<\/p>\n
Foreword<\/p>\n
1. Eros and Thanatos<\/p>\n
2. Mediaeval Sexual Behaviour<\/p>\n
3.\u00a0Mediaeval Sexual Ideal<\/p>\n
4.\u00a0Jealous And Indulgent Gods<\/p>\n
5.\u00a0Pure Desire<\/p>\n
6. Sex and Heresy<\/p>\n
7.\u00a0Fay Ce Que Vouldras<\/p>\n
8.\u00a0The School Of Christ<\/p>\n
9.\u00a0Sense And Sensuality<\/p>\n
10.\u00a0The Romantic Quest<\/p>\n
11.\u00a0Sex Denied<\/p>\n
Origins Of The Pattern<\/p>\n
12.\u00a0Sex As Sacrament<\/p>\n
13.\u00a0From Shame To Guilt<\/p>\n
14.\u00a0The Minor Themes<\/p>\n
15.\u00a0Modern Morality<\/p>\n
16.\u00a0The Rule Of The Dead<\/p>\n
I. The Present State Of English Law<\/p>\n
II. Theories Of Matriarchy And Patriarchy<\/p>\n
III.\u00a0Sources<\/p>\n
IT was Edward Glover who suggested that writing on psychological subjects should be scheduled as a dangerous occupation: and not without reason, since people strongly resent the exposure of their unconscious motives, and are apt to relieve their anxiety by attacking the writer who has threatened their peace of mind. How still more dangerous, then, is the position of the writer who ventures to apply the psychological method to historical material: if ever Glover’s suggestion is adopted, it will be necessary not only to insure him against occupational risk, but to pay him “hard-lying money” as well, for he risks the displeasure of the professional historians, who have decided that no such thing as psychological history is possible.<\/p>\n
To the psychologist, the historian’s method of explanation looks insufficient. It is not simply that he attributes too great rationality to historical figures when explaining their motives and makes but little allowance for unconscious desires: far more dubious is his fondness for thinking in terms of “influences”. He seems to feel that the development of a trend has been “explained” if it can be shown that the people concerned came under the influence of some similar trend elsewhere. Thus, historians have laboured to show that the appearance of a school of lyric poetry in twelfth century Provence was due to the influence of Arabic poetry of a similar kind. But even if it can be shown that the troubadours knew of this poetry, we still have to ask why there were people in Provence disposed to pay heed to precisely this influence out of all the countless influences bearing upon them.<\/p>\n
Sometimes, on the other hand, people are so awkward as to ignore an influence completely, and even to go off in some quite different direction. The historian then explains this as a “reaction” from the prevailing trend, though he does not explain why, on this occasion, the people concerned should have reacted from the trend instead of responding to it, nor does he tell us why they react in the particular way they do. For instance, the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is often explained as a reaction from the growth of industrialism\u2014but what we really want to know is why, at this particular moment, a small group chose to react from a trend which the majority were willing to follow enthusiastically for another century.<\/p>\n
Historians themselves seem to fed the need for some alternative method of analysis in which attention may be concentrated on the general character of people’s attitudes during a particular period, since they often resort to something vaguely known as “the spirit of the times” \u2014especially when people are ignoring a powerful “influence”. It is said, for instance, that the Puritans failed to retain power in 1660 because the “spirit of the times” was against such extreme austerity. Presumably, if they had succeeded in their operations, we should be told that this was because people had been “influenced” by Puritan ideas. It is evident that, though couched in the form of explanations, these are no more than descriptions of what occurred, at a quite superficial level.<\/p>\n
The problem is therefore whether the notion of “the spirit of the times” can be reduced to a more precise form. Presumably this spirit represents the highest common factor in the attitudes of every individual member of the society, when due allowance is made for the fact that some people are more influential than others. Now psychology has, in recent years, cast a flood of light on how the attitudes of individuals are built up and has shown that certain early experiences\u2014the extent and quality of maternal care and teaching, especially\u2014tend to set the personality in a particular mould, which later experiences elaborate but do not radically modify. At the same time, the cultural anthropologists have shown that the attitude systems of the individuals who make up a society are not randomly assorted, but tend to cluster round a particular position (or positions) at any given time; this is because the formative experiences of childhood\u00a0tend to similarity\u00a0at any given period. At one period severity may be in vogue; at another, children may be taken from their mothers at an early age, and so on. Hence it is not an undue simplification to speak of there being a “Typical Personality” (if we define Personality, for present purposes, as the sum total of attitudes) in a given period. Thus it becomes possible to classify the “spirit of the times” in terms of the prevalence of certain elements in Personality, and to draw on the very considerable fund of existing knowledge about the formation of personality.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, personality is, in principle, internally consistent: people do not, in general, display one attitude to, say, political matters and a contrary one to religious matters: if they are authoritarian in one they will be authoritarian in the other, and so on. But no type of attitude is more fundamental and more indicative of the trend of Personality than are attitudes to sexual matters \u2014for, as Freud has so elaborately demonstrated, our earliest attitudes are those formed in the microcosm of the family, and these are largely sexual in character. Hence the study of the changes in sexual attitudes is the very first step, the ‘sine qua non’, of all coherent historical research.<\/p>\n
It is therefore very strange and most lamentable that historians have almost entirely avoided such study, and have maintained something like a conspiracy of silence about such facts as they do know. Look at the most erudite of social histories and you find that they make no mention of sexual matters\u2014apart, perhaps, from a summary of the marriage and divorce laws\u2014and this remains true even when suppression of the facts creates a wholly false impression of the period and makes many events quite mysterious. The most obvious example of this is probably the paederastic practices of the Greeks: even a basic work of reference such as Holm-Decke-Soltau’s “Kulturgeschichte des Klassischen Altertums<\/i>” omits all reference to it. Pauly-Wissowa’s “Realenzyklopaedie der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft<\/i>“, which gives twenty pages to the hetairae, gives but three to it. Plato’s observations on love are frequently quoted without disclosing that he was referring to homosexual love and the difficulties which Xenophon had with his army are left mysteriously vague. School histories are naturally bowdlerized even more thoroughly, and many students leave school without discovering that Henry VIII was a syphilitic\u2014with the result that his marital affairs remain quite incomprehensible\u2014and even without being told of such a major historical event as the arrival of syphilis in Europe, as a result of which (according to some estimates) one third of the population of Europe died within a few years.<\/p>\n
The assumption of historians seems to be that sexual manners are something which exists in a watertight compartment, almost independently of historical trends as a whole, and that it would no more throw light on the general problem of interpreting history to open this compartment than it would to study the development of, say, cooking.<\/p>\n
Even so, it might be supposed that some eccentric specialist would, probably towards the close of the last century, have prepared a definitive work on the subject in several volumes. When I undertook to write the present book, summarizing the changes in sexual attitudes and offering some psychological elucidations, I certainly supposed that the spade work had already been done. But as far as I have been able to determine (and in this I have had full assistance from the authorities of the British Museum Reading Room, as I acknowledge more fully elsewhere) no such work has been prepared, certainly not in the English language. I also note that when Bloch’s\u00a0Sexual Life in England<\/i>\u00a0was published in this country, in a limited edition, in 1938, the publishers stated that they had been unable to discover that any similar work had ever been published in Britain. Bloch’s book, though extremely useful, is scarcely the definitive work which the situation calls for: it deals preponderantly with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and much of it is anecdotal in character; moreover, it leans rather heavily on a fairly limited number of sources, such as the memoirs of Archenholtz and the “catalogues raisones<\/i>” of Pisanus Fraxi. There are, of course, certain immensely valuable works which deal with the subject from a particular angle, notably Westermarck’s “Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas<\/i>” and May’s “Social Control of Sexual Expression<\/i>“, but these do not attempt to cover the whole field. boost of what remains is either scandalous or moralistic. Indeed, the great defect of much nineteenth century writing on these topics is the double assumption, which anthropologists have shown to be unwarranted, that Victorian standards were “high” and all other standards “low”, and that Victorian sexual biases were “natural”, so that whenever men moved towards them it was a natural step and part of a process of moral evolution. Thus it was taken for granted that men should prefer to marry virgins, or should prefer monogamy, or should resent a wife’s unfaithfulness\u2014all of which, however desirable ethically, we now know to be arbitrary preferences; while recent events have destroyed our belief in a continuous moral evolution which we now see to be a notion based on a false analogy with the evolution of species in the biological sphere.<\/p>\n
Still more remarkable is the gullibility and inaccuracy of many writers, even those with the most serious intentions. For instance, one widely-known standard work reports as an example of mediaeval behaviour that Condwiramur (Blancheflor) visited Perceval (Parsifal) in his bedroom at night, to ask his help, and was invited chastely into bed with him, as it was cold standing about. Now this is not, strictly speaking, an historical event at all: it is a Celtic folk-story. More important, it is a late Christian redaction of that story: in the original version there was not the slightest suggestion that the invitation was a chaste one. As such, it is admirable evidence of the Church’s attempt to modify sexual ideals by rewriting popular mythology, comparable with Muscovite practice today; but as evidence of actual sexual behaviour in the mediaeval period it is completely inadmissible. Such errors are not always easy to avoid, and no doubt I have fallen into them myself, for I am not a historian. Less excusable, perhaps, is the credulity with which many writers accept the wildest accusations of the puritanical at or near their face value. “No smoke without fire” is the unreliable principle upon which they work. But in recent times we have seen demonstrated another principle: if you are going to tell a lie, tell a big one. And, just as in the case of the Nazis, the accusations tell us more about the accusers than the accused. The fire which the smoke betrays is within.<\/p>\n
As soon as the necessity for thorough first hand research is faced, the volume of material lying waiting for attention is found to be enormous. In addition to the treasure houses of judicial and ecclesiastical records, and the rich mines of biographical material, there is an enormous bibliography of printed matter which is crying for systematic examination and analysis. Gay’s “Bibliographie Des Ouvrages relatifs a l’Amour<\/i>“, etc., runs to 2,500 pages in double column and is devoted primarily to works in the French language. Hayn’s “Bibliotheca germanorum erotica et curiosa<\/i>” runs to eight volumes, not counting the supplements. Many of the works listed are rare or unobtainable, of course, and others are irrelevant; but even if one confined one’s attention to the 4,000 odd volumes contained in the private cases of the main British libraries, and listed in Reade’s “Registrum Librorum Eroticorum<\/i>“, a useful start could be made. As a first step, it would be exceedingly helpful to arrange the titles in order of publication, and to note the frequency with which different themes appear at different periods, and whether interest in certain themes waxes and wanes simultaneously, or whether, in other cases; an inverse relationship exists. Work of this sort would help to verify, or disprove, the suggestion put forward in the present work that interest in homosexuality and in incest vary in a significant manner which can be correlated with religious and political trends, and might disclose other unsuspected variations and relationships.<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, the practical difficulties of such research are all but insuperable. Very special backing would be required before the authorities would permit direct access to the erotica; in Britain, at least, even fully accredited enquirers are normally allowed only single volumes upon specific application, which must be countersigned by the chief librarian. One reason for these extraordinary precautions is that where books have been the subject of convictions for obscene libel, the library authorities lay themselves open to legal action if they permit them to be consulted\u2014for, as is seldom realized, it has been ruled that the showing of a book, or even an unpublished manuscript, by one individual to another, constitutes an offence. (In 1923, Sir Archibald Bodkin told the International Conference for the Suppression of Obscene Publications at Geneva,<\/p>\n
“I have got two people in prison now for having exchanged and lent and dealt with each other in indecencies, photographs, pictures, books, etc.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In 1932, a sentence of six months’ imprisonment was imposed on a man who submitted translations of poems by Rabelais and Vedaine to a printer, asking him to print them.)<\/p>\n
A further great difficulty is the extreme confusion of terminology, which often makes it difficult to know to what a writer is referring. For instance, in an otherwise admirable book on Jewish sexual law, the writer states at one point that prostitution was forbidden, and a few lines later that harlotry was permitted\u2014whereas the Oxford Dictionary defines a harlot as a prostitute. This confusion becomes inextricable when we come to more delicate subjects, especially homosexuality. One writer speaks of homosexuality being forbidden but sodomy permitted, and one begins to wonder what the sin of Sodom really was. The term buggery is usually defined as meaning unnatural intercourse” between men, or between a man and an animal (things which, psychologically, are rather different), while in British law the term appears to cover anal intercourse between a man and his wife, which is Psychologically different again. When, therefore, the Manichaean sects in the Middle Ages were accused of buggery, what were they actually being accused of? As I attempt to show, the point is quite an important one. In the same way, the term bestiality, which on the face of it should mean intercourse with an animal, seems frequently to be used to mean intercourse between men \u2014 though I have not come across it being applied to a similar offence between women.<\/p>\n
For these and other reasons the research necessary to produce the definitive history of sexual mores, without which no adequate interpretive history can be written, must take many years to prepare and is unlikely to be carried out in the near future. It need hardly be said that the present book makes no pretensions to constitute such a definitive work: its brevity alone makes that clear. As will be seen from the bibliography, about 250 works were consulted in preparing it; even this limited enquiry yielded material for a volume two or three times the size of this one. Within the time available, and in the circumstances I have described, all that was possible was a broad survey, in which the principal features of the landscape should be described and selected points explored. Not only is much condensed or omitted, but the story has been told almost wholly from the man’s point of view. I have not attempted to consider how far women were able to develop their distinctive attitude to sex, how far they accepted male standards, and what the consequences were for them.<\/p>\n
Nor have I had room to draw comparisons between Western (chiefly English) attitudes and those of other cultures, neither those which have vanished nor those which anthropologists have studied in our own day.<\/p>\n
The work is, however, more than just a history. It offers a working theory to account for the changes in sexual attitudes which it records, and attempts to show that the analysis of these changes can be used to cast new light on certain historical problems which have long been held controversial, such as the nature of the relationship between the troubadours and their “Mistresses” and the nature of Catharist heresy. It attempts also to bring into one coherent picture a number of topics which have hitherto been treated in isolation, and to establish connections between phenomena so apparently diverse as heresy and homosexuality, Christianity and dancing, phallic worship and the Abode of Love. Above all, it seeks to show the remarkable continuity of the sex attitudes which form part of Western culture: the proportions in which the elements are mixed vary widely, but the ingredients remain amazingly constant.<\/p>\n
It has not been possible to write of sex without touching at many points on matters of religion; it is far from my wish to wound any susceptibilities, but I recognize that the barest statement of established fact is liable to prove wounding to those who have been brought up to cherish certain illusions. I should therefore like to stress that I have been careful to avoid making value judgments on moral or theological grounds. The standards on which my judgments have been based are as follows: I have regarded health \u2014 physical or mental\u2014as better than disease; and I have regarded love and kindness as better than cruelty and hate.<\/p>\n
It is unhappily the case that a good many outstanding figures in the history of the Church showed signs of what too day would be regarded as psychological disturbance. And it is often precisely these persons who have influenced the Church’s policy on sexual matters. It has therefore been necessary to analyse a number of such cases in the course of the book; some readers may feel, in consequence, that the picture of clerical behaviour that emerges is not a balanced one. Let me therefore emphasise here that, at all periods, there were, of course, within the Church numerous persons of more balanced characters living more normal lives and preaching less extreme views than those I describe. Numerically, I have little doubt, they outnumbered the extremists; unfortunately, their influence on history was usually less. So it should be borne in mind that when I refer to “the Church” I mean those who set the tone or determined the policies of the Church and not the entire body of persons in holy orders.<\/p>\n
I should like to take this opportunity to thank Columbia University Press for permission to quote the passages from “The Art of Courtly Love<\/i>” which appear in the chapter “Pure Desire” , and to express my gratitude to the Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum and to the Reading Room staff for generous advice and help in obtaining material. I also wish to thank the various persons who have read the book in manuscript or in proof, and have enabled me to eliminate various errors.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p>\n
Author’s Note, May 1969<\/b><\/h4>\n
<\/p>\n
Fifteen Years after the foregoing was written, the analysis still holds water: the pendulum has swung still further towards matrism, in the U.S. and other western countries. As predicted, the clothes of the two sexes have become still more closely assimilated: the wearing of jewellery, longer hair, etc., by men in the younger age groups exactly fits the analysis.More importantly, there has been a marked extension of sexual permissiveness. Lack of superego restraint also manifests as violence, the rejection of the father as a revolt against authority (cf: the student revolt). But it is a balanced integration of the Matrist and Patrist elements that marks a healthy and constructive society. Soon we shall be as far from that happy mean on the Matrist side as we formerly were on the Patrist side. Eventually, I imagine, a violent reaction towards austerity and control will occur. How can we halt the pendulum in the middle\u2014that is the burning question.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\nMay, 1969 \u2014G.R.T.<\/div>\n1. Eros And Thanatos<\/h3>\n
\nA FAVOURITE figure of popular writers was to depict the sexual appetite as a “biological urge”: a mysterious uneasiness, dimly linked with the sun, which annually stirs the eel to his long trek from the Sargasso, sets the infusoria churning in the pond and makes the iris gleam more brightly in the plumage of the burnished dove. According to this simple notion, biology also accounted for the appearance of cars parked after sunset in dark lanes, the chairs standing in couples in the public parks and the nameless objects floating like bladderwrack in the river’s scum.<\/p>\n
But of course the treatment of sex as merely a biological urge is sadly inadequate. Sex is both more complex and more metaphysical than that. More complex because it can demand strange and highly unbiological modes for its fulfilment: not just any man or woman, but this man and that woman; not just the archetypal act but a specialized stimulus, a personal idiosyncrasy. More metaphysical, because it can be sublimated into creative activities or denatured into aggressive and destructive ones. The history of sex must pay heed to both these factors.<\/p>\n
Psychology has given us some understanding of the forces which channel sex into specialized forms of expression, but its connection with violence remains essentially obscure. For many people, both topics exert an unending fascination, and the crimes which arouse the greatest public sensation are those in which they are combined. Each strikes chords which come from deeply buried levels of the personality. But while we openly admit the existence of the sexual mystery, we make no such clear recognition of the destructive urge, and avert our eyes from the fascination of violence and death. This horrid perturbation is the magnet which draws many of those who frequent speedways and boxing contests: but it can be seen in its purest form, perhaps, when a man is put to death by the law. In the eighteenth century there were many who travelled long distances to attend public executions, and the guillotine had its regular audience. Today, we no longer permit public executions, but the bare knowledge that an execution is taking place is enough to draw crowds. When Bentley was executed in 1953, people drove all night from places hundreds of miles distant to be present in the street outside the prison, for the meagre reward of seeing the death notice hung upon the gates. Some of those present told reporters that it was the fourth or fifth execution which they had attended. Most extraordinary are the reactions of the onlookers when the warder appears at the gates with the notice. A ripple runs through the crowd, which emits a noise-half-sigh, half-boo. An angry hand strikes the board, so that the warder cannot hang it on the hooks. At once there is a general outburst of violence: arms flail, noses bleed. Ten police officers link arms and form a cordon, against which the crowd charges again and again. Elsewhere other police officers are embroiled with members of the crowd, both men and women, punching, scratching and kicking. There is a crash of breaking glass. A shower of coins rattles against the notice board. For twenty minutes the battle continues, until the police and the warders manage to force the door shut. The crowd surlily begins to look for hats, shoes and coat-belts torn off in the scrimmage. A burly man who has not shaved observes: “Pretty small crowd, all considered Haven’t missed one of these in fifteen years. Nice fresh June morning and a little more sun, that’s what you want, really.”<\/p>\n
Even today – perhaps especially today – we do not like to look too closely at the irrational forces in the human psyche, and the averagely rational man, as he reads the account in his morning paper, perhaps comforts himself that there are always a few abnormal people in society. But the columns of the popular papers, those great hornbooks of the appetites, are proof enough of the universality of man’s obsessive interest in violence, and of his equally obsessive interest in sex. Man has other appetites indeed, but they are controllable. He does not surround his appetite for food with the same prohibitions and taboos that surround his cravings for cruelty and lust, nor does he daily purchase printed accounts of the food consumed by others. With his conscious mind he builds an ideal of co-operation and restraint, and on this shining picture he concentrates his attention, secretly aware that if he pays any heed to the evil shapes which mutter behind him, he may become so fascinated that they will enslave him.<\/p>\n
The history of civilization is the history of a long warfare between the dangerous and powerful forces of the id, and the various systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them. Sometimes man has attempted to cap the volcano, but the molten matter has then forced its way out through fissures in the rock, and the damage done has been as great as if he had made no such attempt. Sometimes he has managed to control and render harmless the prisoned energy by providing adequate institutions for its expression. Rarely has he managed to harness it to do creative work. The purpose of this book is to survey these various attempts to control the irrational as they have been developed in western Europe and particularly in England during the Christian era. Or rather its purpose is to survey the treatment men have accorded to the sexual drive – but from this subject the study of violence cannot be wholly divorced. In the language of Freud, man has two inborn capacities, and each may manifest in a nobler or a baser form. There is Eros, which is love and creativity, but also lust; and there is Thanatos, which is hate and destruction, but may also become the power to control and manipulate for useful purposes. Often these two drives become fused: love can make a divine marriage with mastery, just as lust can make a diabolic marriage with pain. Sadomasochism is the reverse side of a coin whose obverse is creative achievement.<\/p>\n
A century ago, duped and doped by a false analogy between evolutionary progress, which is progress in complexity, and a progress in the social, moral and aesthetic spheres, men could believe that it needed but time and effort to pass irrevocably from barbarism to civilized restraint. Today, we are beginning to realize that civilization is only to be maintained by a continuous struggle against the forces of destruction which beset it, just as the life of the body is maintained only by continuous expenditure of energy from disruption by the force of decay. And while history has demonstrated how easily the destructive forces can break out to create an Auschwitz or a Buchenwald – those same forces which also make a lynching or a scuffle outside prison gates – Freud has forced us to the painful realization that those forces are present within every one of us, as potentialities for good as well as ill.
\nThus the story of how man has handled his sexual drives is also the story of how he has handled his creative impulse. His attitudes to these imperatives colour his whole scheme for society, his politics, his art and his religion. To compress this story within the covers of a single book, without entirely losing sight of these wider implications, is a task of alarming difficult and many omissions and over simplifications are unavoidable. For these I here apologize comprehensively and shall not do so severally.<\/p>\nTo summarize sexual history is the more difficult for the fact that it is almost impossible to view it objectively. From earliest youth we are taught to approve and condemn, and these judgments derive from buried emotions, so that they are held with great force and passion. All judgment tends to be egocentric, but in this field unusually so: the very word\u00a0moral<\/i>\u00a0is derived from\u00a0mores<\/i>, customs. The moral is what is customary And what is customary constantly changes. The range of possible variation is wide – just how wide the anthropologist have taught us. In the Trobriand Islands, for instance, adult do not mind if children engage in sexual play and attempt precociously to perform the sexual act; as adolescents they may sleep with one another, provided only that they are not in love with one another. If they fall in love, the sexual act becomes forbidden, and for lovers to sleep together would outrage decency.<\/p>\n
It may be a healthy discipline, therefore, to study the processes by which the present system of attitudes has been developed. Our sexual codes represent a strange hodgepodge of fragments from different periods in history pre-Christian magic has mingled with Christian asceticism, Romantic idealism has mingled with Rationalist “common sense”, to produce a strange and arbitrary amalgam. So far from being natural and inevitable, our existing sexual codes, seen in Perspective, must appear grotesque – though not more grotesque than those of most other periods. But though they are irrational enough, when viewed from the standpoint of ethics, from a psychological viewpoint they display great internal consistency and accurately regret the conflicts in the human psyche.<\/p>\n
In studying attitudes to sex, one precaution is especially necessary: we must always distinguish between the ideal held up by the dominant group in society as the proper, approved, way of behaving, and actual behaviour. Today, for instance, it is still part of the official sexual ideal that the sexual act shall only be performed by legitimately married couples, all pre-marital sexual experience being disapproved. Nevertheless, as many surveys have shown, the great majority of persons do have some Premarital sexual experience, and usually, it would seem, without experiencing any marked sense of guilt. These are not people who have rejected the whole sexual code: most of them will marry in due course, and some of them may feel quite strongly about certain other sexual regulations – say, those concerning homosexuality or the seduction of minors. Their private code simply differs in certain respects from the official code. Of course, a man may also fail to live up to his private sense of what is proper, and subsequently will experience feelings of guilt and shame. It is with this gap between behaviour and private conscience that the psychiatrist is frequently concerned; but in this book, I shall be concerned chiefly with the average gap between general behaviour and official ideal. This gap, as we shall see, has varied greatly in width from time to time: sometimes when standards have been at their most restrictive, performance has displayed the greatest licence.
\nThese remarks may sound platitudinous, for it is difficult to envisage the curiously persistent character of officially maintained standards until some incident happens to dramatize them. As it happens, while I was first collecting notes for this work, an incident occurred which vividly illuminated the point at issue. The divorce laws of Britain do not recognize incompatibility of temperament as a reason for divorce. Yet it is no secret that a considerable proportion of the population, perhaps a majority, feel that when friction between husband and wife has become so acute that the whole relationship has become poisoned beyond recovery, then divorce may be justifiable. In such circumstances, there is an evident temptation to satisfy the demands of the law by providing the necessary evidence to prove adultery, and satirists have not been slow to point out that the law is actually driving people to adultery, or at the least to the pretence of committing adultery. Yet when it was suggested in court, recently, that collusion of this kind was not unknown, the judge administered a sharp rebuke, declaring that no such collusion was known to occur.<\/p>\nIf we still entertained the delusion that men were rational beings, such an inconsistency between “private knowledge” and “public knowledge” would greatly astonish us. Since, fortunately, it IS more than fifty years since Freud began to transform the study of the irrational, and showed us in detail how far from rational we are, it will not astonish, but may serve to remind us of the nubbly and obstinate nature of the attitudes and motives we are about to examine.<\/p>\n
In tracing the history of attitudes to sex, it is therefore constantly necessary to distinguish between the pretended position and the actual. This is the more difficult since the data about the actual position are consistently suppressed and distorted. Even today, when we are supposedly so emancipated, our history books continue to be written with a determined disregard for facts which the historian considers to be unpleasant. The best known social history of our day makes no reference to sexual matters, other than normal wedlock. Yet the belief that sexual desires and habits are something which can be placed in an airtight compartment, and sealed off from history without affecting the development of the story, is no longer tenable. Eros and Thanatos permeate every compartment of human activity, and a history which attempts to ignore this fact is not merely emasculated but unintelligible. The first purpose of this book is to demonstrate how closely attitudes to sexual matters interlock with other social attitudes and even dictate them.<\/p>\n
Since the western world is still strongly under the influence of the tradition established by the mediaeval Church, let us start by examining that tradition in some detail, before attempting to trace the developments which sprang from it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
2. Mediaeval Sexual Behaviour<\/h3>\n
RAPE and incest characterise the sexual life of the English in the first millennium of our era; homosexuality and hysteria the years that followed. The Christian missionaries found a people who, especially in the Celtic parts of the country, maintained a free sexual morality. On them, it sought to impose a code of extreme severity, and it steadily increased the strictness of its demands.<\/p>\n
The Church never succeeded in obtaining universal acceptance of its sexual regulations, but in time it became able to enforce sexual abstinence on a scale sufficient to produce a rich crop of mental disease. It is hardly too much to say that medieval Europe came to resemble a vast insane asylum. Most people have a notion that the Middle Ages were a period of considerable licence, and are aware that the religious houses were often hotbeds of sexuality, but there seems to be a general impression that this was a degenerate condition which appeared towards the end of the epoch.<\/p>\n
If anything, the reverse is the case. In the earlier part of the Middle Ages what we chiefly find is frank sexuality, with which the Church at first battles in vain. Then, as the Church improves its system of control, we find a mounting toll of perversion and neurosis. For whenever society attempts to restrict expression of the sexual drive more severely than the human constitution will stand, one or more of three things must occur. Either men will defy the taboos, or they will turn to perverted forms of sex, or they will develop psycho-neurotic symptoms, such as psychologically-caused illness, delusions, hallucinations and hysterical manifestations of various kinds. The stronger personalities defy the taboos: the weaker ones turn to indirect forms of expression.<\/p>\n
The free sexuality of the early Middle Ages can be traced in early court records, which list numerous sexual offences, from fornication and adultery to incest and homosexuality, and also in the complaints of moralists and Church dignitaries. Thus in the eighth century, Boniface exclaims that the English “utterly despise matrimony” and he is filled with shame because they “utterly refuse to have legitimate wives, and continue to live in lechery and adultery after the manner neighing horses and braying asses….” A century later Alcuin declares that<\/p>\n
“the land has been absolutely submerged under flood of fornication, adultery and incest, so that the very semblance of modesty is entirely absent”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Three centuries after this John of Salisbury puts his views in verse:<\/p>\n
Thys is now a common synne
\nFor almost hyt is every-whore
\nA gentyle man hath a wife and a hore;
\nAnd wyves have now comunly
\nHere husbandys and a ludby<\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe pages of Chaucer reveal that even in the fourteenth century there were still many-such as the Wife of Bath ready to enjoy sexual opportunity without inhibition; and Chaucer Chauntecleer, we are told, served Venus “more for delyte than world to multiplye<\/i>“.
\nSo far from accepting the Church’s teaching on sex, most people held that continence was unhealthy. Doctors recommended a greater use of sexual intercourse to some of their patients; and it was for this reason that the Church demanded and obtained, the right of passing upon all appointments the medical profession, a right which in Britain it formally retains to this day, though it does not exercise (The issue remains a live one, and Dr. Kinsey, in his report on male sexual behaviour, thought it worth his time to show statistically that persons who practise continence are more likely to have histories of instability than those who do not.)<\/p>\nAphrodisiacs were much sought after – usually on principles of sympathetic magic. The root of the orchis, which was thought to resemble the testicles, as its popular name “dog-stones<\/i>” shows, was eaten to induce fertility: though it was important to eat only that one of the stones which was hard, the soft one having a contrary effect. By the complementary arguments nuns used to eat the root of the lily, or the nauseous ‘agnus castus<\/i>‘ to ensure chastity. The famed restorative powers of the mandrake were similarly derived from its phallic appearance.\u00a0(69<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
In the later period frank sexuality is also betrayed by the clothing. In the fourteenth century, for instance, women wore low-necked dresses, so tight round the hips as to reveal their sex, and laced their breasts so high that, as was said, “a candle could be stood upon them”.\u00a0(184<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Men wore short coats, revealing their private parts, which were clearly outlined by a glove-like container known as a braguette, compared with which the codpiece was a modest object of attire.(95<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0In the time of Edward IV, the Commons petitioned that<\/p>\n
“No knight, under the estate of a Lord . . .nor any other person, use or wear . . . any Gowne, Jaket, or Cloke, but it be of such a length as it, he being upright, shall cover his privy members and buttokkes.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Persons of the estate of a Lord or higher might naturally do as they pleased. Even the clergy shortened their frocks to their knees, and in the following century made them\u00a0“so short that they did not cover the middle parts”.\u00a0(17<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
Prostitution was extremely widespread, and at most periods was accepted as a natural accompaniment of society. The Early Church had been tolerant of prostitution, and Aquinas said (precisely as Lecky was to do six hundred years later) that prostitution was a necessary condition of social morality, just as a cesspool is necessary to a palace, if the whole palace is not to smell. The English were especially apt to prostitution, and Boniface commented:<\/p>\n
“There is scarcely a town in Italy, or in France, or in Gaul, where English prostitutes are not found.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Crusades introduced to Europe the public bath, which became a convenient centre for assignations, though it was not until later that they became brothels as we now understand the term. Henry II issued regulations for the conduct of the “stews” (i.e. baths) of Southwark, which make it clear that they were houses of ill-Fame.\u00a0(13<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0These regulations were confirmed by Edward III and Henry IV, and the stews remains until the seventeenth century.\u00a0(254<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Many of these stews belonged to the Bishopric of Winchester, the Bishop’s palace being near by \u2014 hence the euphemism “Winchester geese” and at least one English cardinal purchased a brothel as an investment for church funds. Some jurists argued that the Church was entitled to ten per cent of the girls’ earnings, but this view was not officially accepted; however, just as today, the Church did not draw the line at receiving rent from property put to this use.\u00a0(204)<\/small>
\nOn the Continent the open acceptance of prostitution went considerably further. Queen Joanna, of Avignon, established a town brothel, as better than having indiscriminate prostitution, and when Sigismond visited Constance, the local prostitutes were provided with new velvet robes at the corporation’s expense; in Ulm, the streets were illuminated by night whenever he and his court wished to visit the town\u00a0lupanar<\/abbr>.\u00a0(154<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\nYet with all this there went a kind of simplicity. Men and women could go naked, or nearly naked, through the street to the baths in a way which today would be impossible, except perhaps at a bathing resort, or for undergraduates living out of college at one of the major British universities. The daughters of the nobility thought it an honour to parade naked in front of Charles V. And it was by no means unheard-of for a young man to pass the night chastely with his beloved, as we hear from the romance, “Blonde of Oxford<\/i>“.<\/p>\n
One of the things which has done much to build up in our minds a false and idealized conception of the Middle Ages is the representation of King Arthur and his knights as paragon of chaste and gentlemanly behaviour. This has been done primarily by the Christian authorities, who rewrote the old British folk-tales so as to bring them in line with the approved morality of the Middle Ages, though the process was carried further by the romantics of the eighteenth century and by Victorian sentimentalism. The facts are very different. Gildas, as a Christian historian, is no doubt somewhat biased, but he describes the knights as “sanguinary, boastful, murderous, addicted to vice, adulterous and enemies of God”, adding “Although they keep a large number of wives, they are fornicators and adulterers.” The morals of the ladies are no stricter. At King Arthur’s court, when a magic mantle is produced which can only be worn by a chaste woman, none of the ladies present is able to wear it.<\/p>\n
When we examine these stories in their original form, we begin to see, not immorality as such, but a completely different system of sexual morality at odds with the Christian one: a system in which women were free to take lovers, both before and after marriage, and in which men were free to seduce all women of lower rank, while they might hope to win the favours of women of higher rank if they were sufficiently valiant. Chrestien de Troyes explains:<\/p>\n
“The usage and rules at that time were that if a knight found a damsel or wench alone he would, if he wished to preserve his good name, sooner think of cutting his throat than of offering her dishonour; if he forced her against her will he would have been scorned in every court. But, on the other hand, if the damsel were accompanied by another knight, and if it pleased him to give combat to that knight and win the lady by arms, then he might do his will with her just as he pleased, and no shame or blame whatsoever would be held to attach to him.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As Briffault comments, however, the first part of the rule does not seem to have been regarded so strictly as the poet suggests. Traill and Mann say, “To judge from contemporary poems and romances the first thought of every knight on finding a lady unprotected was to do her violence.” Gawain, the pattern of knighthood and courtesy, raped Gran de Lis, in spite of her tears and screams, when she refused to sleep with him. The hero of Marie de France’s\u00a0Lai de Graelent<\/i>\u00a0does exactly the same to a lady he meets in a forest \u2014 but in this case she forgives him his ardour, for she recognizes that “he is courteous and well behaved, a good, generous and honourable knight”. And as Malory recounts, when a knight entered the hall of King Arthur and carried away by force a weeping, screaming woman “the king was glad, for she made\u00a0such a noise”.
\nIn Christianized versions of early folk-tales, the knight or hero is often offered the hand of the king’s daughter in marriage if he performs the allotted task; but in the original versions the question of marriage rarely arises. Thus in the Chanson de Doon de Nanteuil, the warriors are promised that if they “hit the enemy in the bowels, they may take their choice of the fairest ladies in the court”. The knight who loves the chatelain of Couci exclaims simply: “Jesus, that I might hold her naked in my arms!” And this is precisely the reward which the ladies themselves frankly promise. In any case, marriage itself was often regarded as a temporary liaison, so that the reward of the hand of the king’s daughter implies few obligations.<\/p>\nIt is noticeable how, more often than not, it is the women who made the advances: Gawain, for one, is pestered by women and they are sometimes curtly refused. They make their proposition in the clearest terms:<\/p>\n
Vees mon cots, corn est amanevis
\nMamele dure, blanc le col, cler le vis
\nEt car me baise, frans chevalier gentis
\nSi fai de moi trestor a ton devis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt is a praiseworthy act to offer oneself to a valiant knight: “Gawain praises the good taste of his own lady-love, Orgueilleuse, for having offered her favours to so valiant warrior as the Red Knight. In a Provencal romance, a husband reproaches his wife with her infidelity. She replies:<\/p>\n
“My Lord, you have no dishonour on that account, for the man I love is a noble baron, expert in arms, namely Roland, the nephew of King Charles.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The husband is reduced to silence by the explanations and is filled with confusion at his unseemly interference.”\u00a0(23)<\/small><\/p>\n
It must be understood that in thus ignoring the Christian code, the knights were not abandoning morality, but were simply continuing in the manner which had been traditional before the arrival of the Christian missionaries, and which continued to be traditional for many hundreds of years after. Our knowledge of the behaviour of the Celtic and Saxon tribes is limited partly by the fewness of the written records they produced, and still more by the systematic way in which the Church destroyed them and substituted its own purified and moralized redactions. However, we do know something about the Irish in the first few centuries of the Christian era, for they produced a considerable literature. It shows us a people strongly matriarchal and with few inhibitions about sexual matters. Virginity was not prized, and marriage was usually a trial marriage or a temporary arrangement. Queen Medb boasts to her husband that she always had a secret lover in addition to her official lover, before she was married. Sualdam marries Dechtin, the sister of King Conchobar, knowing her to be pregnant, and when Princess Findabair “mentions to her mother that she rather fancies the messenger who has been sent from the opposing camp, the Queen replies:<\/p>\n
“If you love him, then sleep with him tonight!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In this pre-Christian era, even more notably than in the early Middle Ages, the running was made by the women. Their method of wooing was often most determined: Deirdre seizes Naoise by the ears, tells him that she is a young cow and wants him as her bull, and refuses to release him until he promises to elope with her. Nevertheless, polygamy was not uncommon, and many of the heroes are portrayed as having two or more wives. Marriage, even more so than in the days of chivalry, was a temporary affair: thus Fionn marries Sgathach with great pomp\u00a0“for one year”,\u00a0and frequent change of partners was usual until quite late in the Middle Ages, a fact which makes Henry VIII’s marital experiments more easily understandable. Dunham asserts that most of the Frankish kings died prematurely worn out, before the age of thirty.<\/p>\n
Nudity was no cause for shame: not only were warriors normally naked, except for their accoutrements, but women also undressed freely: thus the Queen of Ulster and all the ladies of the Court, to the number of 610, came to meet Cuchulainn, naked above the waist, and raising their skirt\u00a0“so as to expose their private parts”,\u00a0by which they showed how greatly they honoured him.<\/p>\n
In such times, to be called a bastard was a mark of distinction, for the implication was that some especially valiant knight had slept with one’s mother: this is why the bastard son of Clothwig, the founder of the Frankish kingdom, received a far larger share than his legitimate brothers when the kingdom was divided up after his father’s death. William the Conqueror by no means resented the appellation “William the Bastard”, as our history books usually fail to make clear. Indeed, it was almost obligatory for a hero to be a bastard, and bastardy was constantly imputed to Charlemagne, Charles Martel and others, as also to semi-legendary figures, such as King Arthur, Gawain, Roland, Conchobar and Cuchulainn.\u00a0(21<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0This pride in bastardy is not wholly unknown in modern times: some twenty years ago, for instance, a British Prime Minister used to boast of his illegitimacy.<\/p>\n
In circumstances such as these, the Church’s first object was necessarily to establish the principle of lifelong monogamous marriage, without which its stricter regulations were practical meaningless. The Anglo-Saxon synod of 786 decreed<\/p>\n
“that the son of a meretricious union shall be debarred from legall inheriting…. We command, then, in order to avoid fornication, that every layman shall have one legitimate wife, and every woman one legitimate husband, in order that they may have and beget legitimate heirs according to God’s law.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It was long before this attempt succeeded. The tenth-century ordinances of Howel the Good, for instance, allow seven years’ trial marriage, and one year’s trial marriage existed in Scotland up to the Reformation.\u00a0(232)<\/small>,\u00a0(240)<\/small><\/p>\n
In this period marriage was still (as it had been in the Classical world) a private contract between two individuals – one for which the blessing of the Church was customarily sought, but not invalidated by its absence. Today we hardly remember that there was once a time when the Church did not claim the power to make a marriage.
\nIt was not until the Counter-Reformation that the Church first ordained that a wedding\u00a0must<\/i>\u00a0be conducted in the presence of a priest, and by this time England had left the Roman communion. Any man could marry any woman, within the laws of consanguinity, and provided neither was already married, by a simple declaration of intention. This process was known as\u00a0spousals<\/i>, and effected a valid marriage, even if performed without oath or witness.\u00a0(191)<\/small>\u00a0This was clearly understood in Shakespeare’s time, as we can tell from the scene in\u00a0Twelfth Night<\/i>, where Olivia asks the priest to say what has passed between Viola (supposedly a boy) and herself The priest replies, not that\u00a0he<\/i>\u00a0has married them but that\u00a0they<\/i>\u00a0have made<\/p>\nA contract of eternal bond of love,
\nConfirm’d by mutual joinder of your hands,
\nAttested by the holy close of lips,
\nStrengthen’d by interchangements of your rings;
\nAnd all the ceremony of this compact
\nSeal’d in my function, by my testimony . .<\/p><\/blockquote>\nIt was considered very desirable to have witnesses, in case of any future dispute, but their absence did not invalidate the marriage. It was usual to follow such spousals by going to church and saying a Bride Mass, and so it became the practice to perform the spousals at the church door, supported by one’s friends, before entering for the Mass. As Chaucer’s Wife of Bath tells us,\u00a0“Husbondes at churche dore have I had five.”\u00a0It was only in the tenth century that the priest took to supervising the marriage at the door, and not until the sixteenth that it became obligatory to conduct the whole of the ceremony inside the church.\u00a0(133<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0In the form of marriage used in England, the break between the two parts of the ceremony, the actual marriage in the presence of witnesses, and subsequent blessing of the marriage by God, can be clearly seen, but in the corresponding U.S. service the part after the break is now omitted.<\/p>\n
The Church, it must be made clear, distinguished between an illegal marriage and an invalid marriage. To enter into spousals without a priest was illegal, and called for penalties but it was still a valid marriage. An illegal marriage might also lead to difficulties in the inheritance of property.<\/p>\n
The form of spousals just described was known as spousals ‘de praesenti<\/i>‘. It was also possible to perform spousals ‘de futuro<\/i>‘, by promising to take someone as spouse at some future date: whence the present practice of announcing one’s engagement. The legal age for marriage was fourteen in the case of males, twelve in the case of girls, but the Church performed marriages on children much younger, even on infants in arms. For instance, the youngest marriage in the Chester records is one between John Somerford, aged three, and Jane Brerton, aged two; the point of these early marriages was frequently to prevent an estate reverting to the crown under feudal law. For the marriage of those under seven, parental consent was necessary. But all such marriages could be declared void when the legal age was reached, provided copulation had not taken place. Conversely, copulation was also what converted spousals, technically, to marriage, and penalties were imposed if it occurred before church blessing had been given.\u00a0(172<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0(This point was controversial, as I shall explain later.)
\nBy way of relief let me try to put a little flesh on these dry bones of canon law by describing the marriage ceremony as it may actually have occurred towards the end of the Middle Ages, and in the early days of the Reformation.<\/p>\nThe bridal procession would set out from the house of the brides father: first, the bride, accompanied perhaps by two pages, bearing a branch of rosemary,”gilded very fair”\u00a0in a vase and hung about with silken ribbons. Next would come the musicians, fiddling and blowing, then a group of maidens. These would all be dressed in the same way as the bride, in order to confuse any demons, who might have been attracted by the odour of contamination, as to who was actually the bride; and if the bride happened to be called Mary they would all be in blue \u2014 the deep blue in which the Virgin is usually shown as being clad in medieval paintings. In Reformation times some of the bridesmaids would be carrying great bride cakes, others garlands of wheat finely gilded, or wheat sheaves on their heads \u2014 symbols of fertility and memories of Ceres \u2014 and they would throw gilded wheat grains over the couple.\u00a0(137<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Thus it is in honour of a pagan deity that today trees are felled in Sweden or Canada, and converted into coloured paper discs that we may throw them at weddings and miscall them by the Italian name for a sweetmeat, ‘confetto<\/i>‘.<\/p>\n
Last would come the bride’s family. In Saxon times, the father would sell his daughter, for at that time women were valued as a source of labour, and the father was felt to suffer a loss. But the Crusades, and other wars, had caused women greatly to exceed men in number, and now he only comes “to give her away”. The priest, appearing, asks if the man will take the bride to be his wedded wife \u2014 the ‘wed<\/i>‘ being the bride price \u2014 and he promises. The bride, promising in almost the same words as are used in England today, takes a similar oath, but adds the promise to be “bonere and buxum in Bed and at Boorde, if Holy Chyrche will it ordeyne”. The bride and groom drink the wine and eat the sops \u2014 the Hereford missal attached special importance to this act, which was still practised in Shakespeare’s time, as we know from the reference in the “Taming of the Shrew<\/i>“.\u00a0(233<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0After the Bride Mass has been said, the priest kisses the groom, who transfers the benediction to his bride by\u00a0kissing her<\/a>. The married couple, followed their friends, might then play follow-my-leader all round the church and end by sitting down to the wedding feast in the body of the church, which would be, of course, free from obstruction in the form of pews. The body of the church was always felt to belong to the local people, only the parts about the choir and altar being reserved to the clergy, a distinction which is easily perceived in any great cathedral, such as Salisbury.<\/p>\n
At nightfall there would be a banquet and dancing at the house of the bride’s father, and bride and groom might remain there a week or more before going to their own home.<\/p>\n
But the ecclesiastical precautions are not yet finished. The married couple retire with their friends, who help them undress and help them into bed, where they sit wearing their dressings gowns. Next comes the ceremony of throwing the stocking. Two of the groom’s friends sit on one edge of the bed, two of the bride’s maids on the other; each man then throws one of the groom’s stockings over his shoulder, hoping to hit the bride; then each girl throws one of the bride’s stockings, in an attempt to hit the bridegroom. If the stocking hits, the thrower is likely to marry before the year is out. Now appears the priest, and the benediction posset. This drunk, the priest blesses the bed, sprinkling holy water on the couple and censing the room, to dispel the demons who will undoubtedly be attracted by the performance of the sexual act which is presumably to follow though not, if the couple are devout, until the three Tobias-nights have passed. Finally, the curtains of the bed are drawn and the guests withdraw, leaving the newly married couple to their own devices.\u00a0(137)<\/small><\/p>\n
“The pride of the clergy and bigotry of the laity were such that new married couples were made to wait until midnight, after the marriage day, before they would pronounce a benediction, unless handsomely paid for it, and they durst not do without it on pain of excommunication”,\u00a0the\u00a0History of Shrewsbury<\/i>\u00a0tells us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In early feudal times, the marriage day might have ended differently, with the feudal lord deflowering the new bride, before releasing her to her husband. The existence of this ‘jus primae noctis<\/i>, also known in France as “jus cunni<\/i>“, in England as “marchette<\/i>“, in Piedmont as “cazzagio<\/i>“, has been much disputed, but Ducange has provided detailed evidence and the best authorities now accept that it existed;\u00a0(190<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0cases are even known where monks, being at the same time feudal lords, held this right \u2014 for instance the monks of St. Thiodard enjoyed this right over the inhabitants of Mount Auriol.\u00a0(71<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Analogous practices are found in many other societies: for instance, in the so-called Nasamonian custom all the wedding guests copulate with the bride.\u00a0(23<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0The psychological purpose of the custom, derived from fertility-religion, is said to be the diversion from the husband of the resentment which a woman generally feels for the man who deprives her of her virginity. Whether or not this is an adequate explanation, it would certainly be misleading to regard the ‘jus cunni<\/i>‘ simply as the cruel and wilful exercise of feudal power, even if that is what it finally became. It is chiefly of interest as evidence of the survival of magical beliefs.<\/p>\n
The picture of normal sexual behaviour which I have been trying to sketch so far cannot, unfortunately, be left to stand on its own. Against it must be put a very different one, if an accurate impression of medieval sexuality is to be presented \u2014 a picture of the perversion and neurosis which emerged wherever the Church succeeded in establishing its moral codes. About the beginning of the twelfth century, soon after the Hildebrandine reforms and the extension of celibacy from the cloister to ministers, a perceptible change comes over the character of the Middle Ages. We begin to find references to sodomy, to flagellation, to sexual fantasies, while false Christs appear and heresy springs up all over Europe as tens of thousands begin to question the doctrine of the Church.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most remarkable phenomenon is the development of extensive fantasying about the idea of a really satisfactory sexual congress. These fantasies soon took the specific form of claiming that one was visited in the night by a supernatural being, known as an Incubus (or, in the case of men, a Succubus). In his book “On the Nightmare<\/i>“, Ernest Jones has traced the relation of these fantasies, and of nightmares generally, to sexual repression. Medieval writers evidently recognised the connection also. Chaucer satirically points out that Incubi have become much less heard of since the ‘limitours<\/i>‘, or wandering friars, appeared on the scene \u2014 for it was notorious that these friars took their pleasure of women while their husbands were absent. (In America, today, an exactly similar reputation is conventionally attached to travelling salesmen.)<\/p>\n
For there as wont to walken was an elf
\nThere walketh now the limitour himself
\n. . . .
\nWomen may now go safely up and down
\nIn every bush and under every tree
\nThere is no other incubus than hee.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nWriters noted that widows and virgins were more frequently troubled with Incubi than were married women, and nuns most of all: as it was put at the time,”Incubi infest cloisters”.\u00a0The more enlightened medical men were certainly aware that Incubi were delusions: du Laurens, for instance, recounts how he was able to bring two women who had complained of the attention of Incubi to admit that the whole thing was a wish-fantasy.\u00a0(257<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0The Church, of course, accepted their real existence and asserted that they were devils in human shape, and this belief persisted in Catholic countries long after the end of the Middle Ages. Just as today psychologists note that patients often do not wish to give up their neurotic illusions, so also in this case. Thus Goerres describes how he was sent to exorcize a girl of twenty who had-been pursued by an Incubus.<\/p>\n
Elle m’avoua sans detour tout ce que l’esprit impur faisait avec elle. Je jugeai, d’apres ce qu’elle me dit, que, malgre ses denegations, elle pretait au demon une consentement indirect. En effet, elle etait toujours avertie de ses approches par une surexcitation violente des organes sexuels; et alors, au lieu d’avoir recourse a la priere, elle courait a sa chambre et se mettait sur son lit. J’essayai d’eveiller en elle des sentiments de confiance envers Dieu; mais je n’y pus reussir, et elle semblait plutot craindre d’etre delivree.\u00a0(Cited Delassus.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
At the same time, it seems possible that, at least towards the end of the period, people sometimes deliberately made use of the belief in the Incubus as a convenient excuse. The sceptical Scot certainly thought so. In his “Discoverie of Witchraft<\/i>“, under the heading of<\/p>\n
Bishop Sylvanus, his lecherie opened and covered again, how maides having yellow haire are most combred with Incubus, how married men are bewitched to use other men’s wives, and to refuse their own,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
he tells how once an Incubus came to a lady’s bedside and made\u00a0“hot loove unto hir”.\u00a0The lady, being offended, cried out loudly, and the company came and found the Incubus hiding under her bed in the likeness of Bishop Sylvanus.<\/p>\n
Scot, writing in the sixteenth century, sees the psychological origin of these fantasies even more clearly than Chaucer.<\/p>\n
“But in truth this Incubus is a bodily disease,”\u00a0he says,\u00a0“although it extend unto the trouble of the mind: which of some is called the mare”\u00a0(i.e. the nightmare). And he adds acutely:\u00a0“Melancholie abounding in their heads . . . hath deprived or rather depraved their judgments”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u2014 a diagnosis which antedates by three centuries Freud’s teaching that sexual repression causes depression.<\/p>\n
Not infrequently these delusions were followed by phantom pregnancies. Thus the Inquisitors, Sprenger and Kramer, write:<\/p>\n
“At times women also think they have been made pregnant by an Incubus, and their bellies grow to an enormous size; but when the time of parturition comes, their swelling is relieved by no more than the expulsion of a great quantity of wind.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The strict sexual taboos imposed by the Church created widespread fears of impotence, as we can tell from the countless Church edicts forbidding attempts to restore potency by magical means, from the demand for restoratives, and from the fact that witches were constantly accused of blighting potency, as we shall later see in more detail. Such potency difficulties are precisely what one would expect to find in a period when the sexual act was represented as a mortal sin.<\/p>\n
The marked increase in homosexuality which occurred in the twelfth century is commonly attributed to the Norman invasion, but since homosexuality is not, in fact, a contagious disease some further explanation is called for. It certainly affected court circles: for instance it was because of his homosexuality that King Rufus was refused burial in consecrated ground. Bloch has denied that Edward II was a homosexual, despite his love for Piers Gaveston, but it seems likely that he was, since Higden says that he was<\/p>\n
“sleyne with a hoote broche putte thro the secret place posteriale”.\u00a0(245<\/a>)<\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
But it was above all the failing of the priesthood, as one can tell from the numerous church edicts on the subject: for instance in 1102 we find a Church council specifying that priests shall be\u00a0“degraded for sodomy, and anathematised for Obstinate sodomy”.\u00a0This new preoccupation with the subject is also betrayed by the constant accusations of buggery levelled at the heretic sects.<\/p>\n
Naturally, persons vowed to total celibacy exhibit the earmarks of sexual repression more vividly than laymen: not only inversion but perversion and hysterical symptoms are found in the monasteries and cloisters in very marked forms, as also among the practising clergy as soon as the rule of celibacy was enforced. Perhaps it is not generally realized how strongly the clergy opposed the imposition of priestly celibacy. It is true that it was an age of violence \u2014 an age in which, for instances Archembald, Bishop of Sens, taking a fancy to the abbey of St. Peter, could simply evict the monks and install himself, establishing his harem in the refectory-but, even so, the scale of the clerical revolt against celibacy was remarkable. Monks repeatedly murdered their abbots for preaching better behaviour to them; priests left their benefices to their sons, as if they were private property, openly defying the rule. In 925, for instance, we find the Council of Spalato forbidding priests to marry for a second time, having apparently become resigned to first marriages. In 1061 these protests culminated in an organized rebellion: a number of Lombard bishops and Roman nobles, claiming that it was no sin for a priest to marry, elected Cadalus, Bishop of Parma, as Antipope, under the title Honorius II. Honorius marched on Rome and captured it, but two years later the defection of Hanno of Cologne, for complex political reasons, caused the revolt to fail.<\/p>\n
The repeated failure of the Church to impose a life of celibacy on the clergy, and the extent to which the clergy defied its efforts by marriage, fornication and turning to homosexuality, have been recounted in a degree of detail which is unlikely ever to be surpassed by H. C. Lea in his “History of Sacerdotal Celibacy<\/i>“. He relates how, as priestly marriage was made increasingly difficult, priests were driven to content themselves with simple fornication \u2014 to the point where, in Germany, the word\u00a0Pfaffenkind<\/i>\u00a0(parson’s child) was used as a synonym for bastard. It was said that in many towns the number of bastards exceeded the number of those born in wedlock, and the claim does not seem incredible if one judges from such examples as that of Henry III, Bishop of Liege, who was known to have sixty five natural children. So serious did the situation become that in many parishes \u2014 at least in Spain and in Switzerland \u2014 the parishioners insisted that the priest\u00a0must<\/i>\u00a0have a concubine as a measure of protection for their wives.
\nMore sinister was the danger of incest, which was deemed sufficiently real for the Papal Legate in France, Cardinal Guala, to rule, in 1208, that mothers and other relatives must not live in the house of clerics, a regulation repeated in many subsequent orders up to the end of the fourteenth century. In general, May has noted that in the court records of the period, priests outnumber laymen, sometimes by as much as fifty to one. This was not because the Church was especially punctilious in prosecuting clerics: quite the contrary. It was frequently declared that clerical sins should be overlooked unless they became a public scandal, exceptionally light penalties were imposed, and frequent dispensations and absolutions were granted by the Curia.\u00a0(154<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\nThat the clergy should break the rule of celibacy is no doubt understandable: what is more dreadful is that they were often prepared to use their supposed power of granting or with holding absolution for sin as a weapon to force a woman’s compliance \u2014 and what a weapon that was in an age when many believed that they would roast in hell without absolution! This frightful crime was, however, treated by the ecclesiastical courts with the greatest lenience, in line with their policy of treating fornication as a milder offence than concubinage, and absolution for it could be purchased for as little as 36 gros tournois. As an example of the fantastic lenience of such courts we may take the case of Valdelamar, tried at Toledo in 1535 for seducing two women and refusing absolution to a third unless she slept with him \u2014 and also accused of theft, blasphemy, cheating with bulls of indulgence, charging for absolution and frequenting brothels. His whole sentence was to be fined two ducats and condemned to thirty days’ seclusion in church, before being free, as Lea puts it, to resume his flagitious career.<\/p>\n
It was to reduce the incidence of such crimes that the confessional box was evolved. The Council of Valencia ordered it to be used in 1565, and in 1614 it was prescribed for all churches, though 150 years later the decree was still being ignored in many places. Unfortunately this invention created another evil: salacious laymen used to enter the box in order in hear confessions. This was regarded as a serious matter by the Church only if, at the end of the confession, they gave absolution: This amounted to usurping the prerogative of a priest and the penalty was being burnt alive. Theology also dominated consideration of sacerdotal offences: the Judges were more interested in discovering whether the attempt at seduction had been made before or after granting absolution than in protecting the women. Thus it was argued that to give a woman a love letter in the confessional was only\u00a0“solicitation”\u00a0(as the offence came to be called) if it was intended that she should read it on the spot, before being absolved. Once the question of intention had been introduced the casuists were able to confuse the issue still further: it became possible to argue that a conditional statement, such as\u00a0“If I were not a priest, I should like to seduce you”,\u00a0was innocuous.\u00a0(154<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
Confession had other abuses: for instance, requiring a man who confessed to fornication to name his partner, so that the priest might discover where best to apply his own efforts \u2014 a thing which was not banned until 1714. There is also evidence that confessors would talk at length with young nuns on sexual matters, discussing every detail of the sexual act, ostensibly to warn them, actually to arouse their desires, but it would take us too far from the subjects and require too many pages, to record all the ingenuities of priestly lust.
\nThe influence of the clergy can best be summed up by the comment made by Cardinal Hugo, when Innocent IV left Lyons after a visit of eight years’ duration. In a speech of farewell to the citizens, he said:<\/p>\n“Since we came here we have effected great improvements. When we came, we found but three or four brothels. We leave behind us but one. We must add, however, that it extends without interruption from the eastern to the western gate.”\u00a0(154<\/a>)<\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The bad example set by the clergy, as this story hints, was not confined to those of lower rank; and in point of fact the Vicar of Christ himself descended again and again to the utmost licence. Sergius III contrived, with the aid of his vicious mother, that his bastard should become Pope after him. The notorious John XII (deposed 963) turned St. John Lateran into a brothel: at his trial he was accused of sacrilege, simony, perjury, murder, adultery and incest. Leo VIII, while still a layman, replaced him: he died stricken by paralysis in the act of adultery. Benedict IX, elected Pope at the age of ten, grew up<\/p>\n
“in unrestrained licence, and shocked the sensibilities even of a dull and barbarous age”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
While the popes were resident in Avignon,<\/p>\n
“the vilest issues were the pastime of pontifical ease. Chastity was a reproach and licentiousness a virtue.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Balthasar Cossa, elected Pope to end the Great Schism, confessed before the Council of Constance to\u00a0“notorious incest, adultery, defilement, homicide and atheism”.\u00a0Earlier, when Chamberlain to Boniface IX, he had kept his brother’s wife as mistress: Promoted to Cardinal as a result, he was sent to Bologna<\/p>\n
“where two hundred maids, matrons and widows, including a few nuns, fell victims to his brutal lust”.\u00a0(154<\/a>)<\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
For those who were enclosed in monastic orders, the opportunities of satisfying sexual appetites were even more limited, and especially, perhaps, for women, who could less easily take the initiative in such matters. Hence, while the records show plenty of cases of nuns, and even abbesses becoming pregnant or being involved in scandal,\u00a0(43<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0we also find the sexual impulse emerging in the form of hysterical manifestations \u2014 using the term hysteria in the strict medical sense. It has long been recognized that people can (without conscious intention) induce in themselves various forms of illness and defects of function at the behest of an unconscious or repressed need. Thus a man who has seen a particularly terrifying sight may develop blindness, and this blindness will disappear as suddenly as it came, when the underlying anxiety has been dissipated. In a similar way, people sometimes become ill in order to escape from situations which they find intolerable \u2014 and the illness is quite genuine. Such hysterical seizures usually bear a close relationship to the unconscious fantasy: in particular, women sometimes exhibit convulsive bodily movements, or become rigid, with the body arched so that the pudenda are thrust forward as in coitus \u2014 the so-called ‘arc-en-cercle<\/i>‘ position.
\nThroughout the Middle Ages, and especially in nunneries, we find epidemics of such convulsions. A particularly clear-cut case is that investigated by the great German doctor de Weier (1515-76), one of the first people to explore such supposed cases of diabolic possession clinically and objectively. He reports them in his great work “De Praestigiis Daemonum<\/i>“, a model of scientific detachment. He was one of the members of an investigating committee sent in 1565 to enquire into the case of “possession<\/i>” occurring among the nuns of the convent of Nazareth at Cologne. De Weier noted that the convulsions exhibited several features betraying their erotic origin: during the attacks, he noted, the nuns would lie on their backs with closed eyes and their abdomens elevated in\u00a0arc-en-cercle<\/i>. After the convulsions had passed, his notes say, they<\/p>\n“opened their eyes with apparent expressions of shame and pain”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The epidemic had started when a young girl who lived in the nunnery began to suffer from the hallucination that she was being visited every night by her lover. Nuns who were put to guard her became frightened by her convulsive movements and began to exhibit them also. Soon the epidemic spread to the entire group.\u00a0(25<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
Upon investigation, the committee discovered that some of the neighbouring youths had been climbing into the nunnery every night to enjoy an affair with nuns of their acquaintance. It was when this had been discovered and stopped that the convulsions developed. De Weier also studied similar phenomena in other nunneries and an orphanage, as he recounts in his Fourth Book.\u00a0(256<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Maury has collected a number of such cases in his “Histoire d’Astrologie et Magie<\/i>“.<\/p>\n
Erotic convulsions seem frequently to be induced when a hysteric loves a particular individual and the love is withdrawn or is not returned. In the celebrated case of Loudun (1634) which Aldous Huxley has recently popularized, the nun concerned, Jeanne des Anges, was enamoured of the Cure Grandier: as a move towards coming to know him better she invited him to become the confessor of the small convent of which she was abbess. He refused. She then developed a prolonged series of convulsions, accusing him of having bewitched her \u2014 and, psychologically, he was of course the responsible, though innocent, party. The sexual character of her hysteria is patent. Thus she claimed to have become possessed by seven devils, each of which she named and described. The first, Asmodeus, filled her head, she said, with sexual fantasies. The fourth, Isaacaron, aroused her passion by more direct methods, and this, she explained, was the cause of the violent bodily movements \u2014 a frank explanation which anticipates that of Freud by almost 300 years. Her convulsions culminated in a phantom pregnancy. The Cure was burnt alive as a sorcerer; the nun became an object of veneration, was presented to the queen and performed several miracles.<\/p>\n
Many other cases can be found. A quarter of a century earlier a young girl called Madeleine de Mandol, of La Baume, accused a local priest, Gaufridi, of seducing and bewitching her, and soon she was joined in these accusations by Louise Capeau. Both exhibited convulsions with the characteristic rigidities. Once six men stood on the arched body of Madeleine de Mandol, just as later men were to stand on the body of Jeanne des Anges.
\nOnly ten years after the Loudun incident, while Jeanne was still performing tours of France, the nuns of Louviers accused two priests, one of them already dead, of bewitching them, and we are told that in their convulsions they indulged in\u00a0“foul languages”,\u00a0that is, they gave voice to the sexual desires in their unconscious minds, which were indeed the cause of the convulsions. Once again, the priests were burned, the dead one being exhumed for the purpose.<\/p>\nEven a century later, in the comparatively enlightened year of 1731, we find the story repeated almost without change. Catherine Cadiere of Toulon accused her confessor, Fr. Giraud, of seduction and magic. Levi says that she was a stigmatized ascetic and suffered<\/p>\n
“lascivious swoons, secret flagellations, lewd sensations”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Apart from these grossly erotic manifestations, it is difficult to avoid detecting the influence of erotic feeling in the language and behaviour of many Christian mystics. Catholic authorities attempt to explain this eroticism by saying that the language of romantic poetry had become common currency, and was borrowed by the clergy.\u00a0(52<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0And certainly the use of erotic images in an attempt to convey a transcendental experience is quite understandable \u2014 as understandable, say, as the use of the image of thirst \u2014 even if one adds that one can hardly employ the image without having at some time experienced the reality to which it corresponds. But much of this imagery seems to go so far beyond the mere expression of longing, and to dwell so fondly on physical detail, that it is difficult to resist the suspicion that in many cases the writers were projecting on to the deity an earthly love which had been deprived of its natural object, and colouring very human fantasies with a veneer of mysticism.<\/p>\n
Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210-88) felt herself sick from passionate love for the Saviour, and advised<\/p>\n
“all virgins to follow the most charming of all, the eighteen year old Jesus”,<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
that He might embrace them. Her “Dialogue between Love and the Soul<\/i>” is studded with passages such as:<\/p>\n
“Tell my Beloved that His chamber is prepared, and that I am sick with love for Him.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Or again:<\/p>\n
“Then He took the soul into His divine arms, and placing His fatherly hand on her bosom, He looked into her face and kissed her well.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
If the writer was describing a mystic experience, there can be little doubt that this experience was created by the damming up of erotic feeling. We can readily see how the blocking of the normal outlet produces the religious erotomania by a case such as that of Margaretha of Ypern (1216-37) who, after the cessation of her mania for men believed herself engaged to Jesus. Similarly, Christine Ebner (1277-1356), after two years of masochistic self torture, was seized by sensual visions in which she felt herself embraced by Jesus and to have conceived a child by Him.\u00a0(81)<\/small>
\nFosbroke points out that the medieval ceremony for the consecration of nuns was in several respects like a wedding A ring was put on the candidate’s finger and a wedding crown on her head. one of the responses which she had to make ran:<\/p>\n“I love Christ into whose bed I have entered.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
After the kiss of peace had been bestowed, she was urged to<\/p>\n
“forget there all the world, and there be entirely out of the body; there in glowing love embrace your beloved\u00a0(Saviour)\u00a0who is comes down from heaven into your breast’s bower, and hold Him fast until He shall have granted whatsoever you wish for.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It may be added that the Church received the sum of money which had been put aside by the parents for their daughter’s dowry if and when she married.<\/p>\n
Is it remarkable to learn that nuns filled with such thoughts frequently developed phantom pregnancies?<\/p>\n
The official explanation seems hardly adequate to explain the ardent longing of La Bonne Armelle and St. Elizabeth to mother the infant Jesus; or the action of Veronica Giuliani beatified by Pius II, who, in memory of the lamb of God, took a real lamb to bed with her, kissing it and suckling it on her breasts. The desperate frustration of natural instincts is also shown by such incidents as that of St. Catherine of Genoa, who often suffered from such internal fires that, to cool herself, she lay upon the ground, saying\u00a0“Love, love, I can do no more”.\u00a0In doing this she felt a peculiar inclination for her confessor.(86<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Again, it seems rather naive to absolve of erotic feeling the nun Blaubekin, who became obsessed by the thought of what had happened to the part of Jesus’s body removed by circumcision. (In point of fact, she need not have distressed herself: no fewer than twelve churches possess, among their sacred relics, the prepuce of Jesus Christ \u2014 notably St. John Lateran, Coulombs, Charroux, Hildesheim, Puy-en-Velay and Antwerp, the last imported at great expense by Godefroy de Bouillon in an attempt to discourage the worship of Priapus.\u00a0(110<\/a>)<\/small>,\u00a0(165<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0There is also an equal number of umbilici.\u00a0(71<\/a>)<\/small>)<\/p>\n
Psychoanalysts have shown how a sense of sexual guilt leads to the in turning of Thanatos, in an attempt to relieve the guilt by continual self punishment, while flagellation, specifically, which is a kind of assault, may be a substitute for sexual intercourse. It is therefore in no way surprising to find that the celibates often indulged in prodigies of masochism, and especially in flagellation, and we find cases of confessors making use of their power of absolution to force their female parishioners to beat them.<\/p>\n
The early Christian fathers delighted in such simple self tortures as hair shirts, and failing to wash. Others proceeded to more desperate extremes, such as Ammonius who tortured his body with a red-hot iron until it was covered with burns. In the Middle Ages, these excesses became ever more frantic. Christine of St. Trond (1150-1224) laid herself in a hot oven, fastened herself on a wheel, had herself racked, and hung on the gallows beside a corpse; not content with this, she had herself partly buried in a grave. Fielding observes:<\/p>\n
“She suffered from obsessions which are now generally recognized as transparent sexual hallucinations.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Christine Ebner, who as noted earlier imagined herself to have conceived a child by Jesus after being embraced by Him, cut a cross of skin over the region of her heart and tore it of, sufficiently demonstrating the linkage of sexual desire and masochism.\u00a0(81<\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
It would not be necessary to dwell on these depressing details if it were not for the fact that the Church erected these appalling practices into a virtue, often canonizing those who practised them, as in the case of St. Margaret Marie Alacoque, St. Rose of Lima and St. Mary Magdalene dei Pazzi. It is true that her superiors forbade the Alacoque to practise excessive austerities, but she ingeniously found others. She sought out rotten fruit and dusty bread to eat. Like many mystics she suffered from a lifelong thirst, but decided to allow herself no drink from Thursday to Sunday, and when she did drink, preferred water in which laundry had been washed She, too, fell to the ground in convulsions and had the illusion that the devil was buffeting her. she said incessantly\u00a0“ou souffrir, ou mourir”,\u00a0either suffer or die. Not content with miraculously caused infirmities, rather like Christine Ebner, she cut the name of Jesus on her chest with a knife, and because the scars did not last long enough, burnt them in with a candle. Her respectful biographer, who has been at pains to emphasize her remarkable holiness and splendid example, here cautions his readers against imitating\u00a0“this astonishing, not to say imprudent operation”.\u00a0(99<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0She was Canonized in 1920.<\/p>\n
The stories of these masochistic nuns indeed show a dreary similarity. St. Rose ate nothing but a mixture of sheep’s gall, bitter herbs and ashes.\u00a0(214<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0The Pazzi, like the Alacoque, vowed herself to chastity at an incredibly early age (four, it is said). Like St. Catherine, she ran about in a frenzy, calling\u00a0“Love, Love”.\u00a0After a prolonged rapture in 1585, she had hallucinations of being mauled and pushed about. She would run into the garden and roll on thorns, then return to the convent and whip herself. She would have herself tied to a post and demand to be insulted, or drop hot wax on her skin. Like the Alacoque, she was thought a suitable person to put in charge of the novices, but whereas the latter had one of the novices dismissed for rivalling her in holiness, the Pazzi made one stand on her mouth and whip her.\u00a0(65<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0She was canonized in 1671.<\/p>\n
It is in the eleventh century that one first finds the Franciscans extolling self flagellation as a penance; and it is at the end of the same century, when the practice of confession became generally established, that one finds confessors also imposing sentences of whipping. At first the priests used to do the whipping themselves, the penitents usually being entirely nude, and the penance being inflicted in a place attached to the church. To judge from illustrations, the victims accepted the penance in just the resigned spirit in which today people accept the verdict of a doctor; and penitents, stripped naked, awaited their turn for treatment as placidly as patients at a doctor’s clinic. In the twelfth century St. Dominic made the practice widely known, and established a scale of equivalents, 1,000 lashes being considered equivalent to the reciting of ten penitential psalms. But the danger of priests indulging their sadistic instincts soon became evident, and other methods were evolved, especially public processions of flagellants, nude from the waist up.
\nThere were those who sensed the perverted nature of this development: France refused to accept the practice and the Polish king imposed penalties on those who adopted it. But the device of organizing groups of Flagellants proved unwise, for in groups a strange contagion occurs. Perhaps the fact of being with others who are giving- rein to powerful instincts normally held in check, gives a man a sense of being licensed by public opinion to break the normal rules, as seems to occur, for instance, in lynchings, looting and other mob phenomena. Whatever the explanation, in the middle of the thirteenth century Thanatos burst loose in the populace at large, but not, as in a lynching, directed outward upon others: this time, it was directed inward in a masochistic sense. The contagion started in North Italy in 1259 everywhere people formed themselves into groups for the purpose of self-flagellation.<\/p>\n“Day and night, long processions of all classes and ages, headed by priests carrying crosses and banners, perambulated the streets in double file, praying and flagellating themselves.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Even children of five years old took part. Magistrates, appalled, expelled them from their cities, but to no effect. Ultimately the movement died down, only to flare up again in 1262 and again in 1296. In the following century, stimulated by the fears aroused by repeated earthquakes this Flagellomania reappeared in 1334. Finally, the culminating horror of the Black Death, which started in 1348, caused an outbreak far exceeding any of the foregoing in scale. Beset by the fear of death and the evidence of God’s displeasure whole populations indulged in a desperate frenzy of self maceration. Processions of men and women, nobles and commoners, priests and monks, numbering hundreds and sometimes thousands, spread over Austria, Bohemia, Germany, Switzerland, and the Rhine province, to the Netherlands and even to England.\u00a0(77<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0The movement continued all through 1348 and 1349, while the Plague raged, killing in many cases seven in every ten of the population. These flagellants, like pilgrims, moved from town to town and in each town they sought out the shrine of the most powerful saint, hoping to procure his help. They began to form themselves into a coherent organization, under the title the Brethren of the Cross. The idea emerged that one could dispense with the services of the Church in attaining salvation. Thirty-three and a half days of scourging, recalling Christ’s thirty three years of life, were the passport to salvation. The Pope, instantly alarmed, on October 20 issued a Bull accusing them of forming a new sect without permission, condemning them as devilish, and calling upon bishops and inquisitors to stamp out the heresy. Under this pressure, the movement broke up or went underground, only to burst out again two years later, and yet again three years after that. This time the sect was destroyed by fire and sword. Except for sporadic outbreaks in Italy, Holland and Thuringia in the early fifteenth century, we hear no more of Flagellomania. That is, we hear no more of a mass popular movement: we find plenty of processions of flagellants on specific occasions under control of the Church.<\/p>\n
By giving official sanction to actions which in normal people are deeply repressed or held under control, the Church contrived that the tendencies to conformity which normally act as a civilizing force should be put at the service of the dark and uncivilised desires of the unconscious. Here, as so often in other fields, the Church acted in just the way calculated to release the very forces it was officially trying to repress \u2014 so easily do our unconscious desires mould our conscious action to their purpose. It was an attempt which recoiled on the Church and was therefore dropped: the Church’s next experiment in this field was to direct the death dealing forces outwards in the form of witch persecutions, as I shall attempt to show in another chapter.
\nIf a reasonable brevity were no object, this account of medieval sexuality could be greatly extended. I have considered only general trends: a full account would have to consider the differences between different classes and different regions, and would have to study the demoralizing effect of social disorganization such as occurred in the wake of wars and pestilence. It would have to describe the violence and lechery of the Crusades, and the wave of frantic debauchery which followed in the wake of the Black Death, when it was held that to commit incest on the altar was the only certain prophylactic against infection.\u00a0(184<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0But for such matters I have no space.<\/p>\nThe frank sexuality of the early Celts was associated with the worship of fertility religions; when the Christian missionaries imposed a new morality, many of the old ceremonies survived and provided occasions for outbursts of sexuality in defiance of Church law. Best known of these were the May Games and the Christmas mumming. The May Games, which celebrated the growing of the crops, took place round the maypole, and these we know survived until the Puritans abolished them in the seventeenth century. Chaucer speaks of the\u00a0“great shaft of Cornhill”\u00a0from which the church of St. Andrew Undershaft takes its name. Similarly the Christmas mumming coinciding with the middle of the winter solstice, derived from the Roman Saturnalia. Indeed, actual phallic worship continued at first openly, later secretly, throughout the Middle Ages, and Early Church statutes often inveigh against it. A full account of medieval sexuality must also consider certain religious sects and minority groups which developed distinctive attitudes to sex. But all these are subjects of such interest and importance that they deserve chapters to themselves and I shall discuss them at a later point.<\/p>\n
I opened the chapter by suggesting that the Middle Ages resembled a vast insane asylum. The phrase was not intended as a hyperbole. John Custance, a manic depressive who has been certified on a number of occasions, has recorded his feelings and sensations: a few extracts will serve to establish the resemblance. In the manic phase, he says, he experience a “heightened sense of reality” which Canon Grensted has compared with the experience of St. Teresa. He felt a sense of love in which there was no repugnance for the loathsome He strives to describe his sense of intenser life, of being at peace; of love with the whole universe. There was a sense of revelation; he saw visions continually and could not distinguish them from dreams. With this went an insensitivity to pain and a release of sexual tension: he had hallucinations of male and female sex organs copulating in mid-air. He felt, also, that he might follow the promptings of the spirit with impunity, however unorthodox; he felt an impulse to throw off all his clothes. He often saw aureoles round people’s heads.<\/p>\n
Strangest feature of all, so far from feeling any repugnance at the loathsome, he felt attracted by it. He explains how his sense of the nearness of God was in some way associated in his mind with the idea of dirt, so that dwelling on the idea of dirty and disgusting things, such as spittle or faeces, seemed to emphasize and enhance his nearness to God. This is particularly striking, since many Christian ecstatics have made precisely the same observation. The Alacoque, for instance dwelt on these ideas with an irresistible compulsion. In her diaries she describes how once, when she wished to clean up the vomit of a sick patient, she “could not resist” doing so with her tongue, an action which caused her so much pleasure that she wished she could do the same every day. Mme. Guyon the seventeenth century quietist, describes an almost exact similar experience.\u00a0(149<\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0St. John of the Cross licked out the sores of lepers, which he described as\u00a0“pleasurable”.\u00a0St. Rose, more ambitiously, drank off a bowl of human blood, newly drawn from a diseased patient.\u00a0(214<\/a>)<\/small>
\nBut whereas the performers of these hardy acts were canonized, Custance, undergoing exactly similar experiences, in modern times, was certified.<\/p>\nBefore the mystic reaches his sense of unity with God, and the release of sexual tension, he passes through two dreadful phases which have been called the “dryness<\/i>” and the “dark night of the soul<\/i>“. Custance underwent experiences which seem identical with these in his depressive phase. He felt, he says, that he had sold his soul to the devil. He was hypnotized by an absolutely horrifying vision of ever increasing pain \u2014 remarkably similar to the conviction of endless torture in hell described so vividly by Calvinists. Furthermore, this depressive phase developed in two stages. The first was a state of deep depression about ordinary earthly misfortunes, which Custance himself calls\u00a0“a dark night of the soul”,\u00a0echoing St. John of the Cross’s phrase. The second stage was a sense of spiritual abandonment and of\u00a0“vulnerability to demonic attack”,\u00a0resembling the sensations reported by Bunyan, Luther and others. In this phase, Custance was obsessed by a sense of guilt for his sexual sins and found himself to be impotent; indeed, he says that sin appeared exclusively as sexual sin. And he adds that he suddenly understood why Catholics find it impossible to conceive of Heaven without also believing in a purgatory.<\/p>\n
And just as in the manic phase he had felt attracted to the idea of dirt, now he felt repelled from it; and associated with this fear of dirt was a sense of remoteness from God, which could only be combated by getting rid of every speck of it \u2014 a feeling which, as we shall see, the Puritans had already experienced. I may add that this very compressed summary does small justice to Custance’s extraordinary book, which should be read.<\/p>\n
With this in mind, it hardly seems too much to say, therefore, that the Church’s code of repression produced, throughout Western Europe, over a period of four or five centuries, an outbreak of mass psychosis for which there are few parallels in history. Perhaps only the Aztec passion for blood sacrifice provides a comparable case.<\/p>\n
It is an important psychological, as it is also a physical, fact that every action breeds an equal and opposite reaction. While the Church claims that repressive measures were required because of the immorality of the times, it seems more probable that, in reality, the immorality of the times was a result of the pressures applied. As Pascal observed:<\/p>\n
“Qui veut faire Lange; fait la b\u00eate.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In the next chapter, therefore, let us see what was the moral teaching which could produce these fearful results. It will be worth examining the medieval ideal in some detail, for it provides the basis from which our present sexual regulation in the U.S. no less than in Britain, have been derived. <\/p>\n
3. Mediaeval Sexual Ideal<\/h3>\n
The medieval Church was obsessed with sex to a quite painful degree. Sexual issues dominated its thinking in a manner which we should regard as entirely pathological. It is hardly too much to say that the ideal which it held out to Christians was primarily a sexual ideal.<\/p>\n
This ideal was a highly consistent one and was embodied in a most elaborate code of regulations. The Christian code was based, quite simply, upon the conviction that the sexual act was to be avoided like the plague, except for the bare minimum necessary to keep the race in existence. Even when performed for this purpose it remained a regrettable necessity. Those who could were exhorted to avoid it entirely, even if married. For those incapable of such heroic self-denial there was a great spider’s web of regulations whose over-riding purpose was to make the sexual act as joyless as possible and to restrict its performance to the minimum – that is, to restrict it exclusively to the function of procreation. It was not actually the sexual act which was damnable, but the pleasure derived from it – and this pleasure remained damnable even when the act was performed for the purpose of procreation, a notion which reached its crudest expression with the invention of the\u00a0chemise carouse<\/i>, a sort of heavy nightshirt, with a suitably placed hole, through which a husband could impregnate his wife while avoiding any other contact.153 The belief that even within marriages the sexual act should not be performed for pleasure, still persists to the present day, more especially in the Catholic Church, where it remains official doctrine; it was publicly reasserted by the Popes once again, while this book was being written.<\/p>\n
Not only the pleasure of the sexual act was held sinful, but also the sensation of desire for a person of the opposite sex even when unconsummated. Since the love of a man for a woman was held to be simply desire, this led to the incontrovertible proposition that no man should love his wife. In fact Peter Lombard maintained, in his apologetic\u00a0De excusatione coitus<\/i>, that for a man to love his wife to ardently is a sin worse than adultery – “Omnis ardentior amator propriae uxoris adulter est.”<\/p>\n
It was about the eighth century that the Church began to develop the enormously strict system which ruled in the Middle Ages. A series of “penitential books” began to appear which explored the subject of sex in all its details; every misdeed was described and elaborated at length, and penalties were prescribed for each.<\/p>\n
This code comprised three main\u00a0propositions<\/a>. First all, who could were urged to attempt the ideal of complete celibacy while for those with priestly functions it was obligatory. In this direction the mediaeval Church could scarcely go further than had the early fathers. Jovinian had been excommunicated for daring to deny, what St. Augustine had asserted, that virginity was a better state than marriage. St. Jerome tolerated marriage simply because it provided the world with potential virgins. But by an extraordinary twist of the imagination, the idea evolved that virgins were the brides of Christ. Hence it followed that anyone who seduced a virgin was not commiting fornication but the more serious crime of adultery, and what is more, adultery at the expense of Christ. The outraged deity was therefore entitled to the revenge which tradition always accorded to a husband in such a position. How literally this fantastic doctrine was held can be shown by a quotation from Cyprian: “If a husband come and see his wife lying with another man, is he not indignant and maddened ? . . . How indignant and angered then must Christ our Lord and Judge be, when He sees a virgin, dedicated to Himself, and consecrated to His holiness, lying with a man…. she who has been guilty of this crime is an adulteress, not against a husband, but Christ.” Evidently the saint saw nothing ludicrous in the premise that the son of God would feel exactly the emotions of outraged property sense which would be felt by the most boorish of human beings.
\nOnce given that virginity was a good, the principle was, as usual, extended far beyond the sexual act, as we see, for instance, in the case of the virgin Gorgonia, who “with all her body and members there of. . . bruised and broken most grievouslie” yet refused the attentions of a doctor because her modesty forbade her to be seen or touched by a man; and was rewarded by God with a miraculous cure.<\/p>\nSince virginity was a good, it was good for wives to deny themselves to their husbands, and since doubtless many of them were suffering from the shock of a painful initiation as well as the conflicts of conscience, many of them did so. Whether this increased the sum total of chastity seems doubtful, since many husbands were driven to vice in consequence, to the point where the Church felt obliged to intervene.<\/p>\n
The second step was to place an absolute ban on all forms of sexual activity other than intercourse between married persons, carried out with the object of procreating. In some penitentials fornication was declared a worse sin than murder. In the penitentials of Theodore and Bede the penance imposed for simple fornication was one year, but the penalty was increased according to the frequency of the act and the age and discretion of the parties. Adultery was more serious than fornication with an unmarried person, and sexual connection with a monk or a nun more serious still, while if a member of the clergy fornicated with a monk or nun, Dunstan’s penalty was ten years fast, with perpetual lamentation and abstention from meat. Later, the seducer of a nun was denied burial in consecrated ground. But it was not the sexual act alone which was tabooed. Attempting to fornicate, kissing, even thinking of fornication were forbidden and called for penalties: in the last case, the penance was forty days. Nor was it the intention alone which made the crime. Involuntary nocturnal pollutions were a sin the offender must rise at once and sing seven penitential psalms, with a further thirty in the morning. If the pollution occurred when he had fallen asleep in church, he must sing the whole psalter.\u00a0(172<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
The penitentials also devoted a disproportionately large amount of their space to prescribing penalties for homosexuality and for bestiality, but the sin upon which the greatest stress of all was laid was masturbation. In the five comparatively short mediaeval penitential codes, there are twenty-two paragraphs dealing with various degrees of sodomy and bestiality, and no fewer than twenty-five dealing with masturbation on the part of laymen, to say nothing of others dealing separately with masturbation on the part of the clergy.\u00a0(172<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0According to Aquinas, it was a greater sin than fornication. This is particularly significant, for we now know that the belief that sexual pleasure is wicked springs primarily from parental taboos on infantile masturbation; the fact that the punishment is given when the child is too young to under stand its significance, and when masturbation is the only means by which he can afford himself pleasure by his own unaided efforts, results in a fear of pleasure becoming embedded in the unconscious, and being generalized until it becomes a fear of pleasure in all its forms. No doubt the Church realized, even if unconsciously, that the maintenance of its system of repression was ultimately founded on the willingness of parents to frown on infantile masturbation, and, therefore, concentrated a great deal of attention on the matter.<\/p>\n
This interpretation would not hold water if it could be shown that the Church, while condemning sexual pleasure welcomed alternative forms of physical enjoyment. But it is easy to show that this is not the case. Porphyry, as early as the third century set the tone by condemning pleasure in all its forms. “Horse racing, the theatre, dancing, marriage and mutton chops were equally accursed; those who indulged in them were servants not of God but of the Devil.”\u00a0(172<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Augustine called him the most learned of all the philosophers and established this doctrine upon a formal basis.
\nOf the existence of such prohibitions, most people have some dim appreciation, since they are still maintained, if with diminished strength, in many quarters today. What is less generally realized is the extensive nature of the attempt which was made to limit and control the sexual act when performed\u00a0within<\/i>\u00a0the marital relationship. Thus the sexual act must be performed in only one position, and numerous penalties were prescribed for using variants, the approach “more canino” – which was held to afford the most pleasure being regarded with especial horror and calling for seven years of penance. Confessors were required to ask specifically about these and every other possibility, and the manuals with which they were later supplied contain questions concerning every imaginable variant of the sexual act: in the present condition of the laws against obscenity it would be inadvisable to quote them here.\u00a0(86<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\nNot content with this, the Church proceeded to cut down the number of days per annum upon which even married couples might legitimately perform the sexual act. First, it was made illegal on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which effectively removed the equivalent of five months in the year. Then it was made illegal for forty days before Easter and forty days before Christmas, and for three days before attending communion (and there were regulations requiring frequent attendance at communion). It was also forbidden from the time of conception to\u00a0forty days<\/a>\u00a0after parturition. It was, of course forbidden during any penance.\u00a0(172<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
Such were the ideas from which European sexual ideals have been principally derived. As we shall see, both the general conception of sex as sinful, and many specific prohibitions and enactments, survived almost unmutilated until modern times and still affect our conduct today. Nevertheless it would be giving a false impression to suggest that the Church prepared these codes with the businesslike and ruthless detachment of a Russian commissary. Rather is it the case they were thrown together in a passion of despairing guilt . The picture we get is of a number of individual figures, like Augustine or Aquinas, Damiani or Bernard, tormented by the virtual certainty of damnation for all who so much thought of sexual pleasure, desperately striving to build dam against the rising tides of sensuality, in a frantic attempt to save people from the results of their own folly. Never mind the justifications, never mind the cruelty and injustice, if only this frightful disaster can be prevented.<\/p>\n
Only real desperation is enough to explain the ruthlessness with which the Church repeatedly distorted and even falsified the Biblical record in order to produce justification for its laws. For such extreme asceticism is not enjoined by the Bible, and certainly not by the New Testament. As Lecky shows, “The Fathers laid down as a distinct proposition that pious frauds were justifiable and even laudable”, and he adds, “immediately, all ecclesiastical literature became tainted with a spirit of the most unblushing mendacity.”\u00a0(156<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
The Church claimed that this stringent taboo on sex had been proclaimed by St. Paul, but in point of fact, although Paul had gone much further than anyone before him in the direction of discountenancing sexual activity, he did not get nearly as far as this. In view of the vast edifice of repressive legislation erected on this tiny base, it is worth giving Paul’s actual words, well known as the quotation is:<\/p>\n
It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. For I would that all men were even as myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. Now concerning virgins I have no commandment of the Lord: yet I give my judgment. If thou marry thou hast not sinned; and if a virgin marry she hath not sinned…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In this passage we can see the expression of a belief in the general desirability of sexual continence, but also the quite distinct recognition that continence is a “gift of God” which many do not have, and a specific assertion that it is not sinful to marry, and that the purpose of marriage is to avoid fornication; this can only mean that it is to provide a legal alternative. Nowadays the Pauline view is expressed by saying that the purpose of marriage is “the relief of concupiscence” while the extreme mediaeval view is expressed by saying that the sole purpose of marriage is procreation.<\/p>\n
Paul also made it clear that he was not propounding the official teaching of Christ, but was simply giving his personal opinion in reply to a number of questions which had been put to him by the Church at Corinth.<\/p>\n
Attaching, as it did, such importance to preventing masturbation, the Church sought a Biblical justification, and had no hesitation in twisting the facts to its purpose. Genesis xxxviii refers to Onan’s seed falling upon the ground and his subsequently being put to death. The idea was established – and is still widely believed – that this passage refers to masturbation, and the word onanism has come to be used as a synonym for it. Actually, it refers to the practice of ‘coitus interruptus<\/i>‘; and the reason why Onan was put to death was that he had violated the law of the levirate, by which a man must provide his deceased brother’s wife with offspring.128 Even the Catholic writer Canon A. de Smet, in his book\u00a0Betrothment and Marriage<\/i>, admits this:<\/p>\n
“From the text and context, however, it would seem that the blame of the sacred writer applies directly to the wrongful frustration of the law of the levitate, intended by Onan, rather than the spilling of the seed.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
It was as part of its comprehensive attempt to make the sexual act as difficult as possible that the Church devised laws against the practice of abortion. Neither Romans, Jews nod Greeks had opposed abortion, but Tertullian, following an inaccurate translation of Exodus xxi. 22, which refers to punishing a man who injures a pregnant woman, but which appeared to prescribe punishment for injuring the foetus, gave currency to the idea that the Bible held abortion to be a crime. He devoted much ingenuity to determining when the foetus became animate, and decided that it was after forty days in the case of males, eighty in the case of females. (Modern English law is even more absurd, for it does not stay the execution of pregnant women until the fourth month of pregnancy, yet may prosecute for abortion before that time.) Jerome, though knew Latin, perpetuated the error.\u00a0(190<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Though the error has long since been exposed, the Church still maintains this position, and it has become incorporated in the law of the state which beautifully demonstrates that moral laws are not really derived from Biblical authority, but that Biblical authority is sought to justify regulations which, because of unconscious prejudices, seem ‘natural’ and right.<\/p>\n
Still more drastically, the Church revamped the story of the Fall to support its general position on sex. The doctrine was gradually propagated that the reason for Adam’s expulsion from the garden of Eden was that he had performed the sexual act, or at least had acquired sexual knowledge. The temptation with the apple became the symbol of a sexual temptation, and Eve, the temptress, was specifically a sexual temptress. As at embroidery on this it was asserted (and is still widely remembered) that menstruation represented a curse imposed on women in punishment for Eve’s part in this seduction. But a single reading of the Book of Genesis is enough to show that this is not what was asserted. It contains, as a matter of fact, two versions of the Fall. In the first (Genesis iii), Adam eats of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and it is for acquiring this knowledge that he is expelled. In the second (Genesis vi), certain angels have intercourse with humans, teach them the arts and sciences, and are expelled from heaven. This is the story of which Milton made use: and it is the version to which Christ makes a passing reference. Both stories concern the acquisition of knowledge by men and are versions of the Prometheus myth – Lucifer, the light-bringer, is an exact analogue of Prometheus who steals fire from the Gods.\u00a0(251<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>
\nThat the Church’s fear of sex was exaggerated and obsessive will already be clear: but, more than this, it was fundamentally superstitious. It preserved the primitive magical belief in the power of sex to contaminate. It was for this reason that married couples must not only abstain from intercourse for three nights after their marriage – the so-called Tobias nights – but having once performed the sexual act, must not enter a church for thirty days after, and then only on condition of doing forty days penance and bringing an offering. Some of the magical precautions taken at and after the wedding, including the blessing of the bride bed, have already been described. Theodore further extended this principle of contamination when he ruled (what had been previously denied) that it was a sin for a menstruating woman to enter a church, and imposed a penance for infraction of this rule. For the same reason, a woman who had borne a baby had to be ceremonially purified before she could be re-admitted to communion. These primitive superstitions derived from pre-Christian Jewry. There can hardly be any better example of the extraordinary persistence of the past than the fact that to this very day the Church maintains in its rites this pagan purification ceremony, under the name of the Churching of Women. Indeed, it carried such ideas much further than had the Jews, as we shall shortly see.<\/p>\nIt was, of course, because of the magical character of the sex act that it automatically converted spousals to marriage, and this was why marriages of children could be declared void if copulation had not taken place. Furthermore, if two person within the prohibited degrees married each other, copulation turned this into a marriage which, though illegal, was valid and which the Church then had formally to annul. The modern practice of treating such a marriage as automatically void dates only from the reign of William IV.<\/p>\n
Still more eloquent of the superstitious nature of the Church approach to sex are its regulations concerning incestuous marriage. Many peoples, though by no means all, have regarded it as incestuous to marry a parent or a sibling. The Christian Saxons had regarded it as incestuous to marry first cousin, arguing that since marriage makes man and wife “one flesh” to marry a deceased husband’s cousin is incestuous. But in the eleventh century the Church became increasing obsessed with incest fears and extended the ban to second and finally to third cousins. (It was later reduced.) But this was not all. So strongly was the principle of sympathetic contagion embedded, so intense were the fears of incest, that godfather and godmothers were included in the ban; next, even the relations of the priests who had baptized or confirmed a person finally, even two persons who had stood sponsor to the same child might not marry each other!\u00a0(240<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
No doubt, in some small villages, these regulations must sometimes have eliminated every available candidate and condemned people to celibacy in just the same way as do the complicated exogamic regulations of the Australian black-fellow.<\/p>\n
In addition, no Christian could validly marry a Jew or the follower of any other religion. Indeed, copulation with a Jew was regarded as a form of bestiality, and incurred the same penances.\u00a0(240<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0In this there is a certain irony, since it was from the Jews that the Christians derived their laws against bestiality. Marriage with a heretic, however, though illicit, was not invalid until the Council of Trent tightened up ecclesiastical laws in the Counter-Reformation.<\/p>\n
It might be thought that this lengthy catalogue of prohibitions would have exhausted the list of attempts which zealots made to complicate and hinder the performance of the sexual act, but there is yet one more to record. They argued that no one might marry for a second time, even if the first partner had died, a doctrine which was alleged to be supported by the Pauline text saying that a man who puts away his wife and marries another commits adultery; though Paul had made it clear that this referred to putting away a living wife. It was also as part of this programme, and not from ethical considerations, that the mediaeval Church set its face against polygamy. The Jews, of course, had been polygamous, and the early Christian fathers – unlike the Greeks and Romans – did not object to it. Even the strict Augustine thought it was permissible to take a second wife if the first were barren, and many early English and Irish kings lived in open polygamy.\u00a0(239<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>
\nThe proposition that the sexual act had power to contaminate was difficult to reconcile with the fact the Christ, who had been born of a woman, was without sin. To claim descent from the union between a woman and a god was a standard way of claiming semi-divine status in the classical world, and it was in accordance with this principle that the Jewish Messiah was expected to be born of such a union. The Christians adapted this to their ends by claiming that He had been born of a “virgin”, that is, without performance of the contaminating sexual act, though in classical myth, of course, there was no such reservation. But even this degree of antisepsis was insufficient and the further idea was propagated that Christ had been born without contact with “the parts of shame” (as the Germans still call them) by emerging through the breast or navel. So widely was this believed that Ratramnus wrote a long, controversial book to prove that He had been born through the sexual organs in the normal way. (A pendant issue was the question whether Christ was divine from the moment of conception or only from some later point in intra-uterine life: this, too, persisted to modern times, and was only settled in 1856.) Others, who found it difficult to believe that even God could impregnate the Blessed Mary without her losing her virginity developed the idea that she was impregnated through the ear, by the Archangel Gabriel, or by God Himself. An Arab physician declares, “Nafkhae is the name of that particular form of air or vapour which the angel Gabriel is said to have blown or caused to pass from his coat sleeve into the windpipe of Mary, the mother of Jesus, for the purpose of impregnation.”\u00a0(257<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0In some early paintings the Holy Ghost, in the form of a dove, is seen descending at great speed with the divine sperm in its bill; in others the seminal words are seen passing through a lily, on their way from Gabriel’s mouth to Mary’s ear, in order to remove any impurities; in one early carving, they came direct from God’s mouth through a tube which led under her skirts.\u00a0(190<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\nThe process of decontamination was at one time extended to the point at which not only Christ, but Mary herself, was considered to have been born parthenogenetically.<\/p>\n
The Church’s attitude to the ‘copula carnalis<\/i>‘ is especially interesting in view of the oft made claim that the Church substituted for Saxon purchase of the bride the higher concept of a contract freely entered into between responsible individuals. Leaving aside the casuistry of such a claim when applied to children of tender years betrothed by parents, it is incompatible with the doctrine that copulation had magical significance. In contemporary Catholic teaching it is bigamy to marry a woman who has previously committed fornication; and it is bigamy to continue to sleep with one’s wife after she has slept with someone else.\u00a0(38<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0Evidently, the performance of the sexual act is believed to create some new relationship between individuals – and even to destroy a preceding relationship regardless of whether the parties freely enter into a partnership or whether they have no such intention. Thus, what the Church has substituted for purchase, in which at least one party is free, is a magical contamination which leaves neither party free.<\/p>\n
But in mediaeval times, it was realized that such a doctrine would have the unfortunate consequence that a married couple could obtain a divorce by simply swearing that ‘copula carnalis’ had not occurred, a thing which could seldom be disproved unless there were children. Since the fundamental object of the Church was to minimize sexual opportunity this was to be avoided at all costs, and an attempt was therefore made to maintain the position that, while ‘copula carnalis<\/i>‘ converted betrothal to marriage, absence of it did not imply that the marriage was void.
\nThe question was important since the Church recognised no justification for divorce. The early Church had recognised divorce for a limited number of reasons, including barrenness and religious incompatibility, and the penitential books allowed divorce in cases of prolonged absence or capture by the enemy, but the fully developed mediaeval code conceded only annulment or separation. Persons wishing for a divorce were therefore forced either to prove that their original marriage had been invalid, or to rest content with a separation, which could be obtained by proving cruelty, adultery or heresy, but which ruled out the possibility of remarriage to another. Fortunately there was a good number of circumstances which the Church was prepared to recognise as making a match invalid, and some of them were vaguely defined, as for instance “lack of public decency”. Thus, for a sufficient consideration the Church could usually be induced to find a reason for permitting an annulment – the only drawback being that an annulment made any children of the marriage bastards. This power of granting annulments became a major source of revenue to the Church and a source of great scandal.\u00a0(147<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\nSince the simplest way to obtain an annulment was to prove the existence of an earlier marriage, it was tempting for anyone who wished a divorce in order to remarry, to declare that spousals had secretly been entered into at some prior date. This was why the Church was so insistent on the presence of witnesses, and, since witnesses can sometimes be bribed, of a priest. It was also because of this danger that the crying of banns was generally introduced in the mid-Fourteenth century, since this provided an opportunity for anyone knowing of an earlier marriage to come forward.<\/p>\n
It was, of course, as part of its comprehensive attempt to regulate all sexual matters that the Church urged people to take their marriage vows in church, but it could not, in view of its general position, assert that a privately conducted marriage was invalid. It was the Tudor monarchs, untroubled as they were by questions of theology, who first made church marriage compulsory.<\/p>\n
Marriage being, as we have seen, a contaminating process, the Church refused to perform it at certain times of the year: the exact periods varied, but usually embraced Advent, part ( if Lent, and the period between Rogation and Trinity Sundays – that is, the greater parts of March, May and December. (Hence the proverbs, now almost forgotten: “Marry in Lent, and you’ll live to repent. Marry in May and you’ll rue the day.”) At one stage there were only twenty five weeks in the year when marriages were legal – though a marriage undertaken in the forbidden periods, though illicit, was not invalid. The Church also restricted the hours during which marriage could be celebrated. Declaring that such things should be done openly, it first declared that marriage must take place in daylight, but later defined daylight as 8 a.m.. to noon. Though this rule was abolished by the Reformation, Laud restored it and it was embodied in statute law in George II’s time, which accounts for the arbitrariness of the present hours of marriage in England, and perhaps for the fact that the meal following is still called a breakfast. Though the legal hours were extended in modern times, the penalty on any clergyman who performs the frightful crime of marrying a couple after the proper hour, unless by licence, remains at fourteen years penal servitude.\u00a0(137<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
The sexual obsessions of the Church bore with especial hardness on woman. By the Saxons she had been treated as property; now she was treated as the source of all sexual evil as well. Chrysostom, less vindictive than some, spoke of women as a “necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill”. But by the Middle Ages even these qualifications were no longer acceptable “A Good Woman [as an old Philosopher observeth] is but like one Ele put in a bagge amongst 500 Snakes and if a man should have the luck to grope out that one Ele from all the snakes, yet he hath at best but a wet Ele by the Taile.” It was argued that sexual guilt really pertained to women, since they tempted men, who would otherwise have remained pure. One is reminded of the reply of Innocent III to one of his Cardinals: “If one of us is to be confounded, I prefer that it should be you.”
\nHere, too, we find the principle of magical contamination creeping in. Not merely the sexual act, but the mere presence of a woman was liable to attract evil, so that during the plague it was inadvisable to sleep with women or even go near their beds, as this would increase the risk of infection – hence the maxim “In peste Venus pestem provocat”.<\/p>\nThis degradation of the status of woman was very different from the position which had existed in the earliest days of Christianity. Under Roman law, at the end of the period of the Antonine jurisconsults, women had had a status in law equal to that of men. And in the Early Church they had been allowed to preach, to cure, to exorcize and even to baptize. All these rights had been gradually removed, and by the Middle Ages married women ceased even to have legal existence. Though unmarried women had certain legal rights, and could dispose of their own property on reaching their majority, married women were mere shadows of their husbands. “The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage . . . for this reason a man cannot grant anything to his wife or enter into any covenant with her: for the grant would be to presuppose her separate existence, and to covenant with her would be only to covenant with himself”, says Blackstone.\u00a0(240<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
Furthermore any suit against a woman automatically made the husband a defendant: hence husbands must have power to prevent their wives from doing anything which might seem to involve them. It was upon this proposition that the husband’s right to inflict “moderate chastisement” on his wife was based. Though the canon law enjoined husbands to treat their wives mercifully, the civil law said that he could “beat her violently with whips and sticks”. It was permissible to thrash a woman with a cudgel but not to knock her down with iron bar.\u00a0(137<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small><\/p>\n
Because the wife was the husband’s property, to seduce her was an offence against property, and even in early Victorian times, the husband’s first recourse was to bring an action for damages against the paramour. But it was for psychological reasons that the chastity belt was invented. It is a common misconception that these were invented for the benefit of husbands leaving on long absences at the Crusades; their invention is almost certainly later in date, as Dingwall has shown. They were generally designed to prevent penetration per anum as well as per vaginam. Cases of their use by jealous husbands are found at many dates, down to the present day, but popular feeling has always been against them. Brantomet describes how a vendor of these articles, who appeared at the fair of St. Germain, was chased away by the angry populace.<\/p>\n
The levers by which the Church was enabled to obtain some observance of this unparalleled code of sexual repression was the power which it claimed to remit sins, conjoined with the use of the confessional and the provision of ecclesiastical courts.<\/p>\n
The ecclesiastical courts had exclusive rights to try all offences against Church, as opposed to civil law, and sexual offences were almost entirely a matter for the ecclesiastic courts. They attempted to deal with offences against canon law by methods peculiarly their own, and gradually built up system of law completely different from the common law of the land, from the law of Justinian, and from the decretals of Gratian which were supposed to embody the law of the Church. Where the common law was primarily concerned to protect individuals from damage by other individuals, the canon law had a wholly different criterion and frequently regarded as offences actions which harmed none, except possibly the performer. Thus they proceeded against people for “impure thoughts” in a manner exactly analogous to thought-control devised by modern dictatorships. They attempted to prescribe behaviour not only in the major matters of Life, but in many minor matters which could never be made legal offences, such as rejoicing at seeing priests in trouble, refusing to sing in church, sitting in the wrong pew, and even for “passive encouragement” of such crimes. To do this – they had to proceed by methods which inevitably caused numerous injustices.
\nPerhaps the most startling of the devices evolved by these courts was their attempt to use marriage as a punishment for fornication. In the procedure evolved in 1308 by Archbishop Winchelsey, a contract was drawn up on the first offence stating that, in the event of a third offence, the parties were to be considered as having been man and wife as from the time of the first offence.\u00a0(172<\/small><\/small><\/a>)<\/small>\u00a0The legal difficulties consequent upon making a situation in the present depend upon a future event can be imagined! The courts had at their disposal the ultimate penalties of suspension from church, and of excommunication in two degrees. The greater of these was a truly drastic Penalty involving loss of all civil rights, and imprisonment if the offender persisted in his sin. In addition to any penance or penalty imposed, the offender usually had to make a public confession of his sin in church, in front of the congregation and clad in a white sheet, although in more corrupt times it was often possible to commute this by a payment in cash.<\/p>\nIn time, the Church so influenced public opinion that the secular courts began to support and reinforce the ecclesiastical courts, and many of these extraordinary prohibitions became embodied in the law.<\/p>\n
At the Reformation, as we shall see later, many sexual crimes were taken over from the ecclesiastical courts and embodied in civil law: some of these – adultery, for instance-were proper matters for the civil courts, since the rights of persons other than the offender were involved. Others, however were of purely religious origin, notably the laws against adult homosexuality and suicide. The fact that in England today civil prosecution is brought against anyone who attempt suicide does not reflect a fear that people will escape their obligations to society by this method but derives directly from canon law and the notion that it constitutes a spiritual crime \u2014 as the Church’s refusal to bury a suicide in consecrated ground\u00a0still<\/a>\u2014reminds us.<\/p>\n
But it soon was evident that no mere physical system of supervision could hope to regulate the most private doings of a man and even his very thoughts: only a system of psychological control based on terror would serve. The offender must, of his own accord, confess his own sin. The incentive for such confession was found in the claim to be able to remit sins. Christ had given Peter the power of “loosing and unloosing”. This was interpreted as the power to admit to Heaven or to refuse; and it was further postulated, first, that Peter could hand this power on to a successor, and he in turn to his successor, and secondly, that each of these could bestow the power upon lesser members of the hierarchy, and thus to every ordained priest. But to make this power effective it was necessary to emphasize the attractions of Heaven, and the disadvantages of Hell. Unfortunately, the picture drawn of Heaven proved insipid, and it became necessary to dwell with increasing heaviness upon the appalling nature of the torment reserved for sinners, rather than on the loving kindness of God – or perhaps we should attribute this to the fact that Church leaders were often more interested in imagining sadistic horror as a fate for others than eternal bliss. It came to be held that only one person in a million could hope to reach Heaven, and historians have noted the increasing emphasis on the doctrine of damnation throughout this period, and the gradual substitution in the iconography of a stern and vengeful father figure in place of the merciful intercessor, Jesus.<\/p>\n
These were the complex regulations with which the Church surrounded sexual activity. It must be conceded that the claim that these regulations were introduced solely on ethical grounds does not bear examination. Nor is it easy to justify the claim that the Church was concerned to foster rewarding personal relationships.
\nFor in the eyes of the Church, for a priest to marry was a worse crime than to keep a mistress, and to keep a mistress was worse than to engage in random fornication – a judgment which completely reverses secular conceptions of morality, which attach importance to the quality and durability of personal relationships. When accused of being married, it was always a good defence to reply that one was simply engaged in indiscriminate seduction, for this carried only a light penalty, while the former might involve total suspension.\u00a0(