The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages

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I can’t think of more brilliant Christmas book to give to one’s significant other if they have even a passing interest in medieval Europe or the rich and extraordinary sex life of its inhabitants. In Venice, a man was accused of bestiality, but in his defense claimed that he had been unable to have relations with a woman or even masturbate. Anybody going into this with a notion of the middle ages as "The Dark Ages" will hopefully begin to realise how misinformed they were. Learned, fun, and full of surprises – a fascinating, wide-ranging guide to medieval sexual attitudes and experiences.

If Mary Magdalene’s sexual sins did not bar her from Christ’s inner circle, they also offered medieval Christians hope that they too might be redeemed. Learned, fun and full of surprises - a fascinating, wide-ranging guide to medieval sexual attitudes and experiences. There were some moments, like referring to Harvey Weinstein as Harry, that held it back from 5 star.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. This was great as an audiobook and contained many examples and direct citations that gave a nice glimpse into everyday life. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about who they could have sex with, in what way, how often, and even when, and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong.

The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages was published in October 2021 by Reaktion Books, and is distributed by University of Chicago Press in the US. I can't think of a more brilliant Christmas book to give to one's significant other if they have even a passing interest in medieval Europe or the rich and extraordinary sex life of its inhabitants. Was it Bertrand Russell who opined that, of all the sexual possibilities, the most perverse was abstinence? Harvey’s specialism in the history of medicine provides particular depth, and is integrated with legal and cultural material to create a sparkling and convincing whole. Like us, our forebears were troubled by sexual violence, but they also shared our tendency to handle it badly’.It’s so tempting to think we’ve advanced as a society, but so many of the things I thought of as backwards in this book are still held as “true” by a good number of people these days. Some of it the content is bleak, of course; the chapters focusing on sex work and sexual violence, in particular, make for difficult reading. 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’.

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. This lively, engaging study combines a scholarly rigour with a sharp eye for telling detail, told in a fluid style that keeps the pages turning.

The Virgin Mary seemed to have a particular weakness for sexual sinners, and collections of her miracles often include stories of fornicators who were saved by her intervention; the Castilian priest Gonzalo de Berceo (c. She received many ‘marks of love’ from Christ, who resurrected her brother and allowed her to do the housekeeping on His travels.

The book is sad and unintentionally funny, sometimes verging on the horrific, and vastly informative. Rolandino Ronchaia (in 14th-century Venice) might be described as intersex, a man who, because of a hormonal imbalance, was more feminine than masculine.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! This means we get an image of extreme violence and idealised stereotypes, respectively, and rarely get a glimpse into what “regular sex” would have been like. It's definitely written with classroom use in mind, but I'd also recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about the subject.