I read somewhere about tenements in New York that averaged a couple of murders a night in the 19th century. One building would have a higher murder rate than the whole city does today.
Maeglin wrote:
Do you have a book, chapter, and verse for that passage? (It sounds like something you might find in Leviticus, but I ain’t gonna go reading all the way through Leviticus again just to find that one verse.)
I think orthodox Jews might disagree with that assessment.
People were always promiscuous. Look at the Regency-the Duke of Clarence, later William IV wrote in his diary, “Last night I fucked two whores-I hope I don’t catch a bout.”
Gosh, everyone, Maeglin’s right about the Victorian filter.
People have always been promiscuous. Why do you think there were so many bastards running around?
Okay, Izzy, here are some facts. Square them with your opinions.
“Elizabethan church records in the English county of Essex… reveal that between 1558 and 1603 one in four adult church members was accused of a sexual offense. Historian Lawrence Stone estimates that about half of the accused were guilty. Offenses included fornication, adultery, incest, bestiality, and bigamy… Promiscuity was so common in the 1500s in England, Wales, and Ireland that… it carried no social stigma.” p.70
“It wasn’t until the twelfth century that the English began getting married in church. And it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that they were required to by law. The fact is that through most of English history nobody much worried if a couple was formally married or not… only fifty percent [of people actually got married in a church].” pp. 70-71. Legends, Lies, & Cherished Myths of World History, sourced from Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800.
“Four of England’s kings (at least four) had homosexual lovers- William Rufus, Richard I (Richard Lion Heart), Edward II, and James I.” p.79
“Richard Lion Heart and Edward II, by all accounts, were openly gay (at least in their court circles). So was France’s Philip I. Philip even appointed his lover as a bishop. (Pope Urban II is said to have aware of their relationship.)” p. 82
“Yale University professor John Boswell found that in the first five hundred years of Christianity homosexuality was widely tolerated. Not until the sixth century A.D. did the Roman Empire outlaw homosexual behavior ‘even though Christianity had been the state religion for more than two centuries.’ In the early Middle Ages… homosexuality was considered less offensive than adultery… penance for a homosexual act last one year, for hunting three.” p.84-85 ibid, sourced from John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality.
Okay, Izzy. Your turn to start providing evidence for your assertions.
"Four of England’s kings
John:
I don’t doubt you, but do you have any more information/cites on Richard the Lionhearted’s supposed Gayness?
Fair enough. I will try to do this if I get a chance.
I would also point out that some of the cites that you bring in support of yourself actually work the other way, or are ambiguous. If you say that over a 45 year period 1 in 8 people committed “fornication, adultery, incest, bestiality, and bigamy”, I would say those figures would be significantly less than the comparable figures today, particularly for the first offence mentioned. Of course, alot of people probably wern’t caught. But I’d also say that those figures are alot less than the comparable figures today (again, referring primarily to the first). So I actually think you’re kind of proving my case with this. Also, I believe Mr. Stone is contradicting himself by saying that “Promiscuity was so common in the 1500s in England, Wales, and Ireland that… it carried no social stigma”, and at the same time acknowledging that these matters were accusations that were recorded in Church documents.
Whether people got married in Church or not is completely irrelevent (another poster made this claim earlier, and I ignored it at the time, thinking it was obviously irrelevent). What matters was whether they had monogamous relationships. A common law marriage is the same as a marriage in a church, for purposes of AIDS transmission.
When I refer to the Middle Ages, I am not referring to the “first five hundred years of Christianity”. I was thinking more of the thousand years after that. Are the first 500 years considered part of the Middle Ages? If so, I apologize for the confusion.
What is the evidence for the claims that the kings that you mention were homosexual? As I mentioned before, there is alot of revisionism going on in this field. I once saw the evidence for the claim that Alexander Hamilton was gay, and was completely unimpressed. In any event, I think it is a fact that many kings were alot more debauched than the general population. Nonetheless, I would be surprised if these guys were openly gay. If this were true, it would indeed suggest that homosexuality was considered no big deal, as you guys are claiming.
I wonder if you could put some numbers on this, for comparison purposes. Give me your best estimate as to the average number of sex partners (including prostitutes, one night stands etc.) that an average Middle Ages person had during the course of a lifetime, as compared to the similar figure today. (The actual numbers are not important, it’s more the ratio that I’m looking for).
I think we’ve firmly established that the old days sucked.
It seems some times were particularly worse than others. Yeah, Medievel time sucked. That pretty much sums up the debate. Who cares about how fast HIV/AIDS would’ve made the rounds when people died from relatively simple ailments?
The simplest, easiest to transmit, and most prevalent infections and viruses were likely to be the most deadly.
Are people happier? No. That’s easy to answer. The bell curve of happiness probably has the same curve.
Are things better? Yes. I doubt we’ve been busting our humps to make things worse.
Are some things worse? Well, I for one can’t stand polictical correctness, but it really is fall-out from years of segregation and discrimination, so it’s not too bad. I wish someone would check my oil and my air pressure everytime I pulled up to a “service station”. But why did that stop? People made in unprofitable to operate that way. People (YOU) chose the faster, cheaper way of dispensing gas, and made it poor business for a service station owner to do things like offer full service.
Are kids worse? Well, if they are, who is to blame? Kids are the same, but what generation suddenly mustered up the strength and changed the landscape of America by sending millions of women into the workforce?
That’s the good ol’ days, folks.
You can sell anything to the American people if you can convince the country that staying home and tending to your family is somehow degrading, and that stuffing your asses into business suits and working ten hour days and shuffling the kids off to day care is the rewarding way to go. Yipee, that’s a great idea. Raising a family and running a household was less desirable than a damn career?! Was everyone smoking dope through that scam?!
The world is so much a better place now, with the huge exception that women in the workforce have ruined the family structure. If you dare to point out that kids are killing kids and they are just lacking the respect for their parents and elders, just remember why. And take some freakin’ accountability, because if you are a baby boomer, it was done on YOUR watch. This is where the old timers nail me to the cross. Yes, I grant to you that point: we live in a time when kids are damn near outta control and have no respect for authority. Allowing the family structure to be disolved was the dumbest goddam thing you could have done. The good old days lasted about four years from 1956-1959 (yeah - that’s four years - count 'em up).
Times are great. They’d be damn near perfect if there was some family structure. Why oh why did it become so damn wrong to acknowledge the differences in the sexes? Yipee, there are women in every corner of corporate America! Oh, that’s important. I mean, it’s sure more important than raising a famliy.
I can absolutely guarantee you it is not anywhere in Leviticus, or any other of the five books of Moses. In fact, I’m quite sure it doesn’t say such a thing anywhere in the Old Testament, but I can’t be sure there might not be something somewhere that someone with an ax to grind might not have been able to twist into this bizzare meaning.
The point I made earlier is that when people say things like this that are clearly false, you have to wonder about all their other claims about this-or-that literature being about such-and-such.
I assumed he meant by the Christian world.
Hey, you’re the one who brought up Dugas. But after doing a rereading of the first page of posts, I think that I conflated an minor comment from a different post with you. Foolish of me, and I apologize. So ignore the post completely, or just take it as a tangent of the tangent this thread has taken.
Ok, IzzyR, we really need to refocus the discussion.
Since the average age when women bear children is about ten years higher than it was seven hundred years ago, you are right. However, consider the following example. A girl is married at age 13. She contracts HIV from her husband, for whom she bears five children over the course of eight years. She sill hasn’t contracted AIDS yet. Her husband dies, and she remarries at age 21. Still plenty of time to bear three more children before finally acquiring full-blown AIDS. So at the age of, say, 26, she has already borne eight children with congenital HIV.
Given that marriage and sexual intercourse were common at a much younger age than they are today, it is not unlikely that her children will pass the disase on a well, not to mention her second husband, who will certainly outlive her.
IzzyR, you are misrepresenting your case. Here is where the discussion needs to get back on track. Observe. I first took issue with the following:
Guinastasia said:
To which you replied:
That is what first caught my eye.
And in your response to John Corrado:
Don’t try to tell me that you are merely arguing that there was less homosexuality and promiscuous sex in the Middle Ages. From the start you were taking the position that promiscuous sex in the MA was “nonsense,” and that there was so little sex and mobility that AIDS would have had no effect.
Your statement that:
…is therefore disingenuous. If you would like to do some backpedaling, you certainly may.
Look again. I made the “not necessarily any correlation” statement first, in my initial post on this subject. And where exactly did I say that there is no correspondence? I can’t seem to find it, oddly enough.
Let’s deal with your idea of religious and social pressure. You are taking these forces completely for granted. Remember this statement?
Where is the evidence? How do you propose to demonstrate that conservative theological texts had any influence in the daily lives of illiterate, immobile commoners? You believe that medieval Europe was a relatively conservative society. Yet you have not proven to what extent this conservatism had any effect on people at large. I have my opinions from reading the sources themselves, but until you put up, your opinions are beneath my criticism.
Which statements are absolutely true, and in direct opposition to your dismissive position of “nonsense” and “AIDS would not have had any effect on the Middle Ages.” Stick to your original guns, IzzyR, or admit that you are wrong.
Negative, Speed Racer. The very fact that you are accusing me of bringing an agenda to bear on my historical study reveals the shallowness of your own argument. If you cannot oppose me with fact, you accuse me of bias.
Lemme tell you a secret about how one goes about studying history. If I want to analyze the mores of a particular society, I do not pay attention to only one kind of source material. I want to know the common laws, the religious laws, the material records of enforcement and punishment, and the literature, often the most telling source of all.
Let’s say I am investigating social attitudes towards murder. It’s illegal in all forms of law. The morality plays of the Middle Ages and fabular literature demonstrate that all muderers get their just due either in this life or in the afterlife. In the literature, murderers are the villains. There are material records for the punishment of murderers. There are artistic representations of punishment (which are especially common in the 13th century).
The sources are in consensus. It is relatively easy to explain a cross-genre source consensus. Murder is bad, and society does not accept murderers.
Let’s turn to a more ambiguous case: promiscuous sex and marital infidelity. It is against religious law, and unanimously considered sinful by the unmarried and celibate theological community. There is no common law legislation against promiscuity. In fabular literature and morality plays (especially the Lais of Marie, as I have mentioned many times before), adulterers and fornicators are usually the heroes. Henpecked wives and husbands are in fact the villains, and usually characterize greed, anger, the ills of old age, and pride. Popular literature abounds with chivalric romances, most of which deal with the unmarried love between a maiden and a warrior. BTW, if you don’t believe that this kind of literature existed in extreme abundance, read Don Quixote, a sharp reaction against courtly literature. Furthermore, there is little record of judicial punishment of adultery and fornication. Peter Abelard was only castrated because he married Heloise. They had been fornicating all along with no problem.
So what is the bottom line? There is no consensus in the evidence, but there is a divergence. The task of the historian is to explain this divergence. There are more tools for this task than I could possibly mention here, even if I knew more than a fraction of them. Here is an example: manuscript provenance. Any manuscript in the Middle Ages was copied by hand. The more people read a text, the larger the demand was for manuscripts. If piece of courtly literature survives in three hundred manuscripts, there is a good chance that it was extremely popular. If a theological texts survives in only one, it is likely that it was never circulated beyond the confines of the monastery in which it was composed.
Theological texts were written for educated audiences, and tended to remain within the religious communities. Even local priests would be unable to read the difficult, erudite, and unrelentingly Latin works of important scholars. Their impact on the average peasant was nonexistent. I challnge you to find evidence to the contrary.
For a basic yet useful primer on scholastic culture in the Middle Ages, I suggest John Baldwin, Scholastic Culture of the Middle Ages 1000-1300, Lexington, MA: Heath, 1971.
Bottom line is that you haven’t offered a shred of this overwhelming evidence for our scrutiny. Are you hiding it for any particular reason? Why don’t you tell me when, where, and what these social codes actually were, to the best of your knowledge? Trust me, it is harder than you would think. Show me a reference to homosexuality in any item of scholastic theology. Or in popular literature.
Right now, you can’t blame me for thinking that your idea of overwhelming evidence amounts to what your sixth grade teacher told you when you studied the Middle Ages for a week in class.
I have already discussed both of these issues in detail. First, I only aim to aruge that AIDS would have had a significant impact on the European Middle Ages, not that people were having as much promiscuous sex as they are today. Second, I have already demonstrated that one looks to the sources as criteria for social mores. When they are consonant across genres, it is fair to conclude that you have stumbled upon a general social more. When the sources diverge, the task to prove such a more is more complicated.
Esoteric? You are surely kidding. St. Anthony was considered the model for all monastic endeavors. St. Benedict and John Cassian wrote their fundamental monastic treatises with his life in mind. Stories from his vita were collected into preaching manuals for uneducated clergymen to be orated to every churchgoing peasant. And you have the temerity to call evidence esoteric? IzzyR, do your reasearch before you waste so much time again, please.
And just think before you write. If the devil tempted Anthony with boys after women didn’t work, what does that tell you? If homosexuality were as reviled and uncommon as you would have us believe, would this make an effective temptation at all? Surely not. Read the passage for yourself.
Your back wheels are squeaking again.
Now, sir, I can say with no remorse, that this is a question spoken like a true asshole. Rather than judge the veracity yourself by opening up one single book, you want me to wade through Leviticus in order to prove all of my expertise in Medieval Studies? Why don’t you bring forward some evidence and then we shall talk.
But since tracer asked, him I shall oblige, embarrassing as this is.
It is a misquotation from another source. You don’t, in fact, have the right to kill your neighbor if you don’t like the smell coming from his house. I was mistakenly referring to Leviticus 1, in which the Lord instructs the Israelites how to prepare a burnt offering. If He doesn’t like the smell, He kills the priests.
In the interests of making my point, however, there are plenty of other laws in Leviticus and Exodus that are not exactly followed, and haven’t been since time immemorial.
Exodus 21:7 says that you can sell your daughters into slavery.
Leviticus 25:44 says you can purchase slaves from neighboring nations. Anyone want to buy and Mexicans?
Exodus 35:2 says anyone who works on the Sabbath should be put to death.
Leviticus 20:18 proscribes exile for having sexual relations with a woman during menstruation.
IzzyR, both John Corrado and I are asking for your evidence. Either admit you are relying on popular fantasy or show us the goods. If you can’t, then kindly apologize for wasting our time.
MR
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Iolanthe *
**
Well, taking it as a tangent, I’d say it is extremely unlikely that anyone in the Middle Ages would have conected the AIDS illness to sexual behaviour.
**What I said was “nonsense” was the idea, expressed by Guinastasia, that the only difference between the Middle Ages and today, with regards to promiscuity, was that it is more openly discussed today. Clearly there was a major difference, as I had previously mentioned. At no point did I attempt to claim that there was no promiscuity in the Middle Ages. There has probably not been a single period of human history in which this has been completely absent. But the level of it was lower, and along with the (also relative) immobility of most people in those days makes it likely that AIDS would not have gotton far off the ground.
My statement that:
…is therefore not disingenuous. Your offer to let me backpedal is most generous but unnecessary.
How convenient. You might want to try your post of 09-21-2000 11:34 AM.
**The same way any intellectual text has influence. IOW the guys who can read it absorb its teachings and values, which they than impart to others etc. etc. until you have priests going on about this or that in Church on Sunday.
I’ve addressed this earlier. But I’ll add that you perhaps answer the question that I put forth for John Corrado for an estimate of the relative number of sexual partners that people had then as compared to now. This way we’ll have some sense of what you are actually saying.
My earlier comments apply here as well.
[quote]
I never said that AIDS would have to spread like wildfire for it to be a serious problem. Even if only half of my example’s children reached breeding age, she would still be passing the disease on to plenty of people.
Diseases less devastating than AIDS is today still have a serious impact on our society. I stand by my belief that AIDS would have been serious, especially in the later Middle Ages.
But that’s not what she said.
Guinistasia did not say that there was no difference between promiscuity then and promiscuity now. She did say that it has “always been around”. She, like I, was responding to the notion that it was so low as to render AIDS a non-threat. In my opinion, it would have to be extremely low for this to be the case. That would probably make for a more fruitful discussion.
How low does the frequency of promiscuity have to be for AIDS to be effectively irrelevant?
This really is the crux of our disagreement, so I think we should focus on it.
This idea is problematic. In a word, the kinds of clergymen who were producing works of theology were not teaching and imparting knowledge to those outside their own circles to a large degree. The secular clergymen, who preached from a pulpit every Sunday, hardly benefitted from the learning and theology of regular clergy, or monks, so called because they lived their lives in accordance with the rules of their monastic orders.
It certainly is true that monks compiled books of exempla, or stories that illustrate some moral paradigm, to assist preachers in their preaching. However, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the impact of high theology on a society with no movable type and a largely illiterate lay population.
Let me try to find a bottom line again.
I don’t think people were having as much promiscuous sex throughout the Middle Ages as they do now.
But I think people were having enough sex that AIDS would still have been a real threat had it broken out.
Perhaps there are people with more knowledge about the specifics of AIDS transmission who can help us here.
MR
And I (and many others) disagree. We seem to have gone round the circle back to where we started.
If someone had AIDS in the middle ages, how would they know they had anything special? It doesn’t really have any distinct symptoms that people back then could detect - you catch it, go symptomatic, and then catch and die from some other disease because of your weakened immune system. Since you can be infected so long before it kicks in, lots of people would die of other causes before their immune system was even effected.
I think AIDS could have existed back then and we wouldn’t know anything about it.
What I meant by, People didn’t talk about it, was not, so much in the Middle Ages, but by Victoria’s time, people did NOT mention sex. It still went on-Victoria herself had a VERY hot and heavy passionate affair with her own husband, Prince Albert. But it was taboo to mention it.
The whole idea of courtly love was adulterous love.
But that’s half the fun in growing up!! You mean, you don’t tell kids about walking to school in the snow in sandals, uphill ten miles both ways?!? You don’t know what you’re missing, dude! 
Philster, please tell me your asinine comments were meant as a joke. Specifically these:
I’d hate to have to get medieval on your ass.
Speaking of which, thanks, Maeglin! Fighting ignorance gets harder all the time, eh?
Maeglin is my new SD Hero/ine?
Personally, if Philster is serious…someone is in need of being slapped with a DRY noodle.
Aids would not have been a big problem in the Middle ages- not because folks did not 'sleep around", but because they did not have intervenous drugs back then. Normal heterosexual sex is so unlikely to spread Aids, that if that was the only vector, the disease might be limited to a footnote in a medical text. Eeven tho a man can spread it to his wife, almost always thru anal sex, it is very difficult for a woman to spread the disease to a male.
Being something of a Medievalist (SCA, you know) I can say that “pre-marital sex” was very likely just as common then as now, BUT, the number of sexual partners had to be, on the average, far less. Simply as the polulation density and mobility was far less. Many peasants never saw anything outside their Village, and even those in the Big Cities (a HUGE 100K!!!) were unlikely to ever leave. Some few did, true, but no-where like in the age of the Auto/bus/train.
I am sure there were gays back in thr “old days” also, but gay baths, where men are openly sodemized by some score of strangers in a single nite- no. If it was not for this practice, and sharing needles, there practically would be no Aids today.
Check me if I’m wrong here. I’ve often heard that AIDS is currently a big problem in Africa. I’ve also heard it said, through textbooks and talking heads on the TV, that the primary mode of transmission in Africa is heterosexual sex.
One of the stated reasons that the risk of AIDS is greater for homosexual men and intervenous drug users is that they are far more likely to have unprotected sex and multiple partners. At least that used to be the case. Or, at least, that’s what I heard.