Out From Under

The Middle Ages. Time of feudalism, of the rich and the poor, and nothing in between. Time of strong church presence in society. If you’ve ever watched Monty Python’s Holy Grail — happy peasants frolicking in sun-drenched fields with inept but well-intentioned knights trotting about on horses?

It was nothing like that.

The Middle Ages: no plumbing, no heating, pretty much universal illiteracy, lice, bedbugs, fleas, death by pneumonia, death by war, death by childbirth, death by infection, death by the Black Plague, death by famine, death by misadventure … without something to lighten their lives, it was a pretty bleak time. “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, short” about sums it up.

Proving that the puritanism in the US has a long and tradition-drenched history, the clergy of the Middle Ages expended a lot of energy trying to control sex. More time than they ought, really. Given that sex wasn’t supposed to be part of their lives at all, they sure spent a lot of time thinking about it.

Thinking about it a lot because they had to know that (despite their frothings at the mouth) most of their congregations were gleefully enjoying every little bit of marital congress they could manage. And probably the usual amount of etra-marital congress, too. (While they, the clergy, had NONE. Officially, at any rate. Boooo.)

All this thinking led to lists. Lots of lists. Things you were allowed to do (very, very short list); things you were not to do (long, long, long list); consequences for doing the things you weren’t supposed to do (long, long, longest list). Here’s a sampling (taken from The Smart Set):

Dorsal sex (woman on top): three years
Lateral, seated, standing: 40 days
Coitus retro — rear entry: 40 days
Mutual masturbation: 30 days
Inter-femural sex — ejaculation between the legs: 40 days
Coitus in terga — anal sex: three years (with an adult); two years (with a boy); seven years (habitual); 10 years (with a cleric).

(Yes, anal sex with a boy was less of a sin than with an adult. Sexual morés, attitudes, and taboos are not as consistent or obvious as we tend to believe.)

There were penalties for oral sex, for sex during menstruation, sex in church (not as wild as you might think: people spent a lot of time in churches in those days), and sex with foreplay. One really does begin to think that perhaps maybe the more vociferous of the clergy might just have indulged in a wee bit of … field work … as part of the research for all these lists.

And here we come to the entirely predictable aspects of this thing. For all that sex was universally bad, it was badder for women than men. St. Jerome found marital sex ‘filthy’ and warned that “nothing is nastier than to love your own wife as if she were your mistress.” With fervour, enthusiasm, and passion, one assumes… Sex preceded by kissing and fondling (which sounds a whole lot like foreplay, no?) was bad, and, while male masturbators only suffered a 10-day prohibition from sex, women got a solid year.

There’s an up-side to this andro-centric thinking: While fellatio (semen in mouth) was prohibited, there was no balancing prohibition on cunnilingus. Probably because, for all their hours spent thinking on the subject, the possibility of pleasing a woman for no purpose but to please the woman … well… the possibility didn’t seem to have crossed the Holy Fathers’ minds.

For the sake of the poor down-trodden female of the Middle Ages, let’s hope it crossed at least some less-than-holy folks’ minds.

via: Andrew Sullivan

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 6:27 am and is filed under Ilona's Take. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.