Tom O’Donnell

In order to conjure up the sexual practices of our forebears we have to bridge gaps. Gaps in language, time and ways of thinking. In order to write a history of medieval sexuality we need to know what that sexuality consisted of. It is hard enough to mentally recreate the sex lives of our friends from idle gossip when we know the euphemisms, the forms of reference, what is on the sexual menu and what is thought permissible. But for medieval sex lives we have to work creatively with our sources to understand what people were doing with one another. And there is a constant challenge with the written sources.

Mouth of Hell, Meester van Katharina van Kleef
Mouth of Hell, Meester van Katharina van Kleef, c. 1440 (Wikimedia Commons)

Our early medieval texts were mostly written by a monastic community, for a monastic community. In this world there is a more marked interest in ejaculation and the fate of semen. This is because semen not used for procreative purposes is more obviously a sin against the propagation of the human race. This is the view of Thomas Aquinas: that the natural point of semen is to beget children so spilling it anywhere but the vagina is contra natura or unnatural.

Is the medieval female sexual experience, then, inaccessible to the historian? If ejaculation is all that theologians and moralists were concerned with, are all other sex acts covered in a veil of silence? 

References to other sexual practices are scarce and scattered. But one interesting example comes from a work written between the late eighth and early ninth century. A penitential, written in Old Irish and ‘imaginatively’ called The Old Irish Penitential, provides a list of the penances due for committing a whole host of moral transgressions. The text is divided into sections on six of the eight chief vices (gluttony was in the manuscript but has subsequently been lost, and pride never made the cut). The section on the sins of lust includes two very interesting entries:

Nech dogni etrath o belaib iiii anni in cet-fecht ma gnathach acnapthe vii annis.

Nech touisim a sil hi gin a banscal penneth dib línaib v annos ma gnathach vii annos.

In English these are:

Anyone who performs the fornication of the lips penance for four years if it is their first time but if it is usually their custom seven.

Anyone who spills his seed in the mouth of a woman must pay full penance for five years, if it is a usual thing, seven.

The latter directly refers to fellatio. Once more we can see the concern for semen that is spilled to no procreative purpose. In the context of this reference to oral sex, itself quite rare in medieval sources, the first entry is likely to refer to cunnilingus. The word for ‘lips’, bel, used in the Irish is that used for the lips of the mouth. But, just as in English, this can be the lips of the vagina as well, for example in the description of the hag in Togail Bruidne Da Derga, or The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel. 

This is a form of sex just for pleasure. Yet it does not elicit a greater censure. In terms of penance, the offender gets off lighter if it is his first time going down on a woman than if he was given a blowjob. What is most illuminating is the way in which the sexual roles are constructed in both cases. A modern audience would see going down on a woman and receiving a blowjob as inverse examples of one another. In the first case the man is active, performing the deed, in the other he is passively receiving it. However, our medieval author has made the man the active partner in both instances: he is the one who performs the fornication of the lips but he is the one who spills his seed as well. This constant emphasis on the male experience is all we have to try and see the full range of sexual experience.

It is in these short references, laconically phrased and difficult to interpret, that we can see how people in the Middle Ages had sex. This is the great challenge of writing the early medieval chapter of the history of sexuality. Once we know the kind of sex people were having, we might start to answer the more interesting question: how they felt about it.

Tom O’Donnell is a PhD candidate at University College London. He works on childbirth and child-rearing in medieval Europe, concentrating especially on twelfth- and thirteenth-century Ireland. 



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