The salacious Middle Ages | Hacker News Reader

The salacious Middle Ages

aeon.co

112 pointspepys18 comments

Whenever people suggest that 21st-century content (namely that distributed through TV, but also in books) is somehow uniquely lascivious, I know they have not read any popular late-medieval or Renaissance literature. Anyone who has read Boccaccio's Decameron or even parts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, such as the Miller's Tale, is purged of any imagined celibate medieval period.

Sex is not new, which means humans have been doing it (!), thinking about it, and talking/writing about it for a long time.

A quick walk through Pompeii and Herculaneum will disabuse anyone of the notion that ancient people were any less sexually motivated than modern people. We're still the same animals we were back then.

> A quick walk through Pompeii and Herculaneum will disabuse anyone of the notion that ancient people were any less sexually motivated than modern people.

The ancient pagans have long been thought of as lascivious - that is still consistent with the "celibate Middle Ages" narrative.

The Carmina Burana are from the Middle Ages. They are full of life and not celibate at all.

The musical work dates from the 1930s, though yes, it is based on poems and texts, by the same name, from ~1000 - 1100 AD. And quite bawdy / visceral.

I remember having to suppress a giggle in high school when I ran into "The Vine"[0] in the Norton Anthology of Poetry. It was nice to know people were still the same 400 years earlier.

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50721/the-vine

> Sex is not new, which means humans have been doing it (!), thinking about it, and talking/writing about it for a long time.

Right. Else none of us would be here.

Three things:

1. Monks and priests were a lot less celibate than we are often told about. They not only visited brothels, they were valued patrons (they paid more than the average guy) and their monasteries even owned and operated brothels. Monks got up to all kinds of naughty stuff. One story recounted by a monk told how a woman seduced him and made love to him against his will, and it was only after a period of many hours that he could recompose himself, and then flagellate the woman for her indiscretion. (The husband, returning afterward, thanked the monk for punishing his wife)

2. Medieval 'damsels' and women in general were not the pious, virgin innocents we imagine. This image was largely foisted upon us by the Victorians, who wanted to recast their history in a more virtuous light. Women certainly enjoyed sex in the middle ages, about as much as men did.

3. This is all very focused on Christian European history. Islamic culture throughout the middle ages, and even after its fall as a leading Mediterranean power, was far more advanced than Christian culture, for about 800 years. Their medical treatments were based on the study of ancient and contemporary texts from around the known world. They brought together the history and knowledge of every culture they came into contact with, examined it, and improved upon it. They were leading pioneers in surgery, anatomy, and treatment of infectious disease. They had multiple fully-functional hospitals in major cities, maintained pharmacies, and trained doctors, all while constantly improving their knowledge and practice.

Medieval Europe had some pretty cool advances in engineering and warfare, but medicine, math and science was definitely not their strong suit.

Monks got up to all kinds of naughty stuff.

Like becoming a painter, meeting an attractive nun, then going off and living with her.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filippo_Lippi

There is a story about William Marshall, where he meets another monk who is up to the same thing, so William beats him up, robs him, and spends the couple's would-be nest egg in defense of Christian virtues.

All good points, but the puritan surge in the XVII century (which followed course to the U.S.) has more to do with the second point than the Victorians (which followed a looser Regency, I heard).

Pendulums oscillate.

A good chunk of this is actually about pragmatic approaches to dealing with STDs prior to germ theory. People could put 2 and 2 together and conclude that a prostitute could transmit disease from one client to another, but their concepts of what was happening were half baked.

Let me try to straighten this out out loud:

(1) We develop sexual desire because we evolved to do so. Indeed without it we couldn't have evolved. (2) Sex is essential for starting a family which is extremely beneficial for your physical and mental well-being. (3) But too much masturbation/sex is bad for your physical and mental well-being. (4) In particular sex can be an addiction which changes the way you view reality (up to and including preventing you from acknowledging this. People used to call this sin. Actually I think some of them still do). (5) Yet telling people that sex/masturbation is sinful can be repressive and harmful. (6) Unprotected sex leads easily to STDs (which in the middle ages were no doubt widely considered to be divine punishment). (7) Education is a vital means of preventing STDs. (8) Yet talking about sex is generally consisdered rude. (9) As is having sex in public. (10) Yet sex addicts and religious maniacs think about sex all the time...

It seems the topic remains confusing half a millenium after the middle ages. Please don't take this as any kind of advice or political statement.

Downplays Syphilis, but this was the most common cause of death, in North America and elsewhere until 1945 (although not always mentioned in the death certificate since for reasons of delicacy, the complication was often mentioned instead.) It was more vicious when it first got to Europe. It wasn't just one more V.D.

The article is about the Middle Ages in Europe, and points out that syphilis didn't appear in Europe until the very end of the 15th century.

Agreed. So what changed the relatively sex-positive Middle Ages so suddenly? The horror of big S. did. It didn't just kill you, your children could inherit it, and your partner might well die of it, too. The author mentions it, but as one more sexual illness. It wasn't.

Something seems awfully convenient with a medieval man going "I need to have sex with you to restore balance to my bodily humors or I will die".

I know for certain that masturbation was not unknown to men of the era (or any era).

It might have been prom night.

And yet, some say a US president was using that line a few decades ago ...

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