife contributed as much to the household economy as did a husband, and they needed children to help out too. So he might plow the fields. She, collected eggs and sold them at the market and the children looked after the sheep in the field. And that was a very tight economic unit. And the importance of children is indicated by the fact that sometimes we see in these areas, individual cases, we don't have great swaths of evidence, but individual cases where a couple didn't formally marry until a woman were pregnant in order that He could be assured that he have the children

that he needed to run his farm and his piece of land. I'll be back with Jacqueline after this short break. Do you think love came into? Because I have heard it argued by people. I've never been entirely convinced by this. But romantic love is a very modern invention that it came in with the Victorians. That until this point, it was all business.

It was all, you know, how many cows do you have? I've got two goats and a chicken. All right, then we'll get married. Do you think that, well, from your research, Where does romantic love figure into this arrangement? I'm not sure romantic love comes in until later in the period. But I think there is marital affection. And so a couple cares for each other, praise for each other's souls, does the best they can for each other.

And some of the language that we see in court cases or coroner's records or so on, uses the language of my dearly beloved wife who, you know, fell into a ditch and drowned. Jesus Christ. Yeah. There were a lot of ditches in the Middle Ages, it seems. And you hear real regret or another place that you can see this affection is if one of them falls ill, the lengths to which another goes not only to get medical treatment, but perhaps to get them to a pilgrimage site like Canterbury where Thomas Beckett was known to perform miracles at his tomb.

And there's recordings of the people who supervised pilgrimage sites about the lengths at which parents and children and children and parents and spouses went to try and achieve cures for their family members. Would these have been arranged marriages? I assume that if you were very rich and if you were in the Middle Ages getting married, this would have been set up. But would that have been the case for poorer people too? Well, both.

In the sense that marriage was done rationally at, say, the village level, because of the rules of consanguinity, you couldn't marry people who were too near to you because you might be related by blood. Right. Often they might marry someone from the next village. But there was a doubt. The woman needed to bring a dowry.

Of course. And so there was an economic aspect to it. The man had to give endow the woman with a certain dower that she would have use of for life, should he pre-decease her. So people were sensible. And also, and we see this particularly in the cities among the urban artisan class, people listened to their friends and their family. And there are court cases that show a woman saying, I'm not sure I can accept your proposal. I'll have to check with my friends. And that would include family members.

And the other side of it is because the theologians said marriage could not be coerced and consent had to be freely given, we actually find the occasional case of someone, sometimes a man, but mostly a woman, resisting and saying, I will not marry the person that you have selected for me. We have two cases of this within the famous Paston family of merchants in the 15th century. Elizabeth Paston was supposed to be married by her family to Stephen Scrope, and she was having none of it. And some of the reports say that she was locked in her room for weeks and beaten twice a day and her head had been broken open and bleeding. Wow.

But still she refused. In the end, her resistance was broken down and she agreed, but then the marriage never happened anyway. Maybe Scrope got the idea. Yeah, you would. By the way, he was 50 and she was 20 at the time. Yeah, that'll do it. Yeah.

But really interesting to see a young woman of that age living with her family. Yeah. exercising that resistance and being strong about it. Wow. The other paston was Marjorie Paston, who married privately and secretly, a clandestine marriage with the family's estate manager. And we have two pieces of information that's very interesting. One is a letter from Richard to Marjorie when she's being kept and locked up by her family.

and they're saying you can't marry him, that's not what's happening, talking to her as my own beloved dear wife, my dear who is my wife before God and so on, because they had secretly exchanged consent. And then there's Marjorie's mother's letter that says she was so defiant, but she went before the bishop, she repeated the word she had said to Richard, and the bishop had no choice but to agree that they were married. So sometimes people rebelled and sometimes quite successfully that marriage between Marjorie and Richard lasted their lifetime. On a slightly unrelated note, I found myself watching Braveheart the other night. I don't know why I was doing that, but they have that strange part in the beginning where the nobles of medieval Scotland

the English nobles go, we're going to introduce prima nocte, which is where any lord can take a common girl into his bed on the night of her wedding. And then there's this like, oh, if we can't get them out, we'll breed them out. And I just wondered, has that ever, ever been a thing? Or is that Hollywood nonsense? Was there ever any law? Hollywood nonsense. Never.

I knew it. It was never law, ever. And it was never really custom either. I don't know the roots of it. But I know that there is a book written that absolutely. denounces that notion. That's a Victorian. That it would be, wouldn't it? Yeah, along with chastity belts and everything else that they came up with. That never made any sense. But that does lead me on quite nicely to talk about the importance of virginity in marriage, which, you know,

thankfully, we're not placing a big premium on that nowadays, although some cultures do, but it was a big deal in the past. True enough. And as my earlier example suggested, in the the lower levels of society, virginity was not as important, but it certainly was in the middle ranks of society because it was based on family honor. And this was also true in the higher ranks. It was the honor of the family, particularly the father, that the daughter was a virgin when she married. And it was absolutely critical if it were amongst the royalty and mobility. And this is mostly not because the hymen was so special and important, but because it was a way of guaranteeing a legitimate lineage. Children inherited property, children inherited kingdoms.

And the father needed to make sure that the child was his. So if a woman were not a virgin, then it's all up for grabs. It could be anybody's kid. And the honor of the family and the way that they passed down their goods through the male line and so on was critical. And that's really the focus of virginity. Although the church theology also wanted people to be virgins, but that's because they were anti-sex, basically. Were they ever interested in men being virgins as well? As the emphasis has always been that it has to be the woman. Has there ever been a point where they were like, we're going to test this man for his virginity? Well, they could. Unfortunately, it's virtually impossible to tell if a man is a virgin. Oh, and a woman too. The World Health Organization has recently spoken out about that. So you can't

tell that with these so-called virginity tests, but they thought they could. They thought they could. The only time that virginity for men has seemed important was within the context. of monasteries where men were supposed to be chased and repressed their sexuality. And so within some areas of monasticism, you wanted to know if a man was a virgin, but you can never really tell. No. Well, let's say that we're in the Middle Ages and I'm going to get married. What would a medieval wedding, I'm definitely not a virgin.

I'm a bit too old for this. I think my ship has well sailed, but let's just pretend that I am. what would the celebrations be like? You could be a widow. I could be a widow. I could be a widow. That's how you get out of having to be a virgin at marriage. Nice.

So let's take sort of an urban middle class kind of family or just that social level. The parents of the woman would have looked around for an appropriate husband and suggested it to her. They get to meet. and if they both consent, they agree in words of the future tense that I will take you as my husband. I will take you as my wife, which means at some point in the future we're going to get married. That's the betrothal. And then the bans would be read out by the church on three consecutive weeks, saying that John Smith and Joan Gray are going to be married. And the purpose of that was because it was so hard in these communities to know if people were related to each other,

particularly in rural communities where there was very little social mobility. And people might know, someone else in the congregation might remember that John's great-grandfather, in fact, was married to Joan's great-grandmother, something like that. And that union would be considered consanguinous. And so they were not legitimately able to marry. Or the other reason was because a lot of times one spouse would desert another and go and move to a different city or a different village and want to take up with a different partner. And so someone might be able to say, wait a minute, I was a peddler passing through that village. I know this man was already married. So we get that out of the way. And couples would be married formally on the steps of the church. The priest does not marry and in fact now does not marry them.

He is not the actor. The couple exchanged the vows between themselves. They make their promises to each other. And that is what forms the sacramental bond. of marriage. So everyone standing around outside the church door, then they'd go in and have a mass, and following that, they'd have a feast and dancing and so on. Then the couple would go off and spend the night together, or everyone else would just stay and have a good party. Now, that's formal marriage. And that was often too expensive or the priests weren't available or whatever. You had to pay the priest to give his time to marry. And so people wed informally. They might be sitting at a friend's house with a bunch of their friends and have decided that they wanted to get married.

And just with their friends there, they might exchange vows. Or sometimes we even hear that they're in a tavern. They've been drinking. Oh, that's a nightmare. Then they exchange their kids. consent and everyone goes on drinking. But what's interesting about these informal marriages, Kate, is that people without a priest knew the critical formulaic words to say to form that sacramental bond. I will take you as my wife. I will take you as my husband. And that's all I needed to do. The witnesses are there just to confirm that it happens. if there's some question about the marriage in the future. Usually the man gives a woman a little gold ring, although sometimes it might be a silver

belt I saw saw in one case recently, but a gift that's part of symbolically endowing her and bringing her, sharing his goods with her, which was one of the focuses of marriage. And then there's the wedding night. And I've heard all manner of things about this from there would have to be bloodied sheets hung up the next day to prove there had been consummation. I've heard people say, oh, there would have been people stood around watching a newly married couple having sex. I'm not sure about that. What does your research say? Well, a lot of the evidence doesn't take us to the bedroom door, to be honest, because our single most important examples that give us.

evidence of what real people were doing are records where a couple is being challenged one way or another in court. Occasional examples from literature and so on. And literature, we don't know how reflective that is. But there was in the very early Middle Ages the notion of blessing the bed of the couple. and this became Christianized. So there's a famous picture of a priest blessing the conjugal bed with the couple inside it and they put grain on it and the priest says a few prayers that they're all praying for fecundity

and for the couple to have children. And sometimes there might be a charivari. All the guests at the wedding are getting a bit too drunk and so they all decide to burst into the bedroom. see what's happening. And then at the highest levels of society, where it's so important that A, the woman be a virgin and B, the marriage be consummated, members of the court would stand around and watch so that they could confirm that the marriage had been consummated. And I don't think, given that those couples frequently may not have met before the wedding day, I'm guessing that that wasn't a very pleasant experience for either of them.

I'll be back with Jacqueline after this short break. It's not medieval, but the marriage of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVIth wasn't allegedly consummated for seven years. There's various reasons to this, but it seems that they just didn't quite know what to do with one another. Marie Antoinette's brother got to the bottom of it and he said that what had been happening was that Louis had been coming in, inserting himself for a few minutes, staying perfectly still and then withdrawing without reaching an end.

Bless them. But that made me think of that. I was like, what counts as consummation then? Like I know that this is, like we're now into weird theological territory, but would the medieval or the church in general have counted that as an act of consummation or just there has to be an orgasm? It's not so much there has to be an orgasm. There has to be an ejaculation of semen into the woman's vagina.

I knew it. Yes, that was what I thought as well. Because I couldn't work out why they were saying it hadn't been consummated, even if Louie had been doing this weird, just sort of lie in there, not doing anything. Bless him. Anything else wouldn't count as consummation or, interestingly enough, sometimes even as sex.

Anal sex didn't count as fornication and adultery. See, that's some small print. Oh, yeah. I know. I know. But in addition to getting married, one of the couple's challenges was, what do we do if we want a divorce now that the church won't let us divorce? And we see many cases in which one spouse simply moves to a different place and sets up a new family and household and life and friends and gets married. and then somehow the other spouse finds this out and goes and demands that the church return the spouse.

And we find both the wife and the husband doing this. Sometimes it's the husband wanting to get his wife back. Sometimes it's the wife wanting to get her husband back. But basically they've gone on and set up new marital arrangements. But they wouldn't have been legitimate marriages because they were. already vowed. And I think that that's really interesting. There are more cases like that than there are cases wanting the dissolution of marriage. There were two reasons of marriage could be dissolved. One was whether they were too closely related. And so they'd get out the genealogy charts and

count if they were related. In that case, they were allowed to separate. For example, that's why Eleanor of Aquitaine and King Louis of France were able to separate so that Eleanor could go on and marry Henry II and then we get the lion in winter. But the other reason would be non-consumation of marriage. So this is where your Marianne Quint question becomes very relevant. The couple had to have the capacity to procreate for the marriage to be legitimate. So one of the only reasons was for separation was impotence of the man, non-consumation of the marriage, and that theoretically, they believe that it might be the woman's fault, but in practice, it was impotence. And we find a bizarre number of cases. And in some of these, it's very clear that an unhappy husband and wife

are colluding in order to separate. He would. You would, wouldn't you? And in other cases, it's the wife just trying to get rid of the husband by alleging he's been impotent ever since they got married. And there's an elaborate ecclesiastical framework for adjudicating this that goes as far as having the man's body examined by women, midwives or married women. and then public attempts at intercourse.

Oh, no. If you were just colluding with the misses because you were both fed up and what that is really committing to it. So the man would be basically, they'd try and make him have an erection in public, basically. That would be less likely to happen if both the couple agreed. Right. That often happened, though, if the wife said, I have not been able to conceive children. We've been married three years. He can't do it.

And then the husband, of course, is shamed and wants to. And the courts are confused. The husband wants to say, no, no, I am potent. And the courts need evidence. And these ecclesiastical courts were rigorous followers of Roman law and the law of evidence. And so they couldn't just accept the whispers of the neighbors who say, yeah, yeah, they never did it and had to figure out a way that was a legitimate proof for the court to make a decision. So that's the underlying logic behind that. Because if they had consummated the marriage

and made the sacramental vow, if they went off with other people or whatever, they didn't. be committing immortal sin. And that's why the church was so concerned about adjudicating marriage and exercising surveillance over how it was done, because people could unwittingly be married and go and marry other people or they could do it deliberately. And their immortal souls were at risk. Were there ever any women that were accused of, well, not impotence, but not being. able to perform? That was a theoretical possibility. You see it in both canon law and theology as a possibility. Sometimes you see it as an accusation. And again, it's just an attempt to get out of a marriage, given that it is my understanding that it is physiologically impossible. They thought the woman would be

too narrow to admit the man's penis. I see. And the physicians of the time said, well, let's go in and have some surgery and widen her up. Oh, God. So in fact, I take it mostly as a theoretical debate between men in an elite educated class who are all vowed to celibacy, who really are just theorizing. So it sounds like once you got into this thing, then, which is quite terrifying given that you can get married at the pub after a few jars with your friends.

It's very difficult to get out of this once you're in. Yes, it is. Wow. This is what we know that they went to the pub because they appear before the court trying to either deny that a marriage occurred or a third party is intervening and saying, that's actually my wife. And so there's a bit of court information. And one thing the witnesses would have been asked is who was there, when did it happen, what words did they say, what was the context? And, you know, sometimes me and my friends were sitting on the trunk in the hallway or having jars in the pub and, you know, all these different places. It took place in a garden. And we asked John Foster to come and be a witness to our vows. And that, incidentally, is what the priest is.

The priest is the primary witness to the vows in the formal marriage ceremony. So as a final question, then, listening to everything that you've said, medieval marriage makes sense for many, many, many reasons. It sounds a bit mad and very difficult to get out of. But I can understand why they're doing this. It's spiritual but also economic and it's, you know, alliances, da-da. And I'm wondering what you think about the institution of marriage to this very day? Because we don't have to get married because otherwise I'm going to be out on the street if I don't have a husband to look after me.

Nobody's interested in marrying me to cement an alliance with Spain. We're not doing that anymore. Why do you think we still continue to get married? I think that it is a holdover from the Victorian period. and their romance with the idea of the family and the loving couple. I mean, the Victorians really played that up. So it enters into the 20th and the 50s, of course, with marriage and the suburbs and children keeps it going. But honestly, Kate, I have no idea why people want to get married now,

unless they are faithful believers in a religion that mandates marriage and that encourages marriage and that marriage now really has probably gone back to being a spiritual relationship within a religious context or it's just something we do to throw a big party. People still doing it down the pub because they've had a few too many. Jacqueline, you have been incredible. to talk to you. Thank you so much. And if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? They can find me at jacolin.murray at u.ogwelf.ca. I'm at the University of Guelph, and you can find me on the website there. Thank you so much. I've thoroughly enjoyed talking to

you. Thank you, Kate. It was great fun. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Jacqueline for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody asks you to do it, but it does actually help us out. And if you wanted to email us to say hi or suggest an episode, then you can do so at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we have got the final episode in our limited series, History's Worst Fuck Boys, and perhaps the ultimate example, Henry the 8th, bo, bop-bom, and an episode on the Greek myth of Medusa. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagi and produced by Stuart Beckwith.

The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.