What medieval attitudes tell us about the evolution of our view of sex

Enlarge / Vintage illustration of medieval women wearing kirtles. A kirtle (sometimes called a cotte or cotehardie) is a garment worn by men and women in the Middle Ages. It eventually became a one-piece garment worn by women from the late Middle Ages through the Baroque period. duncan1890

In the illuminating and entertaining blog Going Medieval, Eleanor Janega, a medievalist at the London School of Economics, upends common misconceptions about medieval Europe. These misunderstandings include that people did not bathe (they did) and that it was the Dark Ages*. Her new book, The Once and Future Sex, is subtitled "Going Medieval on Women's Roles in Society", and that's exactly what she does - if by "going medieval" you hear the pop culture sense of "barbarically dismembering" what, despite his protests, you're probably doing.

His main focus, in the blog and in the book, is to make it easy and convenient for us to envision medieval times as backward in every way, because it makes modern times all the more spectacular . But not only is it bad, it's dangerous. Just because life is definitely better for women today than it was then doesn't mean our current place in society is optimal or destined in any way. It is not.

Progress has not followed a straight line from the bad times then to the good times now. Maintaining that things were horrible then tricks us into thinking that they must be at their peak now. Janega lays out this argument in the introduction, then spends most of the text citing evidence to back it up.

Blame the Greeks

The first chapter describes how medieval Europeans got their ideas about women, sex, beauty, and...well, generally everything from the Greeks. The Greeks viewed men as humans by default; women were viewed spiritually as fallen men (Plato) and physically as upside-down men (Galen). Then came Christianity and its doctrine of original sin, which didn't exactly make men see women in a more favorable light.

"Augustine's message was that even when a man disobeyed God, it was probably because a woman convinced him to do so," she notes. Men wrote down these ideas about women and then spent centuries teaching them to other men in universities and monasteries, where girls were permanently forbidden.

(Nuns were allowed to read, study and think, and surviving records of women who did, such as Hildegard of Bingen [1098-1179] and Christine of Pizan [1364-c.1430], suggest that 'they did not see their own nature as men did. But educated women were rare, and surviving writings by or about them are rarer still.)

Then there is a chapter on beauty standards for women, which mandated golden hair, milky white skin, and rosy cheeks. The adjectives were taken directly from Dares Phrygius, a contemporary of Homer who is said to have witnessed the Trojan War, and they have remained unchanged until…essentially now. Then, as now, women were meant to look that way naturally; God forbid they spend time, money or effort on it. (Literally, wearing makeup was considered one of the most serious sins).

However, medieval men liked to have a big belly on their women. It's the opposite of today's preference for chiseled abs, but both characteristics denote the same trait: wealth. Medieval women with bellies clearly had enough to eat, and today's flat-bellied women clearly have enough free time to work out.

The more things change...

Next comes the chapter on sex. Janega points out that the church-dictated view of women's sexuality during the millennium in question was the exact opposite of our modern view, but served the same function: to put women firmly in their place (benea ...