For better or for worse, some recent films – Kingdom of Heaven and The Last Duel come to mind – have probably made us reflect on what Middle Age sexuality was like.
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In the former movie, the amorous encounters of Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom) with the Orientalized Sibyl of Jerusalem (Eva Green) were a paean to the fusion of cultures, while the violence that the latter movie radiated, in which the contest seemed to begin in bed, made one think that people always wore armor during the medieval period, even when they were at home.
In reality, we only have vague and contradictory ideas about sex in medieval times. That’s why British historian Katherine Harvey’s book The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages is so interesting. Harvey begins by debunking some persistent myths about sex in the Middle Ages, such as beliefs that medieval times resembled a Game of Thrones-like “anything goes” scenario; that the period was defined by the droit du seigneur (as in Warlord); or that it was governed by the chastity belt (which calls to mind Monica Vitti in On My Way to the Crusades I Met a Girl Who....
In the scene, she sits down in a rage with a clanging sound after her husband – who is leaving to join the Crusades – puts the contraption on her. But the historian also warns that it would be a mistake to believe that Europeans between 1100 and 1500 had sex in the same way we do, even if sex is a universal human impulse While. the human body and its physical capabilities have not changed much over the past millennia, she argues that there have been significant transformations in how people view, understand and experience sex.
One fundamental distinction is the medieval tendency to emphasize active (implicitly male) and passive (female) sexual roles. Sex was something that men did to women. That doesn’t mean that the medieval woman was just expected to lie on her back and think of England, although it was significant that the man did the penetrating while the woman was penetrated. In fact, sex between women was only considered to be sex if one of them used an object to penetrate the other. Other forms of sex between women were legally unknown, and it appears that many people did not really understand what they could do with each other.