Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - What Was Sex Like In Medieval Times?

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

What happened when medieval monks were told by the church that they had to be celibate? And how did their wives react?On today's episode, we're joined by Katherine Harvey, historian and author of The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, to take us back to the middle ages and answer the question: what was sex like in medieval times?This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT - sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. 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. My lovely betwixters, it's me, K-Lister. I am here, as I always will be, with your fair-doos warning. Here it is. This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults, about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects,

and you should be an adult too. Well, I don't know about you, but I certainly feel less triggered after that. I hope you do, too. On with the show. But betwixters, it is a beautiful day here. in medieval England, just perfect for a jousting competition, wouldn't you say? Go and grab yourself a goblet of mead and let's start a mingling,

because this is the place where you could meet a partner back in the day. Some 800 years before we were all on dating apps swiping left and right. What a time to be alive. There's lots of men in armour clunking around, trying not to get knocked off their horses, getting into scrapes and trying to impress the on-looking, swooning damsels. To be fair, I have seen similar nights out in Leeds. Hang on, here they come, here they come.

Holy fuckballs, they're not in any fit state to be outdating any time soon, are they? Never mind, there are plenty more where they came from. On with the next. What do you look for, any man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs. turning enough and pushing the fun.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. If you think dating is difficult now, spare a thought for anyone trying to find a hookup

in the medieval period. When it came to having sex, views on pleasure were largely shaped by the church. I can't imagine that makes for some pretty scintillating pillow talk, but maybe there are others out there who disagree. But joining us today to explore this raunchy world is Catherine Harvey, author of Fires of Lust, Sex in the Middle Ages. How did medical views of the body shape their understanding of sex?

How did medieval people conceive of STIs? And what did they think about people that sold sex? I am ready to delve into this one if you are. are betwixters. Oh, and welcome to betwixtor sheets. It's only Catherine Harvey. How are you doing? I'm good, thanks. You, Kate.

Well, I'm doing all right. I'm really, and I asked that of all my guests, but we are recording sort of the day after storm Eisha and now storm Jocelyn, and there's a whole crowd of storms coming our way. So really, when I'm asking people, are you all right? It's like, have we survived? Are you all right?

Is you really been okay? It's just madness, isn't it? I'm so glad that you are here and that you're talking to me today because your book, Fires of Lust, Sex in the Middle Ages, I absolutely adored that book. That was so much fun and it was so insightful and it was so well written. And the first question has got to be, what made you want to write about sex in the middle ages? It was sort of a mistake actually because I started out working on medieval bishops who weren't supposed to have sex. And then I found this whole little clutch of stories about medieval bishops who died of not having sex

because they saw sex very much in terms of sort of part of a healthy lifestyle. Oh. But as a form of excretion, so it sort of helps you get rid of superfluities in your body. And so both too much and too little is bad. Because if you have too much sex, if you lose too much of your bodily fluids, particularly if you're a man.

And then you can die of that too. There are people who are supposed to die of too much sex, which sounds more fun, I suppose, than dying of two. Little. But yeah, because the clergy by the later middle ages, they weren't allowed to have sex. And that was supposed to be able to they weren't allowed to masturbate or anything. So then they think that everything sort of backs up in your body and ultimately it can kill you. So yeah, that was where it started from the Bishop's Dying of Syllabacy. Wow. That is one of the best origin stories for a book I think I've ever heard. It was Bishop's Dying of Not Being able to Have Sex. Because we forget that, don't we? Because we're so used to like the Catholic. Catholic church and priests, all those people being right, no, sex is absolutely off the table and off any other surface for that matter. But there was a point in medieval history where that was a rule that was brought in, isn't it?

That hasn't always been the case. No, it comes in in the 11th century. And up until that point, a lot of sort of the really important ones weren't supposed to be married, the monks weren't supposed to be married. But yeah, you're a married parish priest, would have had a wife, would have had a family. And then in the 11th century, for various reasons, they decide that's a bad idea. And a lot of priests quite understandably get quite upset about that. But yeah. Imagine being that meeting?

Yeah, it must have been in quite a meeting. There was one occasion, I think it was Normandy, where the bishop turned up and all the parish priests threw things at him because they were so crofts about to have a bit to put the wives aside. And the wives weren't for it, please, die. Well, no, you wouldn't be. It's very rich for humour, and I'm certainly laughing at it. But the reality of that must have been really surreal

that you're a Paris priest, you've got your wife, you're doing all your bishop-e priest-y stuff, and then suddenly what a note comes through, there's a meeting where it's like, oh, lads, yeah, sorry, this is all out now. That must have been so surreal. Yeah, I think it was really hard for a lot of people, and I'm surprising, I mean, it takes them several generations

to really enforce it properly, because people are quite resistant to the idea. There's some areas where it's sort of better enforced than others. In Spain, right the way through the middle ages, we get cases of priests who basically have got common, or wives. Even the odd monk. There's one story in the book, the particular sticks in my mind of this monk who, him and his long-term partner,

she basically is. And they said, well, nowadays, they sit in the kitchen reading together, which is quite sweet, really, I think. But yeah, other areas where they're far hotter on enforcing it. But I mean, obviously there are always people who don't quite keep to the rules. And some who break it quite scandalously, there was one bishop from the Netherlands, I think, towards the end of the Middle Ages,

who was supposed to have had 60 short. children. So, yeah. Oh, dear. That's quite outrageous flaunting the rules, isn't it? That is. So your background in part is the history of medicine, right? Yeah. And the medieval linking of sex and health and medicine and religion, they all cross over and they kind of move into one another in ways that seem very odd to us today. But when you're explaining that idea that if you have too much sex, you've released too much, I'm going to assume this is like a humoral thing. It's like, you've lost too many of your juices, and then if you don't get enough out,

that sex was considered a health issue in the middle ages. I mean, it still is sexual health, but in a different way. Yeah, no, I mean, it is, you say very much this idea of balance. They have got some idea that you can contract certain diseases by sex. They get quite hung up on the idea if you can catch leprosy for fire sex, because they think the sort of the bad rapers stay in the woman's womb and she'll infect the next man she has sex with. Can you catch leprosy?

Is it, like, could you... I was going to say, I've never tried. I don't really mean that. I think it is a disease. You catch through very close physical contact. So I suppose in theory, sex, but I don't think it's one of the main vectors of it. No. But it's not a sexually transmitted disease specifically. Not in that sense. I don't think so, no. Wow, leprosy. So they were really worried that what, women were carriers of that?

They were quite worried about, yeah, prostitutes carrying it. There's one chap in where he goes off to the university in 14th century France, and he has sex with a prostitute. and the next day he's got these sort of sores and he thinks, oh God, he's called leprosy from him and that's he swears off sex with women forever. Then ends up before the Inquisition of having sex with men, so I don't quite know how he thought that works. He went too far the other way there then, didn't he really? When people think about the Middle Ages in kind of popular culture,

it still suffers from a lot of damage that the Victorians did to that particular era. And it was the Victorians that came up with the idea of chastity belts and damsels in castles and castles. the medieval period was very chaste. And I guess there was a lot of projection going on because that was really more of their own thing. But the Middle Ages were a lot more raunchy than people give them credit for, weren't they? Yeah, I think so. I mean, obviously there is this sort of dominant Catholic idea of sort of sex belongs in marriage and virginity is great and justice is the idea on all the rest of it. But yeah, on the other hand, I think one thing that often

surprises people is that they had this idea that sex was a really important part of marriage and the marital debt that you know you actually owe it to your partner to have sex with them now that of course can cause all sorts of problems particularly for women in terms of the fact there's no such thing as marriage or rape but yeah no they do i think see sex as part of a healthy lifestyle see sex as part of a healthy marriage it's very important to them of course because it produces children which is well very important for any society but i suppose but particularly in that sort of Christian mindset was very important to produce more little Christians. And yeah, I mean, I think when you look at the literature in particular, I mean, a lot of medieval literature is frankly filthy.

And I don't know that that's, yeah, very, very oddly alongside this stereotype we've got of them. One of my favorite things that I teach medieval literature with students is if you sat them down and you said, what did Kate teach you? They would remember nothing apart from this is when I showed them the erotic marginalia, the little obscene drawings that turn up in medieval illuminated manuscripts, like the tree full of penises and monkeys buggering each other. And they just could not get their heads round that these were drawings in often very religious text. And the thing that blew their mind was they're not like scrappy doodles. Somebody put a lot of time and effort into drawing this particular penis tree. Like what kind of culture or mindset was going on that kind of had

these things in parallel with one another. It's just a penis in a religious text. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a bit like a lot of the sort of carvings in churches, I was in Norwich Cathedral the other week looking at the carving on the ceiling there of Noah with these trousers down. And he's like, what?

Let's build the decorations for our choir in the cathedral. Let's put naked Noah up on the ceiling. You know, and the shee in their gigs with they're exposing their genitals. And yeah, I'm not sure I've worked out what was going on in their minds. to us, it just seems completely inappropriate.

Nobody has, there's lots of different theories floating around, but it's a very odd juxtaposition to our modern mind. And when you talk about sex history, there's so much that fascinates me about it. But one of the things I'm really interested in is like everyday things like dating. Like today, dating, there's so much research going on about what dating apps have done to us as a culture

because, like, dating is now turned into a game. And whereas for centuries, thousands of years, you were kind of limited to the people in your village around you. Now you have a pocket full of every single available person in the world. But if you were a medieval person way before ye old Tinder, how would you have done that? What would dating have been like in the Middle Ages? Yeah.

So, I mean, I think it probably depends who you are because obviously if you're very high up the social scale, you're probably going to have an arranged marriage. I mean, they're bigger on the idea of consent than we tend to think they are. The church is very keen on the idea of consent that you shouldn't be making forced marriages and that you shouldn't be marrying children. So it does sometimes happen at very high levels that they have these arranged marriages with children. But that's definitely the anomaly.

And even then they are quite keen on the idea they shouldn't have sex until they're properly ordinary. Boundaries are important. Yeah. And I think we can agree that was a good one. But yeah, I mean, if you're an ordinary person, you probably have got a bit more leeway. As you say, you're limited to who you physically can meet. but yeah you know people they do I think value love more than again the stereotype maybe suggests that we think they do although obviously there are lots of ideas in there about you know marrying somebody of a surgical social status and somebody your family will approve of and all that sort of thing

yeah I mean how far sex before marriage was a thing I think it's quite hard to get a handle on because obviously the church was going no it mustn't be and definitely you could end up in court for fornication sex outside marriage and yet we do Once parish registers come in in the 16th century, the rates of bridal pregnancy are, shall we say, very high, which certainly is suggestive. Yeah, and the other thing that happens a lot in the Middle Ages is that although the church was very keen on the idea that, no, you must get married in church, you could get married just by making promises to each other

and then having sex. And how do we often find out about those? Somebody then ends up in cult when sort of, you know, six months later, usually the woman is going, He said he'd marry me. We had sex. Now I'm pregnant. And he's bugged off.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I just realized that technically by medieval standards, I'm married to like four people. Hell. They definitely made promises and then they bugged off, Your Honor. Wow. That's weird.

Because how do you even prove that? Like, if you go to a medieval court and you'd say, yeah, he definitely said he would. Do you have witnesses? Yeah, they do get witnesses. Yeah, you know, sometimes you get witnesses going, well, we saw them exchange promises. Occasionally you get somebody who goes,

well, actually, you know, I saw them having sex through the band door or something. But yeah, I mean, it's all quite awkward and embarrassing all around, it feels. But the stakes are so much higher, aren't they? There's so much more stigma. I mean, even though the medieval society was freer and more permissive than we think they were,

you've got to pull it back sometimes, but like, well, it wasn't like a cavorting sexual utopia, either. It wasn't like a feminist paradise by any means. And of course, birth control is, well, what there is is crap and doesn't work really. I suppose the most reliable one would be the withdrawal method, time-honoured, but not very useful. If you get pregnant, you've a bit, like the stakes are really high for this. What are you going to do? And if you're a woman, it's very difficult if you're not loaded to earn your own money.

So if some swine, some scallywag has said, yeah, I will definitely marry you and then got you pregnant and run off, that's a really bad thing. So I can understand why you drag him to court. Yeah, yeah, and sometimes then they make people get married, which I suppose solves the reputation problem but feels like it's probably setting you up for a life of misery. It does, doesn't it? Sometimes they have to, the chap has to give the woman a dowry

so that she can, you know, somebody will then marry her. Oh. But yeah, I mean, in terms of reputation, it is, yeah, problematic. And as you say, there's not a lot you can do because the contraception other than the withdrawal method, there's a lot of stuff that sort of it's based on, again, humoral principles and it made sense of them. But I don't really think the sort of hanging weasel testicles around your neck.

or swallowing a bee or all those sorts of things would have helped? No, limited, I think. Don't try those. Don't please just go and talk to your GP. So, what are you getting letters from people who swallowed bees? No, I wore weasel testicles and my wife still got pregnant. The number of complaints we've had. One of the things that I'm interested well is like this kind of spatial differences throughout time

in a way that I often think that we, it's easy to forget how different things were have been in that we have a lot of our own space today. We might have your own room growing up. You might have a quiet place to go to. And that wouldn't have existed for many, many people throughout history. But where would you go to meet somebody to date on the medieval marriage market? If you're a woman, you can't just go down the pub, I assume, because that would have you'd have been a certain type of woman if you'd been doing that. Where would you go to meet people? What was like a good sociable event? Yeah, no. I mean, it is quite restricted, isn't it? I mean, I suppose, yes, there are sort of that the church is important in those local communities,

you know, social events. But yeah, you are very restricted and your parents probably are keeping an eye on you. And if you go off to do an apprenticeship, often there are clauses in apprenticeships that go, well, you know, your apprentice master is now responsible for your morals, basically, and mustn't let you out to get up to anything. You're not allowed to get married. And you know, so, yeah, there are quite a lot of restrictions that would definitely limit things, I think. I mean, we're all the living, breathing, walking proof that people managed to get around those restrictions somehow. But it's just interesting. How would you do?

Would you catch someone's eye? Would you be able to, I mean, people couldn't, literacy rates weren't great, so you couldn't write them a note? Would you, like, send them a little present? In the Miller's tale, Chaucer's Millers' tale, we're told that Absalon, who really fancies the young Alison, he sends her cakes, kind of like a love token? I mean, I think that would work on me, but was there a sense of, like, that you'd give people, like, little tokens or something, just to let them know? I really fancy you.

Yeah, I think that is quite an important part of medieval courtship. Yeah, the little presents. The little presence. The little presents. We like little presents. We very much like little presents. They're still very much appreciated. So one of the things we talk about a lot is like this sort of emphasis

and you've got to get married and you've got to protect your virtue or at least no one's got to find out that you can't have virtue. It's been compromised by and blah. But what if you're a woman who wanted to stay single? Because a lot of the technically you're looking at it. It's a real kind of shit show for women. I often think that your best deal was to get married, it is a bit like the wife of bath,

and then have him possibly die off and then you can inherit it and just be a rich widow. But what if you wanted to stay single and you didn't want to get married? Was there any space for that? Yeah, I mean, your choices are quite limited. I mean, I think there probably always are

more single women than people think, and some of them will work. You know, that sort of the spinster thing comes from it and all that sort of thing. But no, your options are quite limited. I mean, I suppose one option for some women would have been becoming a nun. But then, of course, yeah,

you bought into a sort of a whole lifestyle that maybe you didn't want just because you didn't want her husband, you wanted to be a nun, is quite a least. Yes, is not it. Yeah. Was it Lucy of Bollinbroke, who after her husband died, paid to stay single? Yeah, there are sort of relatively well-to-do women who do. And some of them, again, then take sort of vows of celibacy,

whether they're really committed to the sedentices. Some of them, definitely are. Some of them you think is this partly to sort of halt them in their campaign not to get married off again. But, yeah, I mean, definitely, to be a wealthy widow is probably your best bit, isn't it? I think so. I think so. In your research, we know it must have been happening because humans are humans, but what is the evidence for things like men having sex with men, women having sex with women, what we'd now call like queer sex? Is that in the records that

you've looked at? And what was the medieval attitude to same-sex relationships? Yeah. So, I mean, for the church's point of view, well, it's definitely a sin. I mean, let's face it, the church is point of view everything, other than marital sex for the purposes of procreation as a sin. So, yeah, the sin. But I mean, did people still do it? Yes, of course they did. Inevitably, I suppose, we know about it, mainly from court records. There's far more about men having sex with men in the court records. There's one particularly good set from 14th, 15th century Florence, where they actually get so head up about this that they set up at an institution called the Office of the Night.

Oh, which, yeah, it exists purely to find cases of men having sex with men. Wow. And they find them. They find thousands of them. And yeah, apparently got to the point where in Germany, in the 15th century, men who had sex with other men were nicknamed Florence because the city became so strongly associated with it. Wow. I mean, it varies quite wildly from place to place and over time, and how many cases you're finding.

And I think probably that's because sometimes, yeah, they have these sort of moral panics and they go, right, we've got to find everybody who's doing it. And sometimes it seems to be allowed more to fly under the radar. I mean, women, there are so, so few cases of women. And again, it's when they end up in courts. but there's about a dozen, I think, with the whole of the later Middle Ages. Clearly, there weren't only a dozen cases

of women who had sits with other women in the whole of the Middle Ages. I think we're fairly confidently saying. And whether one thing that might have helped women to go under the radar was that they very much had this idea of sex in terms of something that one person did to the other and in terms of penetration.

And one of the odd things actually about cases where you do get women in court for having sex with other women is they're often very keen for one of them to be cast in the role of the man and she's seen as the guiltier party. It's all about the penis, isn't it? That's what we're back to.

It seems to be. Wow. Yeah. I'm always fascinated by how differently women who have sex with women is treated than men who have sex with men. Because sometimes I think maybe they were just better at getting away with it than the men were and that's why there's so few of them.

But I think it's probably much more complex than that. And it's almost to do with this inability to conceive that what they're doing is what the medieval mind and not just the medieval period, but it still is enforced today, this odd narrative, that lesbianism is somehow not proper sex. It's very weird.

Yeah, and I think you see that. You do say that right the way through history, don't you? Definitely in the middle ages. I mean, you know, like there weren't many advantages to being a woman, but I think that perhaps maybe that was something that the patriarchy, you know, that we got that small bonus, is that we're probably not going to get executed for being lesbians because they just can't conceive of us having sex with each other at all.

I'll be back with Catherine after this short break. Do you think that women have sex with men have sex with men, how was sex drive conceived of in the Middle Ages? One of the things that often surprises modern people is the idea that in the middle ages, it was women who were thought of as being more highly sex than men, which makes it doubly strange that they didn't think they could be lesbians having sex.

But, okay, what was that about? Why were women thought of as being far lustier than men? Yeah, I mean, I think it goes back again to religion and sort of the Eve and the original sin and all that sort of stuff. And so it's very much coming from there. But it also comes from this medical idea that sort of women are cold and they need men's heat. How do you get a man's heat? Well, by having sex with him. Of course.

So that's terrible euphemism, it isn't. Yeah, religious and medical terms. Women are definitely seen as being the more lustful sex, which again doesn't sort of fit without stereotypes. I think, and what we've since come to expect or been told to expect. I think the other thing that often surprises people is that they were far more interested in women's sexual pleasure than we think they might be.

Oh, nice. Not because they were all great feminists, but because they thought, yeah, sadly, but because they had this idea, again, it goes back to medical theory, they had this idea that to conceive both the man and the woman need to release seed, so there does need of an orgasm.

So there's a surprising amount in medical texts about sort of foreplay on ways to increase a woman's sexual pleasure so that you'll conceive. Some of them are really bad ideas like putting chili on your genitals. I don't think anybody should put chili on their genitals. How have we managed to survive as a species is beyond me? Are there any good sex tips that you've found? You're like, oh, actually, that's not a bad one. I have to say I can remember more of the bad ones.

Yeah, they would stand out, wouldn't they? They would. Yeah. And it sets a low bar. It does. Definitely this idea though that, yeah, women love sex, women are sex. But again, there are lots of stories in medieval literature about women who are just obsessed with penises,

you know, run away with the husband's friends because he's got a bigger penis or something. Yeah. And yeah, they've definitely written by people with penises. Yeah, I can't help them because that must be true. This is the women just out there just going, honestly, like lads, we're not that fuss with them. If you were about to launch yourself on the medieval dating marriage market,

whoever your preferred person is, man, woman, whoever, what would you wear to be stylish? How would you sort of dress to impress? What would be a sexy look in the middle ages? What would be the kind of look that you were going for? I mean, I guess who it is. It depends who you are and when you are, doesn't it? Because if you're a medieval person,

you've probably only got one set of clothes or maybe two. That's true. Got quite limited options here. You're going in your smock, aren't you? Yes. But there's a lot of stuff around the time of the Black Death, when people start going, well, you know, the reason we've got this black death is because everybody's going around in really tightly fitted clothes.

You know, the men are wearing tight hose and showing off their bums and too many people wearing pointy shoes and all that sort of thing. So, yeah. Makes perfect sense. Dress yourself up. Yeah. They liked pale, didn't they? They were all about pale beauty standards in the Middle Ages.

I like that one. For some reason, a shiny forehead. I've never quite worked that one out what that is about why they like that. No, I think the two that baffle me at that one. And there was a medieval Spanish text I read once where it said, what you really want in a woman is sweaty armpits. What? Yeah.

Was that just one guy with an armpit kink who's made the mistake of thinking everybody thinks that this is the same? I don't know because I've never seen it anywhere else. So yeah, maybe that's it. This one embarrassing moment, yeah. I've never seen. In fact, most of the records I've seen is like people trying to avoid body smells, which is another misconception we have about the Middle Ages

is that they would have stunk. They would definitely have smelled worse than we do today, but smelling good was equally as important to them. Yeah, I mean, definitely, again, medical texts. I've seen plenty of recipes for sort of things to deal with your sweaty armpits and to make you smell nice. So, yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe that was one weird chap.

Just hadn't quite realised there that, like, everyone else, yeah, we're not. Don't write that down. It's not the same as ever. What a way to find out that it's just your king. Even like the poor people would be doing things like chewing mint and cloves to try and make their breath smell nicer. There would have been, like, local herbs and things to try and wash hair and try and keep clean.

This was a group of people who did want to smell and look as nice as they possibly could. They weren't just, like, walking around covered in mud. No, definitely not. And I think that's another one of the big misconceptions, isn't it? And definitely, no, medieval cleanness is another one of my favorite topics. And, yeah, plenty of stuff about ordinary people washing. And again, not just because they wanted to smell nice,

they thought it was healthy to be clean. You know, they knew it wasn't good for you to be walking around covered in that. They didn't want to. So let's talk about one of my favorite subjects, sex for sale in the Middle Ages, because again, with all of this stuff, there's such a state of cognitive dissidents going on. Like, on one hand, women are so much more highly lust than men, but we can't possibly conceive of them being lesbians. Sex is really important, but you can't have it, but it's only really important within these predetermined parameters. You can only have it in marriage and on certain days and blah, blah, blah, blah. Medieval sex work seems to throw up a whole load of these contradictions because the church,

will get itself into a right old state because on one hand, it views it as the expression of all the sinful things about sex that it does get itself very concerned with. But on the other hand, there's this strange idea that, like, well, I suppose it's necessary as well in some ways. What's been your research around people selling sex in the Middle Ages? Well, as you say, yeah, it is very contradictory. I mean, broadly speaking, they sort of, at the beginning of the period I look at in the book in sort of the 12th, 13th centuries, the thing is Banet. And then in the sort of the 14th century, a lot of towns start to decide, yeah, well, okay, we're never going to manage to get rid of this. Let's manage it. Yeah. And they start setting up official civic brothels and sort of official redoubt districts. And that has two benefits. One, they can regulate what's going on in there a bit. And there are cases where sort of women are protected from particular abusive pimps or where men are prosecuted for, you know, beating up the sex workers or whatever. Also means, of course, they could benefit for the revenues, which they're quite keen on. But yeah, how that sits alongside a society which is going, sex work is a sin,

these women need to be sort of saved. The church is quite big on setting up sort of houses, essentially convents for repentant prostitutes. And then, yeah, where are the cities with the most brothels? Oh, yeah, that'll be the ones where there's loads of clergy. Oh, my God. There was a saying about Aveniore that, you know, you couldn't walk across the bridge in Avignon without meeting so many prostitutes and so many donkeys because there's so many clergy there when the papers is there in the 14th century.

And they were very close. closely associated with the medieval tradition of public bathing when you would just go down and just have a bath with your mates. And they seem to have been very good places to meet clients or sort of shenanigans when on there. And what is that link about? Is it just because there's nudity, so there's sex? Yeah, I think so. And it does become a very strong link and something that people are very worried about. I mean, obviously there are bathers.

I think there probably are sort of more salubrious bathhouse is where that sort of thing, no, definitely isn't going on and then places that definitely, shall we say, get a reputation. And then, yeah, people get pretty panicked about that. I read about one bath house in Avignon. I can't remember the exact date, but apparently have put out an announcement in like the local town crier, which was like just to let people, it's definitely not a brothel. This is a nice bathhouse where people just come for baths. So it must have been like really concerning for people to be constantly trying to make that kind of distinction. We've lost a lot of the names of the people that were selling sex in the middle ages. what records do you turn to when you're trying to piece this history together

because anything sex history is difficult to get to the actual voices themselves what were the sources you were using when you were looking at people selling sex in the middle ages? Yeah, I mean I suppose inevitably, again, a lot of it is court records. A lot of it is when people get into trouble for things and they end up in court and sometimes then you get really detailed accounts. It's one particularly good case from 15th century Germany where a brothel was investigated after one of the, the women who works those forced to have an abortion and out of those records that you get

loads of the testaments from a lot of the women and sort of details of what life was like in that institution of that particular one very unpleasant so yeah I mean that they are a really good source it would be nice to have something that wasn't to do with more of people being punished but that really is the best way in it is isn't it that that's the thing and there's that amazing record that survived from the southwark stews and it pretended that it was from like the 12th century but it wasn't it was from like the 16th century and it was a record of of the bawdy houses in the area of Southwick and there were lots of rules and things

that people could and couldn't do. And one of my favourites was like, they're not allowed to sell pies. I've never really understood that. Why would it be that the brothel was allowed to sell pies? The blow jobs, fine. Pies, no. I've never quite understood that one.

I don't know. Do they think they're sort of tempting, honest people in who just want a pie and then they'll get up to all sorts when they're in there? Maybe that's it. Maybe that's it. maybe it was just the idea of like just get in and get out like nothing to sort of keep you there

any longer than you needed to be maybe they were just shit at making pies so sex work is an industry that's flourishing it's always flourishing it's very interesting that you said there that wherever there were a lot of clergy there was a lot of sex work doesn't surprise being the least but if we're talking about the kind of sex that the medieval church could get on board with

marital sex to be having babies all of that kind of stuff did they give out advice on when to conceive or how not to conceive? Perhaps they'd probably be a bit quieter about that one. But what was their understanding of even how you could get pregnant? Yeah, I mean, trying to get to grips of medieval sex education is quite difficult. There are sort of the odd sort of written texts that maybe we think people learn from. But a lot of it must have been oral and it's been lost.

But yeah, I mean, definitely the church, yeah, obviously it was mostly supposed to teach you about sexual sin. and definitely there's a lot of stuff about the clergy should be preaching about things and that confession's an important talk. But they are very worried about what goes on in the confessional. The priest must ask you questions, but he mustn't ask you two specific questions because he might give you ideas of things that you have a thought of.

And similarly, when you're confessing, you know, you shouldn't confess too much because don't put that in the priest's ears. So they are very worried about people getting ideas from the confessional. That must have been the case, is that the church operated in this very, very strange way and that they are preaching about sexual sin to their congregations. But that must have been the first time that a lot of people even heard about this stuff.

And in a weird way, the church has become the primary source of learning about sexual sin, that people, they might not have even known about this stuff beforehand. Yeah, and I said definitely they are very worried about that, the idea that they might give you ideas or you might give them ideas and that you've got to be careful to avoid that. Wow. I was recently reading Angela's ashes, which isn't medieval, but I do remember the narrator Frank McCourt saying that when he was a kid,

he became obsessed with reading the Bible, and everyone thought that it was amazing because he was this lovely little boy. He's reading it's so good. He's reading about the saints' lives. But he wanted to read about them because they're so gory and awful and horrible and like full of terrible, terrible things. That's fascinating. There could have been churches full of people sat there going,

oh yeah, this is awful. Tell us more. Tell us more priest. That's so bizarre. So their conceptions of pregnancy is quite limited. I like the idea that you both have to have an orgasm, but that in itself is quite problematic. But the idea that sexual pleasure was important,

how did they conceive of sexual disease? You mentioned leprosy, which is bonkers. I didn't see that one come in. But what other diseases would they have been on the watch for? Because syphilis hadn't quite arrived by the middle ages had it, although that might be disputed, actually. Yes, for all this bit, I left that out of the book on the assumption.

Yeah, that crops up in the 1490s, but not clearly before. Yeah, I think probably before that, they are mainly talking about things in terms of balance. And so you get somebody like John of Gorn, there was rumoured that when he died, his genitals were all horribly rotted. But I think somebody does link that to sex, but too much sex in terms of balance, rather than has he got syphilis or something. Wow. So it does seem to be more in terms of too much, too little than in terms of disease.

there are odd references to something that would seem to be what we'd now call gonorrhea. And I say that there is this awareness that you can catch things from sex, but BD isn't really the concern that it is now. It was more about too much or too little. Were they worried that women could have too much or too little sex? Or is this, were women also being discovered with horribly rotted genitals? I think that the concern with women actually is that if you don't have sex, you won't be releasing any seed

and then it will sort of again back up in your body and choke you and you'll get suffocation of the wound and of course what's the cure for that will get married? Of course it is yes they're far less worried actually in medical terms about women having too much sex

because again because of this thing you're cold and it's warming you up and generally that's good I don't think I've ever found a case of a woman who's died of having too much sex I can't think of any or but yeah too little sex this idea that like you've got to get married

and you've got to have sex and you've got to have babies basically I've definitely seen that one cropping up. But it seems to be, I'm just, I'm going back to your bishops again. Why would they think that someone had died from not having enough sex? What are the cases that they're referencing? Is there any clear case that's actually happened or is this just kind of made up by a priest going, look, my mate Dave, he was a priest and he definitely died because he couldn't have sex? Yeah, no, I mean, they crop up in sort of, it's mainly 12, 13th century writings by priests. So maybe they have got an agenda. And I suppose what will happen is the good ones will be told. I think Thomas Beckett was supposed to have been told

that he would die if he didn't have sex. But of course, because he was Thomas Beckett, he went on our chance then. And we all know how he died. But yeah, there are one or two who they say, well, once they were told that, well, then they did have sex. They tried to save themselves. And yeah, others where they go, no, the doctor told them that, and they didn't. And sure enough, they died. I mean, it definitely is seen as a serious medical problem, whether people did exploit that for their own ends, we might suspect. But definitely, it's. did work in terms of the medical theory. That's all the evidence that I need, quite frankly. Let's talk about nuns for a little bit because I've always been struck by, I can't even

remember who said it to be, but it was at a conference ages ago, and we were drawing parallels between the brothel and the convent. They were run by women, women lived there. I was really struck by that. I was like, God, that's, I suppose that's true in the medieval period. And we often forget that women were sent there because they'd misbehaved, and there was certainly a lot of concern in the middle ages about what nuns were getting up to, and there were some very naughty nuns out there. What is your research told you about naughty nuns and sex? So we don't you say, I mean, there are plenty of naughty ones. There are plenty of stories about nuns who get pregnant, often by the priest who's coming into the convent because he's the only man who's around.

Scaliwax. Yeah, nuns who run away from their convents. I think somebody worked out the figures for female misbehavior are considerably lower than monks. probably because nuns do tend to be more enclosed. And so there's less sort of opportunity, whereas a lot of monks are going out on the town and getting up to trouble, nuns have fewer opportunities. Some of them didn't manage it.

But definitely there was something they were concerned about what all these women would get up to in convents. There has always been this taste for sort of salacious stories about nuns, definitely, and that was equally true in the middle age. Definitely, you know, anybody who's read Chaucer or, you know, any medieval literature knows that there are all these sort of terrible stories about naughty nuns. Probably again, goes back to the idea of it that men are writing these things

and probably tells us more about male fantasy than reality, but there we come. Oh, Catherine, you have been wonderful to talk to today. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? So I think the best starting place is obviously the book, The Fires of Lust, which should be available in an awkward bookshops. And yes, I'm also on Twitter and Instagram and all the usual places. Thank you so much for talking to me today.

so much fun. I've certainly enjoyed it. It's been a good laugh. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Catherine for joining me and if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want us to explore a subject or maybe you've just quaffed a bit too much mead and you fancy to say and how do you do? Well then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We have got episodes on everything from the history of Karen's to the real history of sex dolls all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.

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