The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages

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A distinction was also made between a woman who had sex for pleasure and ones who did so for financial need and desperation. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The writing style is smooth and the book is a real page turner, full of snippets of everyday life from this period.

They also struggled with many of the same social issues, such as whether prostitution should be legalized. A culture in which clerics commissioned sheelagh-na-gigs – graphic carvings of women displaying their genitals – to adorn their holy buildings perplex us.According to The Golden Legend, she was ‘a woman who gave her body to pleasure’, until she met Jesus. She also saved a Cluniac monk who had sex with his mistress before going on pilgrimage, and an abbess who found herself pregnant after a single lapse.

Forms of retribution could be over-the-top sadistic: one punishment associated with adultery demanded that the errant couple be stripped naked, bound together around their genitals, and then flogged as they were paraded through the streets. The 18th Annual Francis Davis Jazz Poll: The State of Our Union Could Be Better Major record labels were once notorious for trying to e. The medieval Magdalene was a composite of several biblical Marys and bore little resemblance to the woman depicted in the Gospels. an expansive, accessible and highly engaging account of what we do – and don't – know about western European sexual culture in the Middle Ages. I feel like I learned something from it, particularly regarding misconceptions of how people in this time period viewed sex and relationships, and I was entertained whilst reading it.By modern standards, medical knowledge, which Harvey is good at explaining, seems as bizarre as the love potions she describes. Sex was something men did to women, preferably during marriage, though female pleasure was important because without it conception couldn’t occur. Learned, fun and full of surprises - a fascinating, wide-ranging guide to medieval sexual attitudes and experiences. I never thought there would be so many records around sex and sexual misconduct from the middle ages. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about whom they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong.