The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages

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Reading Katherine Harvey’s The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, I found myself thinking: weird, weirder and, occasionally, whoa! Content Warnings: References throughout to violence, executions, torture, public punishments, public humiliation, intimate partner violence, murder, murder of a spouse, homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, war crimes, war, sexual violence, sexual assault, rape, gang rape, wartime rape, pedophilia, child sexual abuse, child prostitution, child marriage, forced prostitution, incest, bestiality.

or falling into the trap of believing an absence of evidence for some behaviours and attitudes means they didn’t happen. The obvious problem haunting such a discussion is how accurately the sex lives of ordinary people can ever be recovered. This woman’s sin was nearly uncovered, but Mary intervened by spiriting her baby away to be raised by a hermit and eradicating all physical signs of her ordeal. The church (then or now) hasn’t dared to admit just how blatantly ineffective it is to deny basic human needs and inclinations. This was great as an audiobook and contained many examples and direct citations that gave a nice glimpse into everyday life.It also confronts the fashionable stereotypes of the middle age and though she uses the ‘us/them’ vocabulary, the theme of the book is ‘similar but different’.

Throughout The Fires of Lust she situates the twin themes of morality and medicine in the social and material world that medieval people inhabited. Harvey cites a German poem in which a stepmother advises her daughter on how to seduce a man: leave her bodice unlaced, thus “causing his courage to rise” (among other things! With unabashed directness, a delicate touch of wit, and constant humanity, Katherine Harvey surveys the world of medieval sex and sexuality .The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much - or too little - sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. By exploring their sex lives, the book brings ordinary medieval people to life, revealing details of their most personal thoughts and experiences.