I have just seen Braveheart and those few gentle love scenes triggered my question: How were our predecessors showing love and exchanging intimacies?
The medieval Church taught: ”no fondling, no lewd kisses, no oral sex, no strange positions, only once, try not to enjoy it, and wash afterwards” :rolleyes:
On the other hand, love was a factor in the Middle Ages and love poetry of troubadours was flourishing.
I suppose our God-fearing forefathers and foremothers of Middle Ages weren’t actualy indulging themselves in french kissing Hollywood style. But what exactly were they doing during those gentle moments?
I’ve been led to belive that french people called it “english” kissing.
Be that as it may, those poets and troubadours you mention sure didn’t mince words in describing joys of the flesh.
Peace,
mangeorge
It is well that you ended with a rolleyes smiley. I doubt that the “medieval Church taught” any such things. (There would particularly have been little in the way of commands to “wash afterwards.”)
Actually, the love poems we associate with troubadors were a very late “Middle Ages” phenomenon that might almost qualify as a proto-Renaissance event.
There is a fair amount of bawdy imagery in medieval literature. It is featured prominently in some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Children born out of wedlock were a staple of many stories (Sir Galahad was Sir Lancelot’s son, though Lancelot never married, depending on which versions of the tales one reads.) I’m pretty sure that people responded to sexual urges in the ways with which we are familiar. Europe did not produce a work as openly sexual and as widely published as the Kama Sutra, but there is no reason to believe that Europeans were in any way sexually repressed.
…
Intercourse was forbidden:
When one’s wife is menstruating, pregnant, or nursing
During Lent, Advent, Whitsun Week, or Easter week
On feast days, fast days, Sunday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday
During daylight
If you are naked
If you are in church
Unless you are trying to produce a child
…
Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe
James Brundage
University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987
Provided that they were not simply invented for the book, my guess would be that each of those rules was proclaimed at different times by different bishops or regional councils and were never proclaimed by the church at large–and that they were probably ignored and forgotten within a short period after they were proclaimed.
Some of them appear to be based in plausible rules: the prohibition against engaging in sex with a menstruating woman is biblical in origin; restrictions against sex during Lent and Advent and fast days seem plausible, perhaps likely; I’m pretty sure that the church would frown on engaging in sex while in a church.
I would be curious what Mr. Brundage’s footnotes indicate the actual laws were, who promulgated them, and for what jurisdictions and in what years.
Mind you, I am not claiming that the church embraced anything that we would consider a healthy view of sexual intimacy. Sex always carried the taint of being in opposition to spirituality (at least from the time of Augustine of Hippo onward). I am simply noting that a compilation of rules dragged in from different places and periods is not the same as a monolithic antagonism to having sex while naked.
IIRC Brundage is quite the standard reference for medieval legal history in a social context. My copy is in storage, however. I’m sure the footnotes are quite enlightening, and as I recall the book as a whole makes no real overarching statements about law and medieval sexuality - much more of an “it depends on where you were, who you were, and when you were”.
The general idea was that unapproved sexual behavior required some sort of penance. It was considered a human weakness and once the penance was completed, it was usually considered wiped clean.
From the Penetential of Buchard of Worms (1012):
“Doggie style” Penance: ten days on bread and water
“Sex on Sunday” penance: four days on bread and water.
"Sodomy " (male/male) penance: If you had a wife and only did this once or twice: one year on bread and water, plus ten years of bread and water on holy days.
“Masturbation”: 20 days on bread and water.
“Kiss due to foul desire”: three days on bread and water; 20 days if you did it in a church.
“women having bread prepared on their naked buttocks”: two years penance, holy days only.
“Women smearing honey on their naked body, laying down on wheat, rolling in it, taking the grains and making it to flour, then feeding their husbands the bread”: forty days penance.
Obviously, the penance seems to have stamped out on the last two.
Also, protitution was tolerated by the church and civil authorities. The idea was that men couldn’t control themselves, so it was better to for them go to a brothel than do something rally nasty like masturbation.
Actually, to hear some scholars tell it, the first of those two lasted in the deep backwoods of Appalachia until fairly recently in the form of “Cockle-Bread”, which was a charm that young girls would give to boys they wished to attract.
It was probably one of the many, many folk charms of Europe designed to increase fertility, keep one’s spouse from straying, rekindle the marital passion, etc.
