Gone Medieval - Sex: The Medieval Rules

Episode Date: August 15, 2023

Sex. It’s everyone’s favourite subject. But has it been that way since the Middle Ages? The repressive instincts of some medieval churchmen meant that the way that ordinary people experienced and enjoyed sex in medieval Europe was very different to how it is today. But despite the rules imposed by an all-powerful church, there are more similarities than you might think…In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Eleanor Janega is joined by History Hit stablemate Kate Lister, host of Betwixt the Sheets to unpack sex and sexuality in the Middle Ages and answer the burning question: just how did medieval people get it on?This episode was produced by Elena Guthrie and mixed by Joseph KnightDiscover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here >You can take part in our listener survey here.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world,

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. A word of warning about this week's show, we will be discussing sex and sexuality, and it can get slightly bawdy. There's any children listening? You might want to have them wait until next week. Hello, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Eleanor Yonaga, and in today's episode, we'll be talking about everyone's favorite subject, sex. More specifically, we'll be discussing medieval views on sex and sex. sexuality and whether there really is anything new under the sun. I'm over the moon to be joined by my fellow history hit presenter, the host of Betwixt the Sheets and my wonderful friend,

the amazing Dr. Kate Lister, Kate. How are you? Oh, I'm so pleased to be here talking to you on your podcast. Look at us. I know. I mean, it's usually me over at yours, which is a delight every time, but I know. We have so much fun. It's going to be a romp, everyone. Sorry about that. make it very serious. Oh no. Okay. Well, you're going to ruin our brand, but that's fine. I am delighted to drag you on here because it proves that I'm not the only one. No. Who's constantly banging on about sex in the Middle Ages. And I think that the reason why this is a fun thing to talk about other than the fact that I'm obsessed is that I think people don't really understand quite how the average person in the Middle Ages thought about sex and sexuality. And I mean, I know

that's a big thing to kind of say, but what would you say the prevailing attitudes towards sex were in medieval Europe? It's such a big question, that isn't it? I think the thing that a lot of people forget, and some scholars also forget sometimes, is that like the medieval period was a thousand years of history. That's a long time for attitudes to change. The attitudes we have today are not the same as an attitude that were a thousand years ago. So it really depends where you are in Europe at what point in the medieval period. But I think the thing that always surprises people today is that the attitude tend to be a lot more sexually permissive than we assumed that they would be. Or at least if you've looked at Victorian art and chastity belts

and swooning damsels and all of this stuff, that's what everyone thinks it's going to be like is going to be incredibly repressive. And they were actually much more open. and vocal and enjoying sex than we think that we do. You've got to be careful, you don't make it sound like some kind of sexual utopia where everyone just had an amazing time for the duration, because that wasn't true either, but it might surprise people. The medieval folk were a kinky bunch and they enjoyed themselves.

You hit on something immediately that I love to talk about, which is this idea of medieval people being really kind of repressive from things like, for example, chastity belts, but this is a Victorian myth, is it not? It is. Or at least we have never found a medieval chastity belt. Every historian has to hedge their bets always, because we might find one. We might find a locked chest from the medieval period that is full of chastity belts and a diary that my husband made me wear a chastity belt when he went on Crusades.

And then we all have to go, oh, balls. Yeah, all right, it was a thing. But until that happens, we don't have any evidence of it. It seems it was a Victorian invention. They did a lot of projecting onto the medieval period about their own ideas of sex and sexuality. And this idea of the women were incredibly pure and virgin all the time and that people didn't have riotous sex,

that is largely a Victorian invention. And chastity belts played right into that idea, the idea that men controlled women's sexuality so much they could put a locked belt on them. But we don't have any evidence that happened anywhere, apart from the 19th century, fevered imaginings of what it was like to be a medieval person. Victorians have so much to answer for. They did a lot of damage, didn't they?

Yeah, in my opinion. Oh, okay, but so this is interesting, right? On the one hand, we have this idea of the Middle Ages being this really repressive time in terms of thoughts of sexuality because of whatever it is that Victorians are doing in their spare time, right? But then also there is this issue with sources. say, right? Because the number one way we hear about sex in the middle ages, and we do hear about it a lot, is actually through this super hostile source, which is the church. So if you only get to like read or think about sexuality coming from some written sources, the most of the one that

you're going to get are from the church. And they have these really specific teachings about what sex is and, you know, rules, right, about what it is you're supposed to be doing. Yeah, they do. And as you rightly point out, it's very easy to read through a lot of the sources you get from the churches. My favourite are the penitentials, those big fat books of basically guides to sin, the priests, that if somebody comes in and goes, oh, God, I've done something really bad. I've had a lustful thought. Then you'd look up in your penitential and go, write three Hail Mary's. And there's some mad stuff in there.

There's some absolutely bonkers sins, like women making dildos out of bread or putting fish in their vaginas to try and seduce husbands. and just like, and it's so much fun to read them. And it's very tempting if you read that to go, oh my God, medieval women were running around with fish in their genitals. But you have to like take a big deep breath and be like, well, how, whoa, whoa, one priest has mentioned this and we have no other source work for this at all. So all you can say about that is one priest thought that happened. And religious sources are always going to skew the data,

because they have their own agenda always. I think this is a really good point because much like the Victorians and their reverent imaginations about how everyone's running around in a chastity belt, here we have Bouchard of Verms, who's the fish vagina magic guy. He's just this one guy, the Bishop of Verms, writes this penitential. And it's one of the surviving sources from the earlier medieval period where we don't have a ton of sources from it just because it's a really, really long time ago. And if you just said, okay, well, here's a snapshot of this. is what everyone is thinking about all the time. That's a little too easy, right? I don't think really

any women were putting live fishes into their vaginas and feeding them to their husbands. We can't rule it out, though, Elida. I don't we? Unfortunately, we can't at this point because of my man here. But it's like, here's a guy, right, who's supposed to be not having sex. And he's just sitting around being like, oh, man, women are putting fish in their vaginas. It's like a massive sexual repression fever dream. That's what I, in my less judgy moments, I think that it might be tying into folklore and superstition and because sometimes you do get odd folkloric beliefs that turn up that you can seduce a man by if you try and bake bread and you need it on your belly or on your buttocks

and then you cook it for, that's a folkloric belief that turns up elsewhere. So he might have been tapping into that. But I just can't believe that was common enough practice for it to be like a warning to have to be written about by priests. I think that was a bishop issue, more than a woman issue. Maybe the whole bread-needing thing, you know, who amongst us has not considered becoming seduced if someone presents them with a freshly made loaf of bread? It would do it for me, absolutely, sort of like slightly squished up and buttock-shaped. I mean, the attention to detail, I would feel very special indeed, I would say that, you know, but you've got on the one hand,

your man Bouchard here being completely off as right. rocker about these particular things. But the church does like to make rules, right? Like, this is the thing, is the church as an institution, especially when it picks up steam from the 12th century onwards, around Bouchard's time, it's kind of like, yeah, sure, church, I've heard of that. The Pope, that's a guy. And it seems to become increasingly anti-sex and anti-woman, or at least that's what the documents that we have. I have no doubt there are some liberal priests knocking around, but they never took the time to write us a book about this, so we just don't know what they thought. but it does seem to become

like you get your teachings of St. Jerome he is like resurrected and this guy who just believed that any sexual thought or temptation at all was sinful even if it was your own wife and if he had his way no one would have ever had sex ever but obviously there is a flaw in that particular plan

because then you will run out of Christians pretty damn quick so then they come up with all these mental gymnastics about well okay you can have sex but you can't enjoy it and if you do enjoy it now you've committed a sin And then you start to get all these rules and regulations around it. I think someone put it all together once of like when you can actually have sex according to the medieval Christian calendar.

And it was like at Tuesday one month at 6pm with your pajamas on and all the lights off. But it was like you couldn't have sex on feast days, on holy days. You couldn't have sex after a woman during menstruation after menstruation. And it goes on and on and on. And it's like, I don't know how we survived as a race if people were actually following that. So I assume that they weren't. I think I know what you're talking to. It's William Brundage. It's like a flow chart. That's the one. And it makes me laugh all the time because, yeah, if you looked at that and said,

okay, so the church is very important in the Middle Ages. And so everyone is really only having sex at times the church wants them to. Well, okay, one of the times you're not supposed to have sex is during Advent. And so that would mean that if everybody listened to what the church was saying, no one in the Middle Ages would have been born in September. No, good points. Well, that clearly didn't happen, right? We still have Virgos and Libras. So I think that that's a really sort of important thing to think about, right? But I don't know, like I went to Catholic school and there was, at least in the 90s, this real thing about Catholic school girls and this idea that we were all actually like quite naughty. So everybody kind of knows within a moral context that no one's really listening. No, and we still do that to a certain extent today, don't we? I mean, not everybody follows religious. teaching down the letter. I mean, some people do, but if you're a person of faith, you probably let quite a lot of it slide. People tend not to have an absolutely fanatible. Some people follow the Bible fanatically and then you can't do anything. But you don't even have to be religion, things like health guidelines. I know I'm supposed to be eating five pieces of fruit and veg every day and having

eight glasses of water. And yet I had a can of Coke and a Kit Kat for breakfast. So proud of you, babe. And it might be a leap from a Kit Kat to put in a fish in your vagina. But the point still stance. Is it, though? But is it? In many ways, the KitKap breakfast is the fish in the vagina of our times. Right? I agree with you, which is that I think that many evil people would have been aware of these teachings, and they would have been aware because they went to church regularly, and they would have known about this. So I'd imagine there was a considerable amount of guilt, but when you actually look at all of the rules and all of the fanaticism and all the things you were supposed to do, there's just no way we would have survived as a race if everyone followed it.

This is quite an interesting thing too, is that on the one hand, you've got the church being like, don't you do it, I swear. And what they kind of settle on is like, well, it's all right, as long as you're not having any fun, and you're married and you're trying to have children. So this is quite interesting because I think it's still the way that we talk about sex largely. You know, when we teach about sex, for example, to children, we're like, and it's for having babies. And it's like, all right. That is true, isn't it? Is it still very much the sperm goes to find an egg and then we have a baby stuff? That's true.

So the church won that one, I think it's quite interesting. But you have this idea that, okay, I'm going to let you have sex. If you're trying to have babies and you're married. But how within the context of marriage do they think about sex? I think that there's this kind of tendency to look at this and being like, okay, well, women are then the property of men entirely when they are married. Is that what we see kind of play out in terms of sexual dynamics? Again, you've got to be careful that you don't make it sound like it was a feminine.

utopia at all. But I'm often surprised by how much agency you see in medieval marriages, when you find sources that aren't necessarily from the church, they seem to have a lot of fun with it. And I know that you shouldn't look at Chaucer as documentary. That wouldn't be right at all. It's supposed to be funny. But one of his reoccurring jokes and one of his most richly mined social situations for comedy is marriage, is sex in marriage. He has a real thing about older men and younger wives and older men not being able to satisfy the younger wives and them going and having lots of affairs behind their backs and things like that. But it does seem like that sex is very funny. It's very rich. It's very pleasurable.

It's people give in to temptation. I don't think Chaucer's got a great view of marriage in all of the tales. It doesn't come off particularly well. But it does seem like sex is a lot of fun and sex was just part of marriage. And that was one of the good things about marriage. And it's true that, what was it, like the 90s that marital rape was outlawed in this country. It was really shocking. And so the woman was the husband's property, but that doesn't mean that it was just mass institutionalized sexual assaults forevermore. In fact, who is it? It was St. Christina who refused to have sex with somebody and they pushed this guy into the room with her and she absolutely refused. Her parents were trying to to do it and a husband was trying to get and she just absolutely wouldn't do it. So even though he has a

right to do that, he wasn't able to consummate that marriage. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting thing too because there's this concept called the conjugal debt, which is that when you get married, you kind of owe your spouse sex if it's reasonable. But the thing of it is, is that cuts both ways in the middle ages. We tend to think about sex now and ideas of consent as this is something that men do to women, right? And it's something that men do at women. Medieval people are a lot more likely to be like, women are trying to have that sex. Oh, baby, they really want to have sex. And so actually, part of it is like, well, you've got to put out if your wife wants to. And it's a Tuesday and your pajamas are on and the lights are off. We tend to read that, I think, oh, this is terrible

because it means that husbands can demand things of their wives all the time. And I'm like, well, I mean, yes. But when we take into context Chaucer's stories, for example, and things like that, you know, one of the reasons why these wives are running around behind their husband's back is they want more sex than they're being offered, right? In Chaucer's text, I'd like thinking of like the Miller's tale with Allison with the Miller or the merchant's tale and it's May and January. And January is, it's like 60 and May is 18. And they're having sex. There's quite a visceral description of where this young girl May is brought to bed, quote, as still as a stone. that it's a kind of like a real image of her just sort of lying there. And the expression is like that he laboured from dusk till dawn.

It's this real image of this older guy creaking and really wheezing. And there's descriptions of like his neck skin rattling. And it's really visceral. And they are having sex. But May is just lying there just like, what was that? So she is having sex, but it's terrible sex. So as soon as she gets an opportunity to have sex with the hunky young squire Damien, she's all over that.

In a tree. That's the one that I always bring up to people if they haven't read the Canterbury Tales before because I think people think, oh, it's medieval literature, it's dull. And I'm like, would you like to hear a story about people having sex in a pear tree? This is also quite an interesting one, right? Because when we talk about the Chaucer stories, right, I think that we kind of think that all medieval marriages are these arranged marriages between unwilling younger women and older men. But is that really the case on the ground, would you say? I mean, a range marriage was absolutely and certainly a thing, especially where money is involved. And your parents would almost certainly have quite a lot of say over what you did. But I think it's well, what we kind of

have to remember is that marriage in the medieval period was of a much more financially significant importance than it is today, especially if you were a woman, because you can't really go and earn your own money. I mean, there are careers that women go into, and you've written about that very eloquently, but generally they're not going to be enough to support you on your own. Unfortunately, for most of our history in this country, women have needed men, financially needed men. That was the deal. You stayed at home and you raised babies and you can't make enough money on your own. So a marriage was important. It was really important. So there were arranged marriages, especially when people have got lots of money because now it's become like a business acquisition

and it's more of an alliance and we're going to get this money. You're going to get that money and protection and all these things. Further down the line of just your average Joe peasanty person, it's difficult to say, isn't it? Because they didn't leave us the damn records, which would be extremely useful if any of them had bothered to learn out of right and tell us what the hell was going on. Get it together, 85% of the European population. I'm trying to creep on your marriages. But marrying for love was something that was discussed in the medieval period. It's easy to think of it, it was only transactional. But love is important to them. You do get descriptions of that of people falling in love off when they're already married. So it's not like, right, I must be

completely business minded. But arranged marriages were definitely and absolutely a thing. They were. But I think you might find that people had a bit more agency in it than we like to think of. Because ultimately, if you just go, nope, what are you going to do? What are you going to do? that's a really good point because I mean I think even among the classes where arranged marriage is the thing right like nobility royalty you still have these sources where young men are taken by their fathers to meet girls and then the father say hey what'd you think about that hey a a a a and the guys are like no and it'll always be for some stupid reason they'll be like she liked to be too much as one that I saw so yeah too keen and therefore maybe promiscuous was kind of the idea but I think that that's a really good point is that arranged marriage is certainly a thing, but you kind of still have a yes or no. Right? You still got to get someone in front of the altar who will say, do you take so-and-so? And maybe they don't. And there were workarounds as well. We've spoken about this before, this idea of kidnapping, the term raptus or rape, which doesn't quite mean what we think it does today,

although it can entail that, but it's basically kidnapping somebody and taking them away from their father. if you're looking at the early Middle Ages, if you're looking at a charge of rape under the laws of like Ethelbert, for example, the punishment for that is for the victim to marry the attacker, which to our modern ears is like, that's awful. Made perfect sense to them, apparently, at the time. So that's bleak, but also that opens up the possibility of,

well, if you really did want to get married to someone and your parents had said, nope, you're not marrying him, you can't marry another DJ, that's an awful idea. That you could go, oh, no, he's a kid. snap me though. Oh, well, the law says, it's like there were workarounds. Yeah, that's the thing, is there is kind of a way to worm your way in, even if your parents say no. And that's the thing, too, right? Sources are so interesting about this, because what could just be elopement,

if we were kind of describing it, for them, they'll say, oh, that's Raptis. So you have to be so careful with when medieval people are telling you about things like this, because they got a whole other way of thinking about it, you know, but... The best solution, if someone has eloped, the medieval point of view, a medieval point of you, a medieval or parents' point of view, I guess it's just to make the most of it. Because, well, it's done now. They don't really get divorced. I mean, they can sort of like wander off, I suppose, and separate. But what are you going to do now this has happened, you know? That's a really good point, too, because you can't really get divorced, you know,

unless you're royalty and you get sick of it. And the Pope will say yes, which you won't always do, right? You can't really get divorced. But that's also why, in cases of Raptis, marriage is kind of brought up, right? Because there's a pretty high premium, would you say, still put on this idea of virginity at marriage? Yeah, specifically the women's virginity. I mean, I'm sure that the guys are mentioned, but I think this has always been this idea of young lads sew their oats.

The burden of virginity is almost always on the woman. And that is why when you read through medieval law around sexual assault, it's so awful to our modern eyes, but going back against the laws of Ethelbert, is that if a woman had been sexually assaulted, the cost for that was literally a cost, is the attacker would have to pay money to either her husband or her father,

because it was regarded as a property crime, which again, it sounds horribly brutal. It is horribly brutal. But that's the way they viewed it because if someone has lost their virginity, then they are now devalued in the marriage market. And it's so important to get married because you can't earn your own money and you can't live with your parents for forever and ever and become a crazy spinster person, although I do strongly recommend crazy spinsterdom.

It's interesting, right, because the laws are. of Ethelbert definitely say this. So this is in the early medieval period. But when you get to kind of the high and late medieval period, this is still going on. Like Thomas Aquinas writes about this, because his whole thing is, well, if we are going to have sex or sin of any kind, the problem with sin is that sin is illogical. And it's illogical because you shouldn't do something that's going to make God mad at you, right? Essentially, I'd say it would be illogical to make God mad at you. And so when he classifies sexual sin, he talks about, right? Raptus within this. And he says, okay, well, raptus is bad because you're kind of dishonoring fathers and

mothers and things, but you make it go away through the marriage thing where the dishonor that you've done to someone's father or to someone's husband can be remediated financially. You certainly see this an illegal standpoint in the early medieval period, but hundreds of years later, they're still like, yeah, yeah, no, that's true. Just make sure all the men are happy and we'll roll from there. I guess if they're placing such a high value on a woman being a virgin, in a weird, logical way, it made sense to them of, well, this is the person that's taken her virginity, therefore this is the person that now has to marry her. And it's so messed up that this was like underpinning such important laws. But that's what was happening at the time. And I doubt very much that everyone was a virgin when they rocked upon their wedding day. But the game was to make everyone think that you were. Houston Hughes on the ancients from history hit as we unearth Pompeii's buried secrets in a special mini-series. You'll discover what life was like in this town before the eruption of Vesuvius, the bustling streets, the roar of the gladiators and the hidden lives of sex workers.

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So to go back to Chaucer, there doesn't seem to be much. for the people having lots of affairs there, other than we all get a good laugh out of it. But if you look at laws that actually do still survive towards, I think there's some out of Normandy and other places in France and sort of the Nordic countries, especially particularly hostile to women who were found to have committed adultery. And the punishments range from things like having their head shaved and their noses sliced and often being paraded through the streets. There was one, I think it was Normandy in the Middle Ages, and the woman would be paraded through the streets of her local town, and then it would be up to her husband whether or not he wanted to take her back. Good Lord.

But then again, you know, we've got that law that exists. We can see it in the sources. It doesn't necessarily follow that it was always implemented. Again, so we're back to that thing of like, yeah, there was a law, and yeah, we can look at that and go, Jesus, that was awful. but how often was that implemented? How often did that happen? But the punishment can be very, very severe. This is interesting. We definitely see that in late medieval sources in Italy as well. Because it's Italy and the late medieval period,

it's much more financialized. So what you'll see is people have to pay if they've had extramarital affairs. I've seen that as well. I didn't know it was still going on in late Italy. That's interesting. I love that. I love the idea that if you really fancied

like such and such down the street and you wanted to have a bit on the side, you could maybe save up. Just be like... Oh my God, yeah, exactly. Like, how much is it? Is it five pounds for him to give me head? Right, okay, just give me a couple of weeks.

Do you accept Klarna? But then, again, with this, you have to pay a lot more if you're a woman than you're a man, if you're a man, it's like, ah, well, boys will be boys, right? But then who's paying it? That's the thing, because she can't really earn her own money. So who is paying her horn debt?

it has to come out of her dowry. Wow. I love that. That you'd have to factor in a little bit more if she was quite slutty. No, you're absolutely right. But speaking of head and what we would pay for it

in the medieval period. I think it's also interesting to kind of talk about sex that doesn't apply to this kind of heteronormative procreative model. Oh, that's interesting. Do you think there was

get out closets? Like fingering didn't count. I think actually, fingering was worse. Fingering was worse. Yeah, because it's illogical. So if you have sodomy, so the kinds of sex that you can't get pregnant from, that's totally illogical because sex is for procreation. So it's more sinful. I can see the twisted logic, I suppose. But I think within that too, when we're talking about sodomy and we're talking about non-procreative sex, that means a whole class of people that we would call our homosexual friends are kind of like out of

luck. Because by definition, if you are cisgendered and gay, there's no way that you're going to be able to have procreative sex, right? But that isn't to say that these people didn't exist, but the concept doesn't really exist, right? It's really tricky, isn't it? Like, when you say that to people, like the concept of homosexuality didn't exist, they always look at you like, you bonkers. I don't mean that people didn't fancy like a wide spectrum. Of course, same sex attraction has always been with us. But the idea that it was an idea. identity that you would come out. Because now sexuality is linked to our identities.

It's something that we are. Like, you'd say, I am gay. I've come out as gay. It's like a big thing. And then there's a community around that. And there's an identity and all kinds of stuff that goes on. The idea of that, quote, quote, homosexual as an actual figure, as a person, as an identity, as someone who acts a certain way, emerges really in the late 19th century.

But you've got to be really careful with that because there is evidence of communities. And I'm sure that there's. were communities coming together. How they understood themselves is much harder to try and define. What seems to be the case is that same-sex acts and attraction wasn't something that you would come out and say, I am this. It's more something that you would do. You weren't gay, but you would have sex with men. It wasn't who you are. It was something that you did. This is a really interesting point about communities, though, right? Because I know, for example, we've got this testimony from 14th century London on the part of Eleanor Reichner.

I think we've chatted about her before who gets hauled into court because she's doing sex work where she ought not. And it turns out Eleanor is what we would call a trans woman because she had been born John. And then when they're like, girl, explain yourself. So she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I transitioned. You know what we would call transition up in Oxford at the inn full of trans women who like hang out and tell you how to become trans. and all this stuff. So we know that there are these communities of what we would call queer people,

giving knowledge to each other, right? But Eleanor is like, yeah, now I'm a woman, what do you want? But she doesn't really have a concept of her transness, right? Because that doesn't exist yet. But that isn't to say that she isn't someone who hasn't changed. I find that quite interesting because the community is there, but the concept is not, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to language, doesn't it?

is it's very easy to forget that in our modern age, how connected we all are with each other, especially with the internet. So when you reach out and you form communities and you find people like you and you learn the language and the vocabulary and you can identify each other, it's so important in not only learning about yourself, but in modelling your own behaviour. But what do you do in the 12th century when you can't read and nobody is writing about this stuff? And we know that people did find people because communities have always come together and existed underground secretly, but it must have been so much harder to do. Like, how do you understand your own sexuality and your own gender identity

when there isn't a vocabulary immediately available to you? And I think it's so interesting as well, because you get this real kind of, like, dual idea about what people should be doing when they have what we would call gay sex, right? Because on the one hand, the church is like, don't you do it? No, that's very naughty. But then on the other hand, you have sources like, for example, physicians manuals will be like, well, you know how young women get together and jack each other off? And they'll write about that. I'd be like, that's what little girls, they just hang out. And they just do that. And they'll be like, oh, and it's because their humors are building up and they don't really know what they're doing yet. And it's got to get out somehow or it'll suffocate their womb. So, hey, ho, you know, young ladies. And you're kind of like, excuse me? It's said in this incredibly matter-of-fact way, which to a certain extent makes me find it somewhat plausible. So, for example, when Bushart is like, are you doing fish vagina magic? Oh, don't do it.

Don't do it. That's very condemning. But when physicians are like, oh, yeah, well, you know, that's understandable. And it's a symptom of X medical thing. That, to me, is more believable because it crops up in a lot of different places and it isn't saying, and that's bad and you need to put a stop to it. what they're saying is that it's a symptom of this sexual malaise. And it's a very interesting one, I suppose, from a modern perspective, because I'm like, I don't know, are they? Yeah. And then sometimes

you do get sources, like the discussion that was circulating around, was Edward II. He had like favorites, quote, unquote. And the people writing about it at the time are clearly suggesting that they are lovers. They refer to each other as wife. People are quite surprised by how close they are and that they're kissing each other. One of his lovers, was it Philip? Galveston or one of them. Even when Edward got married, Galveston turns up at the wedding and parades around in purple robes that look better than the brides. And people know this and clock it and register it. And just because they're not saying, yeah, he loves a bit of cock, does Edward the second, it's there. And they clearly know enough about same-sex traction and what's going on to be able to identify it.

people aren't walking around going, oh my God, they're just such good friends. It's like people are suspicious about this and they're not pleased about it. So that, again, with the kind of medical text that you get going on, suggests that people did know. That really shouldn't surprise us. There's too much evidence otherwise, you know? Right, exactly. So it's bad.

It's bad to be gay, according to the church, because you can't have sex in a way that will result in babies, right? So if we're talking about the sort of sex that can result in babies, so, you know, penis and vagina sex is just like right up in there. What kind of methods are available, say, if you're having good old-fashioned penis in vagina sex and you don't want to get pregnant? Like, is there such a thing as family planning?

Oh, well, the pull-out method is a time and trusted, but wholly and effectual method, right? I think that the actual research on that suggests it's between 60 and 70% effective. I told my students that I once, and they were like, oh, God, is it really? I said, no, it's not a good thing. Jesus Christ, that's bad.

But I suppose that would have been effective. And then also, you know, penchant of sex isn't always the main event. There's a lot of other stuff that can go on around that. Other sex acts if you didn't want to get pregnant. And bearing in mind that if you do this, you might get pregnant, that puts a lot of concern on let's do some other stuff instead. But medieval contraceptives was prayer, I suppose, was quite a big one. But you get so like nonsense things turning up in some medical text,

things like jump up and down after. you've had sex. But what you have to remember is that medical texts are often guided by the church or in the fact that if they don't tow the line, the church might ban them. So you're not going to find many medical texts that go, I'm going to tell you how to not have a baby because the church was really big on it. So it would have been word of mouth and oral tradition passed down and you sort of get condom manufacturers, but that's more in the 16th century, 15th century. So I would have put money on the pullout method being the go-to and probably anal

sex as well. Why not? We'll throw that one into. Which is why the church gets so down on all the kinds of sex that aren't PIV, where they're like, who's getting pregnant from that? And it's like, well, exactly, you know? And I think it's quite funny because basically the church spends the entire medieval period being like, please, I'm

begging you, have penis and vagina sex. Just put it in that hole. That's all we're asking you to do, guys. And everyone is like, no. I find it really funny because I feel like our culture has now adopted the church's way of thinking about, you know, when we have these conversations about what counts the sex and what's real sex, and like real sex is this penetrative kind of sex, whereas medieval people are like, oh no, saw that, I want a hand job. It does need to be dismantled this idea that we've got of the only sex that counts is putting a penis into a vagina. Even the fact that we call other sexual acts for play suggests that it's like the warm-up act to the main event, which is bonkers.

really, because most women don't even come through penetrative sex. And yet, here we are going, yes, but this is really the only one that counts. The thing is, is if you get pregnant, unless you're actually married and you are trying to have a baby, it's not good. Getting pregnant now is quite like, oh my God, for a lot of people, right? Unless you're actually trying to have a baby, suddenly finding out you're pregnant is generally, oh shit. Well, what about in the medieval period when the consequences for this are phenomenal, huge. So why would you risk getting pregnant when there are other things on often? Absolutely.

With all of this, we keep talking about what the church wants versus what people are doing. But what about, we've touched on this a little talking about Chaucer, but when we're talking about pop culture and what ordinary people think about sex, how do we see it crop up? I mean, Chaucer thinks it's funny, right? Chaucer thinks it's really funny and pleasurable. Yeah, like, is that what we see also in things like other forms of art? other bits of medieval literature?

They are surprisingly boredy. And again, you've got to be careful because of thousand years of history and many different peoples within that. But we are often, as a modern audience, quite surprised by how open they are around their sexuality. For example, the Sheila Naguig figurines that crop up on early medieval churches. These little grotesque carvings of a female figure with this huge vulva that she's pulling open.

And from whenever they were carved to right now, people are going, now we don't really know what those do. Why are they there? But whatever it meant to the original people, it was something quite important. But there they go, these huge big vulva-like things on a church. Or they're called Maseri Cods, which is the carvings of medieval church pews. If you look at those, they're often obscene. They're often assholes and willies and bowls and all that stuff. And if you look up into the top of cathedrals, you can often see little grotesques. Like in York Minster, way up in the rafters, there is a little carving of a monkey buggering another

monkey. You know, it's funny. Like, people go, oh, well, what does it mean? I think it's funny. But when we look at something like Chaucon, we've got surviving bawdy songs, and there's one French bard, what's I call, like, The Knight who was a vagina or something utterly bonkers, right? We've all been there. But they seem to get a lot of enjoyment and humor out of sex. And they're not that bothered by it in the way that we might, even their kind of more courtly loves. Like, if you're thinking about the King Arthur myth and Lancelot and Gwenevere, when Mallory's writing about it, rather than condemning Gwenevere for her extramarital affair with Lancelot, as the Victorians did, what he has to say is that she was a good lover. And that's like a good thing for him.

I don't think he's saying that she was a right goer, but he's sort of like that she enjoyed love and courtship. So that's quite important to him. And I always think it's fascinating when you think about the actual geographical landscape of people in the medieval period, because we have so much space now that we just take it for granted, we don't even think about it. Like, the idea that you'd have your own room to grow up in, that's so wild. What you'd probably be dealing with is families growing up in one room. And then even if you were, you know, of a poor person and you can go and maybe work at someone else's house or something, you'd be sharing rooms. So you'd see people naked. We're talking about big families here, so they're still having sex with their kids in the room.

And these are a group of people that enjoy public bathing. That's quite good fun to them. So nudity and sex, I think, would have been much more immediate and every day to them than it would be to us, just because they didn't have the space to try and pretend it wasn't happening. This leads me to my final set of questions that I want to ask you about. So if we're looking at these medieval views on sexuality, would you say that we're still being impacted by these things? Are there views of sexuality still coming up in ours? Because in some ways, they're completely different? Or are we just kind of mediated in what our ideas about this might be by people like the Victorians, by intercessors who've kind of like got in the way? I think that the church's

teachings cast a long shadow. It's not just the medieval church. They didn't stop after the medieval period. In fact, they really got going with the thou shalt not stuff. And I think that we have as a culture and a people, we have internalized a lot of that teachings, and it's still with us. point in case the penis in vagina sex being the really important one. We still place a lot more value on women's sexuality and chastity than we do on men's. There's still an attitude of boys will be boys, whereas girls, they're just not given the same license that is being dismantled all the time, but I think that is still there. But what I do like is when you find things that we do have in common, like, we still think

sex is really funny. I like that. And like, if you look at the monkeys buggering each other, in a minster that's funny and Chaucer is still funny and not in a way that Shakespeare is funny where you have to be taught why it's funny in order to be able to get the joke it's a fart joke but I do like that about us is we've always laughed at willies and knobs and farts and that goes right back to as long as we've been doing it but I think we still have that quite rich medieval sense of borediness I like that yeah I mean well at least we do

And of course, we're still putting fish in our vaginas to try and seduce our husbands. Right? Absolutely. Obviously. It's what's made me the woman I am today and all of my relationships. That's why all of my relationships are so successful. We're not going to top that. So let's just look there, I suppose. Kate, it's been such a pleasure to hang out with you as always. Thank you so much for coming along. Any time. It has been my absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for listening, and thank you to Kate for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval by History Hit, and if you like what you heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and please tell your friends about it. If you're looking for more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter by following the link in the show notes below.

And if you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday. Until next time.