Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Medieval Sex Myths About this episode From medieval d*ck pics to sex with monks, how did people in medieval times think about sex and sexuality?
It was a period that spanned roughly 1,000 years and even though views on sex were largely shaped by the dominant Christian faith, whether this filtered down to every day experiences is another question.
Joining Kate today is the legendary sex historian Professor Ruth Karras, author of Sexuality in Mediaeval Europe: Doing Unto Others https://www.routledge.com/Sexuality-in-Medieval-Europe-Doing-Unto-Others/MazoKarras-Pierpont/p/book/9780367647278?srsltid=AfmBOookf6IDrMfRUNEhqwqGvYyv2MpN4Hy7uIUJDeCd3jIWAYk1tkdv.
Why did people in the middle ages think that women were more highly sexed than men? What did they believe were aphrodisiacs at this time? And what did they think caused STIs?
This episode was edited by Matt Peaty and Stuart Beckwith. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.
Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.
You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK.
Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
0:37 Speaker 01 Every restaurant wants to be busy. Most restaurants aren't ready for it. I'm chef Mike from Detroit 75, and Toast helps us stay ready when the lunch rush hits. We prepare for lunch like we're preparing for battle. Orders are flying, tickets are stacking, and the guests should never feel the chaos. Toast keeps our team organized, so we can serve more people, stay consistent, and keep growing. Visit toastapp.com to learn more. Paid testimonial from an actual Toast customer.
1:02 Speaker 02 Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman, and I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous, delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.
1:44 Speaker 03 The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Then comes the melted cheese, the slivered onions, the pickles, the ketchup, and the mustard. Add hot crispy fries and an ice-cold Coke, all for $8. And if things go well, one loose fry at the bottom of the bag. The Quarter Pounder with Cheese meal, now $8. Ba-da-ba-ba-ba.
2:15 Kate Lister? Hello my lovely betwixters, it's me Kate Lister and you are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. And in case you've just wandered in off the street and have no idea what goes on around here, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects and you should be an adult too. And if you're not, then be off with you. We don't need you getting upset while the rest of us are enjoying ourselves. For everyone else, on with the show.
2:45 Kate Lister? Don't mind me betwixters, I have just hopped over into the Garden of Eden to see what's what. I'm actually quite peckish and the fruit is looking pretty good around here. I mean, what could be the harm, right? Well, it turns out quite a lot of harm indeed. Far from an apple a day keeping the doctor away, Eve picked one and then the whole of mankind was plunged into chaos and women were blamed for being thrown out of paradise forevermore. From an apple, an apple! And the fact that it was Eve that did this, that it was a woman that did this, took on a hell of a lot of meaning in the centuries to come. Because only someone who was weak-willed and easily led would be stealing apples.
3:25 Kate Lister? At least that was the idea that took hold, particularly in the medieval period amongst many other theories. So, let's grab some more apples and find out more.
3:41 Speaker 04 What are you looking for, honey man? Oh, money of course.
3:44 Speaker 03 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
3:46 Speaker 04 I make perfect compliments of whatever my boss needs by just turning him up and pushing the button.
3:58 Speaker 03 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
4:01 Speaker 05 Goodness, I feel so damned. Goodness has nothing to do with it, dary.
4:09 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. A very happy new year to all our old and new listeners. Hello, we're very glad to have you here. Who knows what 2025 holds? But we can always rely on the past to provide stimulating, fascinating and downright naughty entertainment. Take the medieval period, for example. This is a time that we often think of as being dominated by the Catholic Church. A hell of a lot of thou shalt not went on or did it? Just because the church was saying behave yourselves, does that mean that everybody did? Why did they think of sexual desire as a particularly female trait? How were sexually transmitted infections thought of and treated?
4:54 Kate Lister? And is there any way that we could consider them a progressive, even sex positive society? Well, joining me to find out more is Professor Ruth Karas, author of, well, fricking loads of books on medieval sex, but author of Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. There is nobody better to help me find out more. Pilgrim badges and wimples at the ready, Betwixters? Let's do this.
5:22 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Professor Ruth Karas. How are you doing?
5:29 Speaker 06 I'm very well, thank you. I'm delighted to meet you after having followed your work.
5:36 Kate Lister? Are you kidding me? Oh, yeah. I've followed your work for years. You are like an academic superstar in medieval sexuality and medieval sex work. I've got everything you've ever written. Honestly, I'm so thrilled to be talking to you today. I really am.
5:53 Speaker 06 Well, thank you.
5:55 Kate Lister? Can I ask, as a start off? What brought you to study medieval sexuality? Because honestly, you're such a big name in this field.
6:04 Speaker 06 Actually, I was inspired by a professor that I had when I was, I think, in my second year at university, John Boswell, whose work I'm sure you know.
6:15 Kate Lister? Yep.
6:15 Speaker 06 And the first thing I ever wrote on sex work in the Middle Ages was an essay for his class on the early Middle Ages, and that would have been back in 1976, 1977, or thereabouts.
6:33 Kate Lister? When you were researching this in the 70s, because the field of the history of sexuality is it's quite vibrant now, and there's more and more people entering the field, more and more work being done. But in the 70s, when you started studying medieval sexuality, did you get a lot of resistance around that? What was the field like at the time?
6:52 Speaker 06 When I said this started in the 70s, I mean, I was an undergraduate then. This was just when, I mean, I wasn't sort of identified as a researcher in that area. When I started doing it seriously, which would have been the mid 80s, I got an awful lot of nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
7:09 Kate Lister? Yes.
7:10 Speaker 06 Not so much, this isn't a real subject of study, at least not to my face. Although I expect there was some of that there in the background.
7:19 Kate Lister? It still gets a lot of wink, wink, nudge, nudge, like people aren't quite sure where to put their reaction to this, when you tell them what it is that you study. Is that what it was?
7:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, and, you know, cracking jokes about it, doing experiential research, or, you know, identifying what their field of study, and they would say, well, do you do that, Ruth?
7:40 Kate Lister? Yes.
7:41 Speaker 06 Like that.
7:42 Kate Lister? But your work has been so formative when it comes to studying not just sex work, but sexuality in the medieval period. When you first started researching this, what sources and documents were you drawing on? Because it was a relatively new field of study. Or were there other scholars who were working that you were able to talk to?
8:04 Speaker 06 There were some other scholars, a lot of people in the field of literature.
8:08 Kate Lister? Yeah.
8:08 Speaker 06 Not that many historians. I was using largely court records. There are a lot of people who work on court records for different kinds of things, but were very welcoming of somebody else starting to use this kind of source. And let me give a shout out here. The article that I'm probably best known for was about Eleanor or John Rechner, who was probably trans sex worker in late 14th century. And the way I discovered that was that Sheila Lindenbaum, who was a professor of English literature, said to me, oh, you know, I was reading through these London court records, you know, this case.
8:53 Speaker 06 And I was reading through the London court records by using a calendar. So it's sort of a printed summary of the records that had been published in 1927. And the case she referred me to, although it was in the calendar, was two men convicted of immorality. And I was working on sex work, and so I was looking for women.
9:15 Kate Lister? Yeah.
9:16 Speaker 06 And so I just, oh, well, this is, if it said a man and a woman, I would have looked at the case, but this said two men. And I said, okay, this must be some other kind of immorality. I mean, I wasn't really thinking about same sex relationships at that time. She put me onto it and she said, I looked at it because I was interested in the use of space in late medieval London. I'm not doing research on sexuality. If you want to go with it, do whatever you'd like with it. And so I took that and.
9:48 Speaker 06 Sort of said, oh, well, maybe I shouldn't be thinking about male sex workers also. Or, I mean, I was thinking of Riker at that time as a male sex worker. Now, I don't think it's at all clear. But another scholar who was not working in the history of sexuality, but who took this seriously as a field, who was feeding me information.
10:09 Kate Lister? What was that like when you looked at that case? And you sort of put two and two together, hang on a minute, hang on a minute here. This is Eleanor Riker suddenly becomes John Riker with this really lurid story. Was there a moment where you were like, oh, my God, this could be a trans sex worker from the Middle Ages?
10:27 Speaker 06 This is the part that's a bit embarrassing because when I published this, which I think was in 1990 or 1991, along with a colleague from English literature, we called the article "A Transvestite Prostitutes in Late Medieval London", and I would not use either of those terms today. I mean, I would say a trans or possibly trans or gender fluid sex worker.
10:58 Kate Lister? Yeah, but I mean, at the time.
11:00 Speaker 06 Yes, right. I mean, I was, I, we're not all prisoners of our vocabularies because if we were all prisoners of it, then things would never change. But it's hard to think outside the terms that are current at the time that you're writing.
11:15 Kate Lister? When we're thinking of the medieval period, what chunk of time are you thinking of when somebody says medieval?
11:22 Speaker 06 Approximately 500 to 1500. But people have a different start and end dates, depending on which part of Europe you're talking about, or indeed, if you're talking about another part of the world. So 500 to 1500 are nice, round arbitrary dates.
11:43 Kate Lister? It's a thousand years of history, like give or takes. If you're looking at something like sex and attitudes to sex, I mean, apart from the acts themselves, which have remained fairly consistent over, over the history, have you found that attitudes around sex can be called consistent within that chunk of time, over a thousand years? Or do they change dramatically, radically? Is there anything that you could be called characteristic of medieval sexuality?
12:11 Speaker 06 One thing that is relatively stable across that period is that all sex outside of marriage is bad.
12:22 Kate Lister? Yeah.
12:22 Speaker 06 There was always an attitude that all sex was bad that emanated from monastic life. Monks and nuns were supposed to renounce all sexual activity. They took vows of chastity. And a lot of the writing that we have about sex from the Middle Ages comes from a monastic context. And therefore, we get perhaps a distorted idea to the extent that they were talking to each other and not to the laity. We're hearing only about monastic sexuality. And to the extent they were talking to the laity, it's not at all clear that the laity were listening to them.
13:06 Speaker 06 But is that the only way to salvation? Through renunciation and not only renunciation of sex, renunciation of delicious food. You know, you were supposed to eat only what was necessary to keep your body alive and not get great pleasure from it. Renunciation of comfortable clothing and bedding. I mean, the monk or the nun was supposed to live an ascetic life in all respects. So is that the only way to salvation? And the saying was that virgins get a hundredfold reward in heaven, widows a seventyfold reward in heaven, and married people a thirtyfold reward in heaven.
13:51 Speaker 06 Marriage was not as good as virginity, but it was good.
13:55 Kate Lister? Yeah.
13:55 Speaker 06 Augustine said, "It's not a lesser evil, it's just that virginity is a greater good." And Augustine was the most popular author of the Middle Ages. I mean, even though he's writing at the very beginning of the period, he's very widely read. If you sinned within marriage, which is to say if you had sex within marriage that was not for reproductive purposes.
14:19 Kate Lister? Yep.
14:20 Speaker 06 That was okay. That was not a mortal sin. You know, if you did it just for pleasure and you confessed it and you did a penance, it was not that big a deal as compared to if you did it outside of marriage. But sex outside of marriage was officially condemned through the Middle Ages. That doesn't mean that it didn't happen. But I think there was a major change in attitudes towards sex within marriage that comes in the 12th, 13th century. Several things happened then. One is that marriage begins to be officially considered a sacrament. There hasn't been sort of a formal sacramental theology around marriage up till that time.
15:03 Speaker 06 The other thing is that there are people around who are espousing a life of purity and renunciation of sex, not within the monastic context. And they get labeled as heretics.
15:16 Kate Lister? Really?
15:17 Speaker 06 And, yes.
15:18 Kate Lister? I thought there would have been really into that, that had been going, well, don't know.
15:21 Speaker 06 No, no. In fact, there's a story told, again, by a monk of a man who was trying to seduce a woman and she refused. And she told him that it would be a sin for her to have sex with him. And so he denounced her as a heretic on the grounds that, you know, she was anti-sex. And the people who were known to later historians as cathars, although that's not what they called themselves, but a group of people largely in the south of France, although elsewhere in Europe as well, who, as far as we can tell, believed in renunciation of the flesh, and they are condemned as heretics.
16:07 Speaker 06 And so then the church starts saying, no, we think sex for reproduction within marriage is really a good thing. And there starts being a lot of talk about nature and the natural.
16:19 Kate Lister? Yep.
16:20 Speaker 06 And talking about nature and the natural can be a way of condemning some activities as unnatural. But it also can be a way of saying, you know, well, what does nature do? I mean, nature is for reproduction. Every spring, the animals are reproducing and the plants are reproducing, you know, the birds and the bees are reproducing and people need to be doing it too. And so there's still this ascetic strand and that renunciation is the best, but there is also a strand of thought that says, you know, marriage is good, reproduction is good.
16:57 Kate Lister? Sex is good.
16:58 Speaker 06 Sex is good when it's for reproduction. And this attitude that it's good was the case all along. For example, in Jewish culture, there's a very interesting book by a scholar called Jeremy Cohen about the Bible verse, "Be fruitful and multiply."
17:18 Kate Lister? Okay.
17:18 Speaker 06 And how it was interpreted across the medieval period, but even before the medieval period, I mean, he really covers it for millennia, how that verse is interpreted in Christian and Jewish culture. And in Jewish culture, it's an absolute commandment. I mean, men were supposed to have the duality of that commandment, be fruitful and multiply like it's two different things. They said, well, what could it mean by using two different words for the same thing? And in biblical interpretation, whenever there's a redundancy, they'll say, well, that must be because it has two different meanings. And what they interpreted as the meaning of this was you needed to have at least one male child and one female child.
18:03 Speaker 06 And so a man or a woman should not renounce sexual activity until they've sort of done their duty, obeyed the commandment by having one male and one female child. And that's why if a man died and he hadn't had children, this is back in biblical times. This is not in medieval times where the Jews did not practice polygamy, but in biblical times. The woman was supposed to marry the man's brother and the first son and first daughter she had with her husband stroke brother-in-law would not be her new husband's children. They would be considered her first husband's children.
18:47 Speaker 06 And, and his brother was sort of doing the
18:52 Speaker 06 Obeying the commandment of being fruitful and multiplying on his brother's behalf.
18:57 Kate Lister? There are a lot of conflicting messages here, Ruth, aren't there? Like you might just be a medieval person walking around trying to work out what it is you're supposed to be doing here is you've got on one hand, you've got things like that in the Bible, like go forth and multiply, get on with it quickly. If you can't do it, your brother will. And then on the other hand, you've got Augustus going, let's really try not to have sex. But I suppose if you, if you have to, all right. And then there are so many conflicting messages. How do we start to understand if any of that translated to the general populace? Because just because church leaders are saying something doesn't mean that people were listening, that it had an impact. How do we get to what normal people were doing?
19:40 Speaker 06 It's hard to know what normal people were doing. I mean, we know they were having children. We have, you know, inheritance records and so on. And obviously the population of medieval Europe did not disappear. But by the later Middle Ages, we have not necessarily sermons that were preached. I mean, we don't have recordings, but we have handbooks for preachers that give like little stories to tell in your sermons.
20:05 Kate Lister? And I love that.
20:06 Speaker 06 The one that I really like is, I think it's a priest who has a vision and the angel shows him his congregation and some of them are shining with halos on. And he says, those are married women. How come they're shining with halos on? Why isn't it the celibate people who are, who have the halos? And the angel tells him, you know, these are women who had sex with their husbands in order to bear children. And when their husbands died, you know, they remained chaste and they also did lots of good works. They did charity in the community and all these things.
20:43 Speaker 06 And so they are the ones who have fully obeyed God's commandments more than say those who renounced sex, but weren't kind to their neighbors or various other things. So that's what's being preached to the laity in the later Middle Ages, because it was understood that eternal chastity was not for everyone.
21:07 Speaker 06 You wanted to encourage your congregation to live a life as God commanded, you know, as a layperson.
21:15 Kate Lister? They also have this, again, another contradictory narrative to this one. They have this very, very powerful, right, women behave yourselves. You can have sex with your husband, but then you're going to stop when he dies and behave yourselves. But they also have this narrative that that comes through, that women are insatiable sex maniacs who can't be trusted. I think the first time I ever learned that was through your work, actually, isn't it? I think I was in my MA. How do those two things fit together? Why did people in the Middle Ages think that women were more highly sex than men? What was the rationale for that?
21:50 Speaker 06 It's really hard to say why. I can, I can tell you the rationale that they gave, which is sort of a story used to dress it up. But it was, I mean, the story of Adam and Eve, that it was Eve who had tempted Adam with the apple.
22:06 Kate Lister? Yeah.
22:06 Speaker 06 It's basically because women are weak.
22:08 Kate Lister? Weak, yeah.
22:09 Speaker 06 It's not that men don't also feel desire like women, but men are stronger and more able to control it. Therefore, Adam might be considered just as guilty as Eve because Eve was the one who tempted him and instigated him into eating the apple and disobeying God. But he's the one who was stronger and should have known better. So it's sort of based on, on women's weakness, really.
22:39 Kate Lister? It's this really strange one when you see it cropping up. Is it the idea that men were just as horny, but they could control themselves? Or was it the idea that women were naturally more desirous? I think it's a very male fantasy, that one, to go, look, lads, they just can't help themselves. They'll be all over you.
22:56 Speaker 06 I think the idea really was that men were stronger, men were more rational.
23:02 Kate Lister? Yeah.
23:02 Speaker 06 And therefore, they were in a better position to control their desires.
23:07 Kate Lister? Yeah.
23:08 Speaker 06 The way I think of it is up till the 13th century, the line was, uh, women are more sinful than men.
23:15 Kate Lister? Yep.
23:15 Speaker 06 Because of Eve and so on. And from the 13th century, you get, and women are also inferior and weak and stupid. Because they've rediscovered Aristotle, and that's what he says.
23:25 Kate Lister? And he says it, yes, he says it a lot. You see the.
23:28 Speaker 06 Yes.
23:28 Kate Lister? And then Saint Jerome turns up. Oh, God.
23:31 Speaker 06 Yes.
23:31 Kate Lister? Saint Jerome.
23:32 Speaker 06 Saint Jerome, you know, is, when he says all these terrible things about women, he's writing against marriage there. And his relations with, he had a couple of pen pals who he wrote to a lot. A rich Roman widow who basically supported him, and then her daughter. And he was always polite to them and told them what to do. He mansplained a lot of things to them, but he gave them, he always spoke in a respectful tone. And he respected, you know, the choice of chaste widowhood and so on. I mean, of course he did. They were supporting him.
24:14 Kate Lister? Yeah.
24:14 Speaker 06 That was their philanthropy. But when he wrote about, you know, how horrible and dangerous women are. He is writing to men about marriage and he's saying, don't get married. Because, you know, women are temperous and will do all these horrible things. It had a considerable effect on women, I would say, but he wasn't writing to women there. He's writing to men.
24:46 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Ruth after this short break.
25:03 Kate Lister? Autumn is underway at last, which means the nights are closing in and everything in nature feels like it's just slowing down, except us, of course. For most of us, me included, the world still has a lot of demands on us that can feel like a lot to deal with. There will be a time in all of our lives when we could use therapy, but often when you try to do that, it's still way harder than it should be. Finding a therapist is hard enough, but finding one who actually takes your insurance? That's where most online therapy platforms fall short. Many don't work with insurance at all, which means you're stuck paying the full cost out of pocket or paying for an expensive monthly subscription.
25:48 Kate Lister? Ruler does things differently. They partner with over 100 insurance plans, making the average co-pay just $15 per second. That's real therapy from licensed professionals at a price that actually makes sense. Thousands of people are already using Ruler to get affordable, high-quality therapy that's actually covered by insurance. Visit ruler.com/shets to get started. That's R-U-L-A dot com forward slash S-H-E-E-T-S, Sheets. You deserve mental health care that works with you, not against your budget.
26:23 Speaker 02 Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman, and I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 Brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous, delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.
27:08 Speaker 03 The Quarter Pounder with Cheese is made with 100% fresh beef, cooked when you order it. Add hot crispy fries and an ice cold Coke, and hopefully a lot of napkins. All for $8.
27:22 Speaker 02 There are two types of business owners, those who are busy and those who want to be busy. Toast is designed for both, with tools to keep you humming and help turn grind into growth. That's how you turn busy into business. Toast, built for busy.
27:49 Kate Lister? If I could throw you a curveball, because it's just something that I've been looking at lately. Was there any sense of menopause in the Middle Ages that you can think of? Because the only real thing that I can find about it is Saint Jerome, who chips in with something along the lines of, I'm paraphrasing now, but it's like, oh, because menstruation's ended, you're now no longer spiritually a woman and you can basically look forward to a contented life of croning or something.
28:15 Kate Lister? Sounds like him, right?
28:16 Speaker 06 There are commentators about this, again, on the question of sex within marriage and how you should do it only for the sake of reproduction. Well, after you've passed your reproductive years, which is more obvious in women than in men, is it still okay to have sex within marriage? And the answer was, yes, it is. Because God is all-powerful and if God wanted you to have another child, he would cause you to be fertile when you're having sex with your husband. And therefore, as long as you're open to the possibility of having another child, if God wants you to, then it's fine to have sex after menopause.
28:58 Kate Lister? Ah, interesting. While we're on the subject of medieval understanding of how the body works, kind of menopause stuff, erections fascinate me, what the medieval people thought of erections, because that ties into their understanding of aphrodisiacs as well.
29:17 Speaker 06 Yes, and it also ties into the idea of fertility. I mean, you'll see little men with erections running around in the margins of, say, their tapestry.
29:28 Kate Lister? So many willies on that, it's unbelievable.
29:30 Speaker 06 Yes, and I found in one of the volumes of...
29:36 Speaker 06 Court records from medieval Paris that I was looking at recently, there's one page where it's full of dick pics.
29:44 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
29:45 Speaker 06 You know, the person has just doodled them and it's not because there's anything on that page that is a particular.
29:52 Kate Lister? Warranted a cock.
29:53 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's just that the scribe got bored.
29:57 Kate Lister? We've never changed.
29:58 Speaker 06 Yeah, so they made a really strong connection in the Middle Ages between impotence and infertility. I mean, we know today, I mean, there are men with perfectly healthy erections and perfectly healthy sex lives who nevertheless are infertile. I mean, they have a low sperm count, but in the Middle Ages, it would not, I mean, they didn't think of that, you know, if the man was capable of having sex, then it was the woman's fault if
30:33 Kate Lister? Of course.
30:34 Speaker 06 if they didn't have children. And there are, in fact, a marriage could be dissolved if the couple were incapable of having sex. And so, I mean, I see this in the court records that I'm looking at now, and a number of other people have written about this. If one partner complains that the other is unable to have sex, then experts would be called in to testify, and sometimes these are doctors who are called in to examine. But in some cases, it's midwives who are called in to examine the man. And in some of the cases in York, there are sex workers who are called in to examine the man. And they're supposed to, you know, fondle him and dance around naked and so on to see if he can get an erection.
31:19 Speaker 06 And then they, they describe what happens and it's really quite funny.
31:23 Kate Lister? Could you imagine that's your entry point into history is a court record where they called in a bunch of sex workers to try and help you get it up and you failed?
31:33 Speaker 06 Yep.
31:34 Kate Lister? That it's the humiliation in it. Why were they doing that? Like, because that went from a modern point of view, that is objectively, it's hilarious. It's a completely mad thing to be doing. They must have had a reason for this. Why wouldn't they just accept? The wife has turned up and said, look, guys, I like him, but he can't get it up. Why do they have to subject it to this? Right, I'll tell you what we need. We need a midwife, a priest and a sex worker here immediately.
32:01 Speaker 06 That was one of the few ways you could get out of a marriage you didn't want to be in.
32:05 Kate Lister? Oh, yes.
32:06 Speaker 06 So if the woman says, I want out of this marriage. My husband is incapable of having sex with me. And she also would say, and I want children. That's part of the formula that you more or less have to say. And he says, no, that's not true. That's how they find out the truth. If you couldn't prove something like that, you couldn't get the marriage dissolved. You could get what they called divorce, but it's more like what we would call a judicial separation. You didn't have to live together. You'd have the property divided, but you still had to, as they say, render the marriage debt. If the other member of the couple wanted it and you didn't have the right to remarry. So if you had been pushed into a marriage that you thought was a mistake,
32:51 Speaker 06 claiming that you were unable to consummate the marriage would be a way of getting out of it.
32:57 Kate Lister? That's, yeah.
32:57 Speaker 06 But you would never have the couple sort of agreeing to go into court and say, oh, we have been unable to consummate this marriage. Because then if you were sort of labeled as impotent, you would never be able to marry anybody else either.
33:10 Kate Lister? Right.
33:11 Speaker 06 So only one party is going to be making that claim.
33:15 Kate Lister? Have you ever found any records of a man bringing a woman to court saying that she can't have?
33:19 Speaker 06 Yes.
33:20 Kate Lister? Oh, you have?
33:20 Speaker 06 Yes, and there's a very interesting case that Shannon McSheffery found recently. I don't know whether she's published it or not, of a woman or, well, someone who was considered to be a woman, married as a woman, but who may have been intersex. And there are a number of cases. They're much rarer than women claiming a man's impotence, but they're saying that the woman was unable to be entered, basically. And that, again, she would be examined by doctors or midwives to see whether that is the case.
33:57 Kate Lister? And am I right in thinking that they understood an erection to be full of air? That that was kind of like inflated, like a pneumatic penis?
34:06 Speaker 06 That I don't know.
34:07 Kate Lister? Because I've read that they believed chickpeas were an aphrodisiac for this reason, because they thought that foods that doth provoked wind, that windy foods was an aphrodisiac.
34:19 Speaker 06 Yes, they did think that windy foods were aphrodisiac. I'm not sure that that's because they thought the penis inflated.
34:26 Kate Lister? Why would they think windy foods would make you horny? That seems like the least horny kind of food to me.
34:33 Speaker 06 Well, it has to do with the balance of the humors. The four bodily humors. So, color, yellow bile, black bile and blood. And, you know, they had to be in proper balance. But men were thought to be more controlled by blood, that is sanguine. The four sort of personalities you get from it are sanguine if blood is dominant, melancholic if black bile is dominant, choleric if the yellow bile is dominant, or phlegmatic if phlegm is dominant. And the idea is that to be healthy, you want to have these humors all in proper balance with,
35:17 Speaker 06 you know, it's going to be out of balance a little bit and that's what dictates your personality type.
35:22 Kate Lister? And farting can help this.
35:24 Speaker 06 Yeah, and the balance also corresponds in various ways to the different elements of earth, water, wind and fire. And so you would eat windy foods for, to get you in balance.
35:41 Speaker 06 This is sort of what they got from ancient Greek medicine.
35:44 Kate Lister? God love them, God love the ancient Greeks. But what about something like STIs? Because now we are, we're very on that. We've got public information programs and it's part of sex ed curriculum at school. But in the Middle Ages, what kind of sexual diseases would they? Was syphilis just towards the end of that particular period? But what was their understanding of sexually transmitted diseases?
36:09 Speaker 06 They knew you could get diseases.
36:12 Kate Lister? Yeah.
36:12 Speaker 06 You can read through catalogs of diseases of the sexual organs. They refer to something called gonorrhea, but it's the Greek word gonorrhea means a discharge from the genital area.
36:26 Kate Lister? Oof.
36:26 Speaker 06 That name was given in the modern era to a particular disease caused by a particular pathogen, but it wasn't understood that way in the Middle Ages. It was just a discharge. And they understood discharges not to be so much caused by contagion because they didn't understand germ theory. They understood them to be caused by overindulgence.
36:49 Kate Lister? Ah.
36:50 Speaker 06 For example, there's a 14th century English poem trying to discourage people from having sex with sex workers. And it says, one reason is that measles, M E S L E S, have sex with them. And that word could mean lepers, people with Hansen's disease, but it could also mean just anybody with a rash. I mean, because they didn't have a clear diagnosis. You don't want to have sex with a sex worker because somebody who has this unspecified disease has already had sex with them. And the implication is that it's therefore going to be contagious. But I'm not sure they understood it in that specific a way.
37:35 Speaker 06 Rather, it's just they're in general filthy because a filthy person has previously had sex with them.
37:42 Kate Lister? We should talk about sex work because your research in this area has been absolutely transformative. It was in your work that I learned about lavenders. That was one of my favorite sex worker medieval facts ever. Tell us about that one for anyone who's not familiar.
37:57 Speaker 06 So a lavender is a laundress. The word comes from the Latin word for washing. And the reason the plant is called lavender is because it was used to make laundry smell good. There was a strong connection between. Washers and sex workers and possibly because people who did washing handled dirty clothes and intimate items, but more likely, I think, was because that was who came into your house and particularly for houses of men, monastic houses, they might
38:37 Speaker 06 have men as their servants, but for some reason, it was always women who did the washing. And you get this in regulations for medieval colleges within universities, be sure that the person who does your washing is an old woman. And it may be also that that was something that either sex workers supplemented their income by doing washing, or washers who tended to be poor supplemented their income with sex work. And that was sort of the stereotype.
39:10 Kate Lister? And they came to be known as lavenders, didn't they, sex workers?
39:13 Speaker 06 Well, they came to be known more commonly as spinsters.
39:18 Kate Lister? Oh, no.
39:19 Speaker 06 I mean, a spinster is a woman who spins.
39:21 Kate Lister? Yep.
39:22 Speaker 06 And that was understood already in the 15th century to be the equivalent of a woman who is not married, because that woman who's not married has to support herself. And that was often how she did it, by spinning. But you also will occasionally see an equation of spinsters in the sense of women who spin, or single women.
39:46 Kate Lister? Yep.
39:47 Speaker 06 As sex workers. Any woman who wasn't married could be suspect.
39:52 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Ruth after this short break.
40:19 Speaker 02 Hi folks, this is Mark Bittman from the podcast Food with Mark Bittman. And I'm here to suggest that you host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are, as usual, no antibiotics ever in their meat department, so carve up turkey and spiral cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All of their fabulous, delectable pies are made with no high fructose corn syrup. Where else are you going to find that? Gourmet Thanksgiving flavors with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.
41:00 Speaker 07 There are two types of business owners, those who are busy and those who want to be busy. Toast is designed for both, with tools to keep you humming and help turn grind into growth. That's how you turn busy into business. Toast, built for busy.
41:26 Kate Lister? I was reading a book recently about attitudes to sex in medieval Germany. And I'm not going to attempt to pronounce the word because it took up the entire page. But there was a word there that they used for these single, independent women, and it translates to women who earn their own bread. And that was their name. And it was also they were regarded with suspicion and local towns were passing laws about them and like, be careful of these women in your house. And it was that they were of independent means and they were associated with sex work too.
41:57 Speaker 06 Yeah, well, it was an accusation used.
42:01 Speaker 06 To essentially keep women in their place. I mean, you see that today, too. And there's a difference between a formal accusation and just an insult.
42:10 Kate Lister? Yes.
42:10 Speaker 06 That's why in the book I wrote, I often translated the Latin word meritrice, not as prostitute, but as whore. You know, when we say sex worker, we use that phrase because we want to give the person respect as a person doing a particular job. But when they use the Latin word meritrice, which in some cases should be translated as sex worker, but often they weren't using it to give women respect. They were using it to give women disrespect. I mean, if someone uses the word whore as an insult today, it may have a technical meaning of a woman who has sex for money. But when people use it, they just mean, you know, a woman who is sexually inappropriate or a woman who I wish to insult.
42:55 Kate Lister? And what were attitudes to women who really, and men who really were selling sex? Because it seems that attitudes to sex work were very different from our own modern understanding.
43:05 Speaker 06 I mean, the range of attitudes was not very different from our own. I mean, on the one hand, you have, you know, these are members of our community. These are women, or in some cases, men, although we have a lot less information on that. These are people who are members of our community, and this is how they are earning their living, and they're entitled to the pay for their work. And on the other hand, you have the church teaching, no, these women are sinful and they're filthy and they don't actually, you know, have a right to anything. There's a whole discussion about this in the University of Paris in the 12th century
43:46 Speaker 06 about should a sex worker be given her wage? And the answer that they come up with is, well, yes, if she's agreed a price. With the customer, then it's his obligation to pay it unless she's wearing makeup.
44:04 Kate Lister? Oh my god.
44:05 Speaker 06 Because if she's wearing makeup, that means that she has committed fraud or deception by making herself look more beautiful than she actually is. And therefore, he's been defrauded. He doesn't have an obligation to pay.
44:19 Kate Lister? That's just, I just imagine just large groups of men sitting around in meetings, day after day, coming up with this stuff.
44:26 Speaker 06 That's the thing that because the medieval church is, you know, required all men in major orders to be celibate. And because a lot of boys left home at a pretty early age to be educated. You have this group of men who haven't been around any women. I mean, they haven't been around their mothers and sisters since they were quite young. They haven't been around any women except laundresses. I mean, that's a bit of an exaggeration. I mean, some of them would have had landladies, some of them would have, you know, come into contact with other women, you know, who are selling things in the market and so on.
45:06 Speaker 06 And at the top levels within monasteries or universities, those in charge would certainly come in contact with women, philanthropists, donors. But for the most part, they've not led a home life with women since they were quite young. And they basically use women to think with. I mean, some of these people, Peter the Chantress and his circle are the ones who I was talking about, who are sort of theorizing about sex work. And they theorized about a lot of practical things, but they're talking about a sex worker getting paid is part of their theorizing of what is fair in the market. And they're actually talking about the market because they're located within the university, but it's in medieval Paris.
45:51 Speaker 06 They're in a major city. They're coming in contact with the market. So that's why they're thinking about these things. But there are also just a lot of discussions about various things in texts from the medieval universities where they're using women to think with. They're not talking about real women. What is it a woman's obligation to do if a tyrant says to her, "If you don't have sex with me, I'm going to kill a thousand people." Should she do it in order to save a thousand lives? And their answer is, She should not do it because even if she and a thousand other people are put to death, they are martyrs and they're going to go to heaven.
46:37 Kate Lister? I would never get to medieval heaven. I would mess this up. That makes no sense to me at all.
46:43 Speaker 06 No, I wouldn't get to medieval heaven either for a variety of reasons.
46:47 Kate Lister? But I might get to medieval heaven if I went on a pilgrimage, which the final question that I'm going to ask you, because I could keep you here for weeks asking you questions, but I won't. Pilgrimages. Now, anyone that studied Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or knows a bit about it, there's this idea that the medieval pilgrimage was almost like, you know, Ibiza Club 18 to 30. And you get those pilgrimage badges and you can get like replicas of them on Etsy and things like that. And they're basically penises and vulvas that people were wearing as badges going to pilgrimages. What on earth was that about? What's your thought?
47:27 Speaker 06 So I, I don't know that those particular ones were actually pilgrimage badges. They were badges certainly that you could get. But I think those are more, you know, you got the one with the cockle shell on it if you'd been to St. James or whatever other pilgrimage site you'd been to. The others, I think, are just more like the kitsch souvenirs that you buy in the market and not necessarily the place you've gone on pilgrimage, but the place that you, you know, you've traveled anywhere. What are you going to, you know, bring back for your mates? I mean, like, you might bring back today, well, not you, but one might bring back, you know, a T-shirt with a rude slogan on it or something like that.
48:12 Kate Lister? I might bring one of those back.
48:13 Speaker 06 Well, yes, depends what the slogan is, right? But in the same way, you'd bring back this badge as a souvenir. Not that everyone, you know, who went on pilgrimage was all that holy.
48:25 Kate Lister? Were they quite rowdy things? Was that a reputation well deserved?
48:30 Speaker 06 Marjorie Kemp, the author of the first autobiography we have in English, was going On pilgrimage, she went to Rome and she wanted to go to the Holy Land. And the people she was with would not let her board the ship with them to go to the Holy Land because they found her company too unpleasantly because she was praying and weeping all the time. They were interested in enjoying themselves en route and she was spoiling it for them.
48:56 Kate Lister? I bet she was. So they were, it's the kind of reputation that I guess they did deserve is that it was a bit of a, a bit of a knees up.
49:04 Speaker 06 Yes and no. I mean, people went for a number of reasons. And I'm sure there were some people who went entirely for devotional reasons and some maybe half and half. And some maybe because it was a good opportunity to see the world. I mean, the biggest mistake people make in understanding the Middle Ages is to think that it was one big, solid block of people all behaving and thinking the same way. And it certainly wasn't any more than any other time period.
49:34 Kate Lister? Yeah. So as a final question then, do you think that we can learn useful things from the medieval period about sex? Or do you think that we, you know, we're so advanced now, we're so past it, they can't, there's nothing that we can learn from them?
49:48 Speaker 06 I think one thing we can learn is that any gains that we make in terms of attitudes towards women, attitudes towards same sex desires, you know, attitudes towards just about anything. Any gains that we make are fragile because you can see how things in the Middle Ages, you know, you have ups and downs and changes and changes between, you know, the Middle Ages and now. I think we can see some backlashes going on right now. And I think we can learn from the Middle Ages that we need to watch out for that.
50:28 Kate Lister? Ruth, you have been wonderful to talk to. I'm so glad that you came on. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
50:35 Speaker 06 I'm on Blue Sky under my actual name, although I don't post there a huge amount. And if they're interested in academic publications, I teach at Trinity College Dublin, and they can go to the webpage there for the history department. And there's a link there with a listing of all my academic publications.
50:58 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for talking to me. You've been marvelous.
51:02 Speaker 06 Well, thank you for having me. This was a lot of fun.
51:10 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Ruth for joining me. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. I know everybody says that, but it really does actually help us out. If you have one New Year's resolution that you could actually keep, it would be to like, review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. But if you wanted to explore a subject, or if you just wanted to say hello, then you can also email us at [email protected] . We've got episodes on the history of the gym and the brothels of Pompeii all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Matt Peaty and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again at Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
52:00 Speaker 07 Hey, I'm Pablo Torre, host of Pablo Torre Finds Out. And I have chased down a lot of strange stories, but nothing quite like what's inside a McDonald's Quarter Pounder with cheese. Hundred percent fresh beef, cooked right when you order it, hand-topped onions, plus cheese and pickles in every bite. And right now, you can get one with medium fries and a drink for just $8, only at McDonald's. For a limited time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher in Hawaii, Alaska and California. And for a delivery, fresh beef not available in Alaska and Hawaii. Offer not valid for delivery.
52:37 Speaker 04 The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver. Kids are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, often unsupervised, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. That's where Gab comes in. Gab offers safer phones and watches for kids with no social media, tailored to every age, offering the right tech at the right time. Or Tech in Steps. From GPS-tracking-enabled watches for younger kids to phones with parent-enabled apps for teens, each device allows kids to more safely grow their independence. Visit gab.com/getgab and use code GETGAB for an exclusive offer.
53:18 Speaker 04 That's G-A-B-B dot com forward slash get gab. Gab: Tech in Steps. Independence for them, peace of mind for parents.
Previous When Was The First Boob Job? Next Ancient Eroticism, Pagan Workouts & Body Ideals: History of the Gym Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated