Dan Snow's History Hit - Sex in the Middle Ages

Episode Date: December 31, 2021

Please note that this episode contains conversation about sex that you might not want to listen to in the presence of children.What did medieval people really think about sex, and were those thoughts all that different from ours today? The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much-or too little-sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about sex and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. More familiarly, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner and also struggled with many of the same social issues that we face today. Dan is joined by Katherine Harvey, Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and author of ‘The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages’. Katherine holds a PhD in Medieval History from King’s College London and has published widely on medieval topics, including sexuality, gender, emotions and the body. Join Dan and Katherine as they discuss sex through the ages, as relating to general attitudes, frequency, religion and marriage. Please vote for us! Dan Snow's History Hit has been nominated for a Podbible award in the 'informative' category: https://bit.ly/3pykkdsIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. It's New Year's Eve, which means a couple of things. One is that 2021 is drawing to an end, but more importantly it means the opportunity to vote in the Podbible Best Podcast categories is nearly over. Midnight tonight. Midnight. GMT. Zulu time. It's all over. The competition is closed. Now, you know when you're young, I look at my kids and think, wow, look at those kids. They could do anything. They could win an FA Cup. They could play first base for the Yankees. They could become Supreme NATO Commander of Europe. They could be a scientist.

They could win a Nobel Prize. They could win a Pulitzer. They could do anything. Now, as you get older, there's like a funnel and you just get squished in ever further. Now, at my age, I'm not going to win a Nobel Prize. It's not going to happen. I'm not going to win it. I'm not going to play professional sport in any way, shape or form. Slowly, the opportunities just fall away because of your incompetence, laziness or lack of

imagination. And what's left to you is a very narrow set of opportunities. And what is left to me, Dan Snow, age 43, is this opportunity to win a regional podcast competition for most informative podcast. It is what it is. It is what it is. And in this position I find myself in, it is probably best to win most informative podcast in the Podbible Awards because not doing so would be marginally worse. I'm not saying it's the life I wanted when I was a kid, folks. I'm not saying this is the Mars mission, first human on a different planet kind of accolade I was expecting to get when I was 10, but it's an accolade nonetheless. So long story short, get over to Podbible, podcast awards, just Google it, or follow the link in this info on this New Year's Eve and make an

old man very happy. In the meantime, folks, because it's also New Year's Eve, our minds are turning to sex, particularly sex in the middle ages. The middle ages, not middle age, in the middle ages. All right. We're talking to Kate Harvey. She's an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck University of London. She is an absolute legend. She knows everything about sexuality, gender, emotions, and the body in the middle ages. She's written a book called The Fires of Lust, Sex in the Middle Ages. If you're staying in tonight, doing nothing, listening to a podcast on New Year's Eve, this podcast could be perfect for you

because it's all about other people having sex, having a good time. How did medieval people really think about sex and how are those thoughts different to ours today? You're about to find out. Dr. Kate Harvey's about to tell you. Lucky you. Also, another request, as the new year dawns,

make it a history hit New Year. We've got some monumental projects happening this year that are going to blow your mind. Go to historyhit.tv, historyhit.tv, sign up today. Well, tomorrow. But in the meantime, folks, here's Dr. Kate Harvey. Enjoy. Catherine, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me on. Why is it that we always think that previous generations to us were like fantastically either prudish, deviant, lunatic when it comes to sex?

Like we all think that the past is like a totally different world. Yeah, I don't know whether we all watch too much Game of Thrones or something, but no, it is one of those areas where we really tend to assume that people were really, really different. And definitely when I started writing the book and talking to people, I realised just how different they thought we were. Given you've spent so much time thinking about this and researching it, is what strikes you the familiarity? Because from your book, I'm really struck by how many of these issues we're still talking about today. And it does seem that, funnily enough, our ancestors feel much more familiar than people might think.

I think so. I mean, I think some of the ways that they were framing it have changed. You know, some of our terminologies, when we think in terms of things like straight and gay, I don't know that that's very helpful to project back onto the Middle Ages. But definitely, yeah, one of the things that really struck me was how many of the same sort of issues they're dealing with and whether that's sort of personal things like, you know, the difficulties of finding a partner or infertility or something, or whether that's bigger social issues like how do you deal with prostitution do you ban it or do you regulate it a lot of it did yeah it was surprisingly familiar i think more so than i expected it to be should we start with shame because that's probably something that although we still have lots of

issues around sex and shame in our society we probably think we're far more enlightened we're all shagging away much more than they were in certain periods. I mean, obviously, you're talking about the Middle Ages, a gigantic and geographically disparate and religiously disparate thing. But what about shame? I guess that's where the whole sort of the religious element comes in. And maybe that's where they were different to us, in that there is this whole background of Catholicism.

And so things like the influence of the idea of Adam and Eve and original sin, and therefore, you know, after Eve ate that apple, everything to do with sex is sinful and shameful. A lot of that goes on. And so there are people who sort of torment themselves trying to be celibate and all that sort of thing. But of course, a lot of that's the clergy and the very devout, and I don't think we should assume that everybody was the same. There is some sort of sense sometimes of the church trying to impose that and that some of these punishments, certainly punishments for things like adultery, some of the things I look in the book about the public humiliation of people, some of it was just

having to process through the streets and you shift or something to the church but some of it was there was a really bizarre punishment called running in the south of France in the 13th century where they tied people together at the level of their genitals and made them run through the streets being flogged. I'd imagine that would make you feel quite embarrassed and quite ashamed. Beyond that, there is this sense of sort of people behaving more like us and also this sense that, you know, sex could be something funny. So lots of different people, lots of different attitudes. They didn't have one attitude to sex any more than we do. Do you see the kind of really

quite violent changes towards sex that we've had in the 20th century partly as a result of the pill and contraception and science and various things? I mean, did it really differ from place to place? I read that Venice was a place where, well, certainly had a reputation as a place where unmarried sex was less frowned upon than elsewhere, for example. Yeah, I think you definitely do get variations in attitude from place to place, and also over time. So, for example, you get panics about same-sex sex at certain times. Somewhere else in Italy, Florence, in the 14th, 15th centuries, there was this mass panic about men having sex with other men,

and they set up this special institution to deal with it, and thousands and thousands of men are whored through that court. Whereas in, say, England at the same time time there seems to be hardly any interest in it so there's really quite a lot of variation in a really quite an interesting way. Although non-religiously sanctioned sex was shameful was there any sex positive around like terms of health and mental wellness? Yeah I mean I think one of the things that is really interesting that really does seem to set up a conflict with these religious ideas is the fact that in medical terms sex is very much part of a healthy lifestyle because medieval medicine rests on this idea of the humors and you need to keep the humors in balance and having sex is one of the ways to do that so as long as it's in

moderation it's a good thing you know there are stories about people who die of both too much and too little sex so you know it has to be in balance. But I think for most people, it would have been seen as something like a healthy diet or something that it can be good for you. What about age? One thing we're always really struck by is people getting married when they're sort of eight and nine and ten and everything. So what was actually going on there?

Were people having sex with children regularly? No, I think marriage at that age is much, much rarer than we think it was. Usually, if it does happen, it's very elite levels of society. And usually then they tend to marry them, but they don't consummate the marriage until they're as well into their teens. And probably for ordinary people, the average age of marriage seems to be in early 20s, which is probably were very lustful but they think it's bad for them to have too much sex and they're worried that the children of teenagers will be feeble and so generally it's not seen as a good thing more broadly definitely i think they shared our repugnance with child abuse and although obviously there are all sorts of horrendous cover-ups in the church and the like although i'm not sure we've moved on too much from that it was something that was frowned upon that they did take seriously. And yeah, again,

not as common as we think. There are parts of your book which, I don't know, are we allowed to find them funny? I mean, some of the things people wrote about sex, just like people wrote things that remain true to this day and things that are like total balls. It's fascinating, the kind of range of things that people i guess that's no change from the present yeah one of the things that i did find some of the literary stuff is really bizarre isn't it some of those sort of stories about genitals wandering around by themselves as characters in stories but also i mean i think some of the real life stuff one of the things that people often seem to find quite funny is these annulment cases where men are accused of

impotence and then they have to sort of demonstrate their potency and they get physically inspected yeah it does all sound quite funny there is a part of it that goes but would you think that was funny if that was your neighbours physically examining you and what did that do to those marriages that they then had to stay in there has always been a humorous element to sex hasn't it and I think they very much saw that well I think they have a bit about over sex men like it's More like you get plague and you're sitting in a bath of eggs or something and drawing eggs into the anus. I mean, it's extraordinary. Yeah, it's how that's

even physically possible. I haven't persuaded anybody to try that one, but... A bath full of raw eggs. That's the cure, isn't it? That's one of the possible cures, yeah. Yeah, there's no doubt about it. I mean, there are all sorts of contraception. There's a story about a woman who supposedly swallowed a bee and then never had any more children. Some of these things do seem truly bizarre.

I mean, a lot of them are based, again, on this sort of the humoral properties and that there is sound medical theory in medieval terms behind them, but they do sound, frankly, ridiculous to us. They do, and we'll come into some of the treatments as well about the fish and the vagina and various things like that maybe at the end of the podcast. But what about consent? We talked about underage, so people get married too young, but we think we're all very enlightened now because we marry for love and we have far more choice, many of us,

in who we choose to marry. But your work strongly emphasises that consent and desirability was always part of medieval marriage. Yeah, I think it was far more important than we tend to allow. I mean, if they did have all these considerations about sort of social status and a suitable marriage and approved by the family and all the rest of it. But I think generally, no, there is this sense that you should marry somebody you want to marry. And that sort of very much part of the church's idea of marriage is that it must be consensual. And that's one of the reasons why they're very uncomfortable with child marriages, because you should be able to consent and that consent is very much what makes a marriage it comes up again when i look at rape and you know the idea again that consent is very important it does matter to

them far more than we maybe assume that it would interesting that once you're married that consent is assumed which of course was true until britain until bizarrely recently very recently yeah they have this doctrine about the marital date. And so basically, yeah, once you're married to somebody, that's it, you're assumed to have consented to sex with them and you are supposed to have sex with them basically whenever they ask. That becomes more and more important in the middle ages.

So in the early middle ages, there were all these rules about, you know, you mustn't have sex until you're in Lent and on church and all these sorts of things. And by the 12th, 13th century, they're actually getting to the point where they're going, no, actually, if that's the only way to pay the marital debt, you can have sex on Good Friday. It's better than one of you has to commit adultery or something. So it's, you know, it becomes a really serious thing for them. And what about virginity? Is that theological? Is it from the Virgin Mary? Is it about property

and about control? Like this sort of obsession with virginity, quote unquote purity? Yeah, I mean, I think it is very much a Christian idea, isn't it? And I think, yeah, it does very much go back to the Bible and to all these various saints. One of the things that's very interesting, actually, is that it is about men as well as women. We tend to very much think about virginity as being a female quality. And obviously the famous saints, it is people like the Virgin Mary. But actually in the Middle Ages, they are also quite interested in the virginity of Christ, the virginity of John the Baptist, and the virginity of clergy. I've done quite a lot of

work on medieval bishops, and there's quite a lot about them being celebrated as virgins in a way that I think is quite surprising to us, because we don't think of it as being about men. You're listening to Dr. Kate Harvey. We're talking about medieval sex. This is where we are. More coming up. Ancient history fans, this is our moment. Subscribe to The Ancients now to get your weekly goodness of ancient history. We've got the big topics. So through this material, we're actually looking at this entangled sum of hundreds and thousands, in fact, of stories of life across ancient Eurasia. We've got the big names. The Romans, of course, become so powerful and the

Romans conquer the whole of the Mediterranean world. And Hannibal was the one who challenged the Romans the most. We've got the big discoveries. And these are the only surviving boxing gloves from the Roman Empire. And we even have some groundbreaking new archaeological detective stories. Bards of Cleopatra. I had never come across any such thing before. Subscribe to The Ancients on History Hit wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. to be continued... were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Speaking of virgins and a person who will not end up being a medieval bishop what about the poor monk who was persecuted by that demon who kept jerking him off i mean i felt very sorry for him yeah this is another really weird thing because again we tend to think of virginity very much as a physical state don't we as of losing your virginity they sort of see it as a physical state but also a mental state and so somebody like this poor monk who yeah this demon keeps interfering with him and the bishop says nope that, that's it. He's not a true virgin. You can lose your virginity. You've never had sex, but you've had, you've masturbated or you've,

yeah, been polluted by a demon or even you've had impure thoughts. And allegedly that's it, you're not a virgin. The flip side of that is that because it's a mental state, they think you can regain your virginity. And so you do get people like Marjorie Kemp, who was a 15th century Norfolk mystic, who she was a mother of, I think, 14, and then decided she wanted to be a mystic. And she spends a lot of her time talking to Jesus, Marjorie Kemp. And he reassures her that no, in heaven, she'll dance with the virgins because she is sort of truly pure in her mind. I find it very interesting, the idea that this poor 12th century monk, he must have, unless he was reported on,

but if he's talking about this demon interfering with him, that must be like him reporting it to the authorities himself, poor thing. It's extraordinary the process by which some of these cases you mentioned come into the public space. Some of the things that mentally this does to people, there are cases of priests who castrate themselves trying to be celibate. You know, there are all sorts of horrible stories about people immersing themselves in icy rivers in the middle of winter, throwing themselves in beds of nettles and all sorts of things. And so I think there's no doubt about it

that this sort of ideal of celibacy did do a lot of damage to a lot of people, particularly a lot of the clergy. And what about ideas around sexual activeness? I always do these podcasts and the idea that either the men or the women are the kind of sexual aggressors or the ones that are weak and susceptible to sex all the time. I mean, does that change as well? I think probably what most people find most surprising is that, and again, it goes back to medicine actually and the humoral ideas, although also there was sort of the religious idea of the tempress,

is this idea that women are really sexually voracious. It's partly, as as they say it's to do with humors and the idea that women are naturally cold and so they sort of they want men's heat which they can get from sex and so women are supposed to be very lustful and again that comes out a lot in a lot of the literature you know there's a lot of medieval poems about women who are obsessed with sex and obsessed with big penises and really sort of lusted in a way that doesn't fit with maybe a lot of our stereotypes about sort of passive women. And what about that men are incorrigible sex fiends as well? Does that ebb and flow? Is that a consistent theme?

I think that is always there. And partly, again, because of this sort of humoral thing that men need to have sex for their health and that's one of the justifications for the legalization of prostitution and the establishment of town brothels and of course they are sort of framed by this idea that we're all sinners and we're all lustful and so both men and women are terrible people although they have also got this idea about sort of men should be able to it because they're manly should be able to exert more self-control so you do get some really interesting stuff about adultery where some people actually suggest male adultery is worse than female adultery, because actually they should be displaying self-control and setting an example, whereas what do you expect of women? You know,

they've got no self-control. Speaking of control, contraception, you've got some fairly scary methods in this. Yeah, all sorts of bizarre stuff. Some of it is fairly sensible. Basically, a lot of it rests around the idea that they think both men and women have to emit seed to conceive so a lot of their methods are sort of framed around trying to stop that so there's quite a lot of talk about coitus interrupters which obviously it's fairly sensible then there's sort of stuff about after you have sex you sort of you get up and jump around or you keep sneezing or something and then there are yeah the more bizarre they are most of them based on humoral things so a lot of it's trying to sort of adopt the properties of an animal or something to alter your complexion or to cool down your body so that you'll be less lustful all sorts of bizarre things you put mint on the

genitals you can hang a weasel's testicles around your neck there are all sorts of bizarre amulets and things. There's one involving, I think it's elephant dung. I mean, I don't know whether that just makes you so repulsive. Nobody wants to have sex with you. Maybe that's how that works. Say a woman who supposedly swallowed a bee and then never conceived again.

They do tend to make sense in humoral terms, but did they work? You suspect not. But I think it's interesting that the intent was there. And you know, not everybody in the Middle Ages was the intent was there and you know not everybody in the middle ages was just having 40 children and quite happy about it yeah good point and also it's probably impossible to even get a handle on this but I was very struck by in elite marriages if they're not marriages of love the measures of politics and statecraft is it acceptable for both

parties to have sex outside those relationships or just the men what about women perhaps often trapped within those marriages yeah I mean I think probably those are or just the men. What about women perhaps often trapped within those marriages? Yeah, I would say probably those are some of the sort of, to us, least palatable cases because of the obsession with inheritance. And obviously they are far more concerned about wives getting pregnant and passing off somebody else's baby as their, than they are about men fathering many children. Although I don't think that necessarily means that they're quite happy with the idea of men just going off with everybody else. There is this idea that they are

supposed to be sort of displaying self-control and setting an example. They were increasingly concerned with the sanctity of marriage and marriage is a sacrament and therefore it's something that needs to be respected. In terms of sort of women and adultery, I think what isn't true is this idea that we see a lot of female adultery as a justification to kill a woman or shut her up in a convent. That's actually very, very rare. And there is a lot more sympathy for sort of women in unhappy marriages. I can't remember which one it is, but there is one very famous medieval theologian who says actually a lot of female adultery is caused by male drunkenness and cruelty. And therefore we should have sympathy for these women. So it's a lot more complicated, I think, their attitudes than we tend to assume. And what about those sources? Because this must be so hard for you, because if you're relying on

these church courts and sources, I mean, they're not going to be, they're going to be coming from a certain point of view, aren't they? Do you have other wonderful random sex diarists telling you what was going on from a non-religious source, for example? Not as much as I'd like. I mean, if somebody could discover a medieval Samuel Pepys or something, that would be brilliant. I mean, you do get odd little sort of collections of letters or something. There's a marvellous set from 14th century Italy. So Merchant and his wife, the Dantinis,

and there's a lot in there, for example, about their experiences in fertility and the various advice people gave them for how to conceive. So you do get little snippets of that in things like the past and letters, little snippets of things that show you people's attitudes. You do get snippets of popular culture and verses and things. But no, a lot of it is prescriptive. A lot of it is framed by the church.

And that is a problem. You know, sometimes you're trying to read from the silences. It's medieval history for you, isn't it? We don't know everything we'd like to know. And that's what's fascinating about the church. You've got these, I mean, St. Augustine is so appalled by sex. And then you also have the Bishop of Winterstow running brothels in Southwark. People find it very confusing.

I find it very confusing. It does come back to this thing that we said at the beginning about, you know, there's a very broad period. It's a very big area and it's a lot of people. And in the same way as we don't all think the same today, we tend to talk as if the church is this sort of monolith with one opinion. But actually, even if you read broadly through the ecclesiastical sources, you do find differences of opinion and, you know, ranging from the type of people who are almost going, nobody should ever have sex, to some of the parish priests who seem to be going, well, there might be justifications

for contraception if you really can't afford enough children. So that range of opinions, I think, is really quite interesting. And as you say, though, wrestling with many of the same issues we are today. Yeah, I say a lot of the personal issues, but also you mentioned the Bishop of Winchester and his brothels in Southwark. I think that's a really interesting one, actually, in comparisons with the modern attitudes, because up until the sort of the late 13th century, basically their approach is they try to ban prostitution. They try and chuck sex workers out of cities there are no brothels and then from the late 13th and more into the 14th century a lot of towns start to legalize brothels they set up official brothels in cities official red light districts and they go for regulating they go for

trying to make sure that there isn't working conditions that they prosecute men who are violent towards prostitutes. And some people think that's a good idea and some people don't. Towards the end of the Middle Ages, it starts to swing back towards a maybe we should ban it again. But you know, that's a debate we're still having, isn't it? They've just said Spain, I think, is trying to ban prostitution again. You know, so it's still, it's very much an ongoing debate. Problems that we can never work out the answer to. Speaking of problems we can never work out the answer to, can you give me the penis enlargement recipe that's in your book? Oh, crikey.

Can I off the top of my head? It can tell me it's chopped up earthworms and juju oil. That's OK. Yeah. So there are several of them, but I think probably one of the most disgusting is the one about chopped earthworms and juju oil. There's stuff about beating your penis with sticks.

There's all sorts of dietary things you can do. Yeah, all sorts of remedies. And if a woman wants to snare a man, this potion is mind-blowingly unpleasant, but she can create a potion made from what? There's one to do with a fish that you've put in your vagina. There's all sorts of unpleasant ones. Some of them use menstrual blood.

There's a woman in Italy who I write about in the book who ends up in deep trouble with the courts because she's made some sort of potion. It's menstrual blood and There's a woman in Italy who I write about in the book who ends up in deep trouble with the courts because she's made some sort of potion. It's menstrual blood and belly button fluff, I think she uses, to entrap this nobleman's son. And yeah, she ends up in all sorts of trouble for that. And it's deeply horrible stuff. Works every time.

Are you one of these wonderful scholars who, because you work on such a broad period, that other friends and historians just kind of, if they come across some letters doing other work into a different particular field, they go, hang on, this might be right up your alley. And she just gets sent medieval pornography and filth all day long. Yeah, all sorts of weird conversations.

There was somebody coming up to me at a conference and going, yeah, we must talk about medieval wet dreams. That was an odd one. Yeah, definitely. So the weird stuff's come my way over the years, yeah. Well, I'm glad you've put it all in one place for us all to enjoy so thank you very much

Catherine what's the book called? it's The Fires of Lust Sex in the Middle Ages Fires of Lust thank you very much coming on thank you

I feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country

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