Rosalie's Medieval Woman - Medieval Women's Sex Lives

sex &
sexual health
PLEASE NOTE!
ADULT THEMES!

The Very, Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women
Sex, Sexual Health, Contraception and Sexuality
CHURCH PROHIBITIONS - SEXUAL HEALTH - APHRODISIACS - PROCREATION
CONTRACEPTIVES & ABORTIVES - PROSTITUTE- THE CULT OF THE VIRGIN

- - ADULT THEMES - -

The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women is now a book! You can find information about it in the BOOK tab at the top of the page. This page contains a very small overview of some of the key elements in a medieval woman's private life.

Unlike today, a woman's status in society wasn't gauged by her age or profession, but by her sexual status.

She was either (ideally) a virgin, a wife or a widow. Her rights and obligations were dependent on these. Holy women, who may have at one time been wives or widows and may no longer have been actual virgins, were considered virgins as brides of Christ and usually fell into the same category as unmarried, and therefore chaste, women. An unmarried woman who was not a virgin, either because she was a mistress or prostitute found herself on tenuous ground both legally and in society.

Church prohibitions
On the subject of sex, the church had much to say.

Not only did it have differing opinions of the goodness women in general, it also recognised the need for men to marry and produce heirs. Obviously, all women were sinful descentants of Eve from the Garden of Eden, who was not loved much by the church. This feeling was echoed from the pulpit by men who weren't very keen on women as a gender. The 11th century cardinal Peter Damien wrote that;

...woman is Satan's bait.. poison for men's souls..

The church acknowledged that a woman was required as part of God's play to go forth and multiply. A woman shouldn't, however, enjoy sexual relations. It was something to be endured for the sake of procreation.

Since sex couldn't be forbidden entirely, restrictions on when relations could take place were in place. Listed below are some of the times when it was not permissible to have sex, even with one's own husband.

Sex was not permitted on a Wednesday, or a Friday, on a Sunday, or Saturday, on any of the 60 church feast days, during lent, during Advent, during Whitsun week, Easter week, while a woman is menstruating, while a woman is pregnant, while a woman is breastfeeding, within the walls of a church, during daylight, if she is completely naked, for the eight days leading up her husband taking the Eucharist or if the couple was related, even by marriage. The only permissible position was the missionary position.

The church confessional became increasingly personal. Priests could ask the most personal questions about a woman's most private practices. Among the questions listed in an 11th century Confessors Manual, are questions specifically aimed at women-

Have you made a tool or device in the shape of a penis and tied it to your private parts and fornicated with other women with it? Have you swallowed semen to enhance your husbands desire?

The fact that the church felt the need to even ask this question tells us a certain amount about sex practices which were frowned upon, even if they didn't involve sex with men.

Sexual health
It was believed that sex was a requirement for a woman's ongoing good health. A husband's impotency was taken quite seriously, as it was believed that a woman needed regular sexual intercourse for her emotional and physical well-being.

The humors which would build up inside her if she was denied her could lead to madness, convulsions, fainting fits, suffocation of the womb and hysteria. A woman could divorce a man for his inability to perform.

Thomas of Chobham devised a method to determine if a husband was was absolutely impotent. He approved a physical examination of the man's genitals by 'wise matrons', followed by a bedroom trial:

'after food and drink, the man and the woman are to be placed together in one bed and wise women are to be summoned around the bed for many nights. And if the man's member is found to be useless and as if dead, the couple are well to be separated.

There are documented court cases in both 1292 at Canterbury and 1433 in York where wise women testified against the husband in cases such as this. It was not unusual that the wise matrons were family members or known to the man. This could hardly improve performance issues he may have been having.

Aphrodisiacs
Trying to encourage a potential lover or husband is a thing we do even today. We associate certain foods and herbs with being sexy or promoting desire. Medieval aphrodisiacs were not of the ilk that we hope for today. Today we think champagne, caviar and oysters. Or chocolate. The medieval woman was unlikely to find any of these on her list of things to inflame the passions, so what might she consider? Onions. Let's start with onions.

The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti, which is a copy of the Tacuinum Sanitatis from the 14th century Vienna has this to say:

An excellent thing, the onion, and highly suited for old people. They generate milk in nursing mothers and fertile semen in men.

A different translation of the same manuscript, the Tacuinum sanitatus, Paris, folio 24v, has this to add:

Onion. (Cepe)
Nature: (according to Rasis) warm in the fourth degree, moist in the third.
Optimum: The white ones which are watery and juicy.
Usefulness: They are diuretic and fecilitate coitus.
Dangers: They cause headaches.
Neutralisation of the dangers: With vinegar and milk.

One might think that onion breath might be somewhat off-putting, but the manuscript fails to tell us how to prepare them for the desired effect. It also causes a confusing conundrum. It increases the desire but at the same time gives a headache.

Hildegarde von Bingen recommended steering away from them altogether and wasn't a fan at all.

Garden Nasturtiums are also recommended. If you look closely at the seeds, you might feel that they look quite similar to a certain male genitalia, and you'd be right.
Attributing properties to foods and plants in the natural world based on things it reminded one of, was called the Doctrine of Signatures. It was understood that since God had created all things, both good and ill, health and disease, then he had put the cures for all ills here on earth with us, we only needed to find them.

We would find them, it was thought, by seeing similarities in the physical object and what it was needed to cure.
If a bean looked like a kidney, it stood to reason that it would be helpful medicinally for the kidney. So, in this way, nasturtium seeds, which resembles testicles, would be helpful to augment the sperm and coitus. Several versions of the Tacuinum sanitatus include the uses: Augment the sperm and coitus but cause migraines (Vienna, f 30v) and Augments the sperm and coitus but also causes migraines (Casanatense, f.LIV.)

Asparagus should also be helpful to increase desire. The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti assures us it absolutely was. It tells us:

Pick those young stalks whose tips point downwards. They open up occlusions which prevent the humours from flowing regularly through the body's passages, and they stimulate carnal relations. Asparagus is harmful to the intestinal hairs unless it is first boiled in salted water with vinegar.

The fact that it is male member-shaped isn't worth thinking about. Another version of the same manuscript from Vienna, tells us that it influences coitus positively, but doesn't say for which gender.

A medieval woman who wants something a little more all-purpose could turn to leeks. They stimulate urination, influence coitus and, when mixed with honey, clear up catarrh of the chest, according to that quite-reliable source of herbal healthcare, the Tacuinum Sanitatis. Rather unhelpfully, it doesn't clarify whether the coitus is influenced for the better or worse.

Sex for procreation
Producing an heir was serious business for the medieval family and a woman was expected to provide a male heir to keep the family name, business and land holdings. A marriage was often not deemed proper until coitus had taken place, sometimes with witnesses. The image detail at left comes from a 13th century manuscript the Maciejowski Bible, from France. It shows a king in bed with a woman who has her hair sensibly arranged in a coif.

Medieval manuscripts offered advice to lift a libido or assist if pregnancy was desired. The Tacuinim Sanitatus, from Vienna, also known as The Four Seasons of the House of Cerruti, offers this herbal advice:

Sage: It is good for the stomach and cold diseases of the nerves. It's digestion is slow but can be speeded up with honey. We read that if a woman who has slept alone for four days drinks this and then has sexual relations, she will immediantly become pregnant. To this end, women who survived the plague in one town in Egypt were made to drink the juice of sage leaves so the town could quickly be repopulated.

There was other advice on the best times for sex to produce male heirs and there were many recipes to guarantee a pregnancy. Herbal books such as the Tacuinum Sanitatus from the 14th century offered herbal remedies almost certainly guaranteed the gender of choice, as did Trotula, who is reknowned for her weasel testicle recipes.

Contraceptives and abortives
Rather surprisingly, medieval women did know about and use contraception. Since childbirth was so perilous, many women desired contraception which was roundly condemned by the church. St Augustine declared that any woman, whether she was married or otherwise, became a whore in the eyes of God if she used contraceptives, as the only reason for sexual intercourse was procreation.

Abortion was also frowned upon as it was stated in the dictum that a fetus had a soul of its own after 40 days. In both civil and canon law in 13th century England, abortion was condoned in certain conditions only- in the case of an unborn child endangering the life of the mother, it was the life of the mother who was to be saved. Debates on contraception for a woman who had previous complications with pregnancy were held with great seriousness. Should a woman refrain from sex so that she might not conceive and possibly die in childbirth? What about her martial obligations? Were contraceptives permissible in situations such as these?

Luckily, breastfeeding and poor nutrition provided a certain amount of contraceptive measure for peasant woman. Women in higher society were more likely to have wet nurses and better diets and thereby ran the risk of pregnancy sooner than her poorer counterpart.

One contraceptive measure recorded by medieval German women is using beeswax and rags to form a physical block. Other popular herbal compounds used rosemary and balsam with or without palsley (parsley?)

Trotula offered many helpful herbal remedies, and a few rather strange ones. Her most famous is the one with the weasels:

Take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin or in another skin, and she will not conceive

A future Pope wrote about contraceptives for men in his book The Treasure of the Poor. A plaster made of hemlock, pictured at right, applied to the testicles of the husband prior to the sexual act was recommended as a male contraceptive.

Medieval prostitutes
Women who made their living in the sex industry were as active in the middle ages as they are today. Prostitutes were generally looked down upon but deemed to be a necessary evil- something that society needed but would rather not talk about.

Shown at right is a detail from the 1400-1409 painting Paul The Hermit Sees A Christian Tempted.

At times women who were prostitutes wore visible markers on their clothing to identify them with their trade. Ironically, at certain periods over the Middle Ages, prostitutes were exempted from sumptuary laws because it was acknowledged that a women in that line of work required certain things to make her desirable in order to make a living.

Dress in the Middle Ages by Francoise Piponnier and Perrine Maine state that:

The striped cloak .. in Marseilles.. the striped hood worn in England, the white hood of Talouse, the black and white pointed hat of Strasbourg were increasingly replaced by bands of fabric stitched to the sleeve or the shoulder, then by tassels worn on the arm.

The church, although scathing in their condemnation of sex and women who have it generally, were not above being involved in the industry. A brothel in Dijon, France, lists twenty per cent of its clients as churchmen. It's also recorded that the Bishop of Winchester received regular rent from the brothels of Suffolk.

Guidelines were needed to regulate the hours and wages of prostitutes so that the women might not be taken advantage of. In that way, the industry was regulated with fixes wages and working hours. There were always women who worked outside these, though, and these were the women forced into prostitution against their will by mothers, family, ladylords or brothel owners who were disreputable.

The Cult of the Virgin
Many clergy despised woman as instigators of original sin and for their general weakness although there was the issue of the Virgin Mary who really made things tricky. Mary was a woman, and Christ's mother, and therefore the holiest and purest of all women, and as an example of womanhood, could not be faulted.

Many female saints were also virgins, and the church could not deny their holiness. This caused a catch 22 situation, where women were to be loathed and reviled, but also revered and worshiped.

While sex was regarded and somewhat necessary for procreation, many women chose to live a life of celibacy and religious devotion. This was often seen by family as a blessing.

Prayers from a nun were believed to be more powerful than prayers from a lay woman. A dowry was not required for a marriage that would never happen and it many cases, it was the only way for a girl to obtain a really good education.

In many instances, the choice for a woman to remain a virgin, even after marriage was not enthusiastically greeted by the family or spouse. A woman who remained chaste, although admired for her purity and devotion to God, was certainly putting her health at risk by not gaining enough male seed or by the poisonous humours which were not being released.

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