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HANDBOOK OF
MEDIEVAL SEXUALITY
HANDBOOK OF
MEDIEVAL SEXUALITY
EDITED BY
VERN L. BULLOUGH
AND JAMES A. BRUNDAGE
I~ ~~~;~~n~~~up
NEW YORK AND LONDON
Published by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OXl4 4RN
Transferred to Digital Printing 2010
Copyright © 2000,1996 by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here
after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage
or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Handbook of medieval sexuality I edited by Vern L. Bullough and James A.
Brundage.
p. cm. - (Garland reference libarary of the humanities; v. 1696)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8153-3662-4 (alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8153-1287-3 (hbk)
1. Sex customs-History 2. Middle Ages I. Bullough, Vern L. II.
Brundage, James A. III. Series: Garland reference library of the
humanities; vol. 1696.
HQ14.H35 1996
306.7'09'02-dc20 95-52021
CIP
Cover illustration: Bible moralisee (Wien, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek
Cod. 2554). Courtesy of the Austrian National Library
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
CONTENTS
IX INTRODUCTION
James A. Brundage and Vern L. Bullough
SECTION I
SEXUAL NORMS
CHAPTER I
CONFESSION AND THE STUDY OF SEX
IN TilE MIDDLE AGES
Pierre J. Payer
CHAPTER 2
33 SEX AND CANON LAW
James A. Brundage
CHAPTER 3
51 WESTERN MEDICINE AND NATURAL PHILOSOPHY
Joan Cadden
CIlAPTER 4
8 I GENDERED SEXUALITY
joyce E. Salisbury
CHAPTER 5
103 CHASTE MARRIAGE IN THE MIDDLE AGES:
"IT WERE TO HIRE A GREET MERITE"
Margaret McGlynn and Richard J. Moll
CHAPTER 6
123 HIDING BEHIND THE UNIVERSAL MAN:
MALE SEXUALITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Jacqueline Murray
SECTION II
153 VARIANCE FROM NORMS
CHAPTER 7
155 HOMOSEXUALITY
Warren Johansson and William A. Percy
CHAPTER 8
I 9 I Tw ICE MAR GIN A LAN D Tw ICE I N V I SIB L E :
LESBIANS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Jacqueline Murray
CHAPTER 9
223 CROSS DRESSING AND GENDER ROLE CHANGE
IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Vern L. Bullough
CHAPTER 10
243 PROSTITUTION IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE
Ruth Maw Karras
CHAPTER II
261 CONTRACEPTION AND EARLY ABORTION IN THE
MIDDLE AGES
John M. Riddle
CHAPTER 12
279 CASTRATION AND EUNUCHISM IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Mathew S. Kuef/er
vi CON TEN T S
SECTION III
307 CULTURAL ISSUES
CHAPTER 13
309 A NOTE ON RESEARCH INTO JEWISH SEXUALITY
IN THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD
Norman Roth
CHAPTER 14
319 A RESEARCH NOTE ON SEXUALITY
AND MUSLIM CIVILIZATION
Norman Roth
CHAPTER 15
329 EASTERN ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY
Eve Levin
CHAPTER 16
345 SEXUALITY IN MEDIEVAL FRENCH LITERATURE:
"SEPARES, ON EST ENSEMBLE"
Laurie A. Finke
CHAPTER 17
369 OLD NORSE SEXUALITY: MEN, WOMEN, AND BEASTS
Jenny Jochens
CHAPTER 18
401 SEX ROLES AND THE ROLE OF SEX IN MEDIEVAL
ENGLISH LITERATURE
David Lampe
427 CONTRIBUTORS
429 INDEX
VII
INTRODUCTION
Medievalists in earlier generations were reluctant to deal with sex. They like·
wise tended to ignore topics related to sex, such as courtship, concubinage,
divorce, marriage, prostitution, and child rearing. They paid little attention
to women and even less to gender issues. Gradually, however, like specialists
in other fields in the humanities and social sciences, they have begun to in
vestigate and write about these matters that their predecessors studiously ig
nored. Medievalists who have continued to explore the more traditional sub
ject areas sometimes complain that, in consequence of these new-found inter
ests, those in the current generation engaged in the study of the Middle Ages
have abandoned political and economic topics in order to emphasize the
"trendy" topics concerned with family and sexual studies. We believe that the
broad field of medieval studies has ample room for scholars interested in all
rypes of thought and behavior. We would insist that sexual conduct formed
an important element in the lives and thoughts, the hopes and fears, both of
individual medieval people and the institutions that they created.
This is not to say that the criticisms that scholars in the more tradi
tional fields of medieval studies have voiced are without merit. Important
themes in the political, institutional, and economic life of the Middle Ages
certainly remain unexplored, and we hope that studies in these fields will
continue to attract younger scholars. However, we also wish to affirm that
the broadening of research interests among us during the past thirry years
or so has yielded significant results that have considerably enriched the whole
field and at the same time have increased its interest and appeal for mem
bers of the next generation of scholars.
The decades of the 1970s and 1980s in particular witnessed an out
pouring of studies dealing with various aspects of human sexualiry during
the Middle Ages. One reason for this is quite simply that, once academics
began to recognize that it was legitimate and respectable to study sexual
ix
behavior, it also quickly became apparent that medieval records and other
sources contained rich lodes of information about sexual behavior. This
opened up fresh opportunities for original research and invited new inter
pretations of earlier conclusions about medieval society and its workings.
Earlier medievalists, to be sure, had not entirely ignored sexual top
ics. Traditional treatments of sexual matters, however, typically took the form
of what may be described as moral discourse. Either such embarrassing
matters were abruptly passed over as the instructors or writers hastened with
burning blushes to apply themselves to more neutral topics, or else they dis
tanced themselves from the subject with moralistic reflections upon the
flawed nature of humankind in this wicked world. An illuminating example
of the second type of reaction occurs in the writings of Leopold von Ranke
(1795-1886), one of the founders of modern "scientific" history. In his study
of the decline of fifteenth-century Italy, Ranke observed:
Far be it from me to pass judgment upon the temperament of a great
nation, which in those days was a source of intellectual stimulus to
the whole of Europe. No one can say that it was incurably sick: but
it is certain that it suffered from serious diseases. Pederasty, which ex
tended even to the young soldiers in the army, and was regarded as
venial because practiced by the Greeks and Romans, whom all de
lighted to imitate, sapped all vital energy. Native and classical writ
ers ascribed the misfortune of the nation to this evil practice. A ter
rible rival of pederasty was syphilis which spread through all the
classes like the plague. I
What Ranke understood by "pederasty" went far beyond the sexual
practices that we now associate with the term; rather he used this word as
a catch-all term for everything that he disliked. He continued,
We shall not [italics ours) be able to maintain without fear of con
tradiction that aspiration to fine language rather than to noble deeds,
the imitation of antiquity in what it has achieved in the shade, rather
than in what it has performed in the sun, as Machiavelli says, is mere
luxury, and not healthy for a nation as such: for instance, the train
ing of boys not merely in drawing and in composing prose and verse,
but also in "fine hypocrisy," as their teachers expressed it, which con
sisted in making speeches in public, raising and lowering the voice
by turns, now affecting the tone of complaint, now that of triumph,
simulating an unreal passion on an unreal theme, a practice which
X INTRODUCTION
they continued in a strange manner when grown up-in fact, this
whole form of training to which women, whom we find improvising
Latin verses to the lyre, also aspired. But no one can doubt that it is
a weakness, when those who affect to be masters of life, recommend
in place of manliness, chastity, and strict self-control, naught but
acuteness and the semblance of such virtues. Besides this, there were
youths who preferred to sit upon a mule rather than a horse, men who
spoke to their superiors as softly as if they were at their last breath;
men who were afraid to move their heads lest they should disarrange
their eyebrows; men who carried a looking-glass in their hat and a
comb in their sleeve. Many considered it the highest praise to be able
to sing well in ladies' society, accompanying themselves on the viol.2
Such moralizing continued, although the terms changed, well into the
twentieth century. When the author of a medieval history textbook published
in 1963 daringly mentioned the word "homosexuality" in his discussion of
the transition from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages, he felt necessary
to place his reference in a broader moralistic frame:
The civilization of the Roman empire was vitiated by homosexuality
from its earliest days. A question, uncomfortable to our contempo
rary lax moralists, may be raised. Is not the common practice of ho
mosexuality a fundamental debilitating factor in any civilization
where it is extensively practiced, as it is a wasting spiritual disease in
the individual? It is worth considering that another great and flour
ishing civilization, the medieval Arabic, where homosexuality was also
widespread similarly underwent a sudden malaise and breakdown.
Is there some more psychological causation, resulting from the social
effects of homosexuality that has been ignored?)
Such a statement surely indicates that the author had paid little atten
tion to the knowledge about human sexual behavior that had accumulated
since Ranke wrote, more than a century before. Cantor simply repeated the
same sort of moralizing that Ranke indulged in, although he placed the flour
ishing of homosexual activity at the beginning of the Middle Ages, rather than
at the end. He also used the newly-minted term "homosexuality," which had
not been available to Ranke, to describe the conduct of which he disapproved.
Homosexual behavior obviously occurred in Roman antiquity, in
much the same forms and varieties as it does in the late twentieth century.
Some of the most gifted writers of the Golden and Silver Ages of Latin lit-
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