Beyond Death

A few months ago, I wrote about sex toys in the Middle Ages, you can find the article here.

Today I’ve chosen to step into the bedrooms of both common people and royals, to show that no matter which century you live in, or where you live, sexuality has always remained the same throughout the ages, though with some decidedly peculiar features. But hey, it was still considered medicine!

In our imagination, the Middle Ages are a dark era, marked by prohibitions and forced chastity. Yet sexuality between men and women in the fifteenth century was far more complex, and surprisingly similar to ours, even if shaped by rules and beliefs that now strike us as bizarre.

For medieval physicians, male seed was not just reproductive material: it was a vital substance, tied to the body’s balance and even to mental health. And it was not supposed to die unused.
If it stagnated, it could provoke melancholy or illness. That’s why men were advised to “release” regularly: ideally within marriage, of course, but also through daily masturbation or with prostitutes.

The Church condemned it (at least in theory) as a sin, but medicine considered it a therapeutic act.

And the women?
“Strange” as it may sound, women too were regarded as producers of seed. To conceive, it was thought necessary for them to experience pleasure.
This created an ambivalent view: female pleasure was recognized and even encouraged in reproductive terms, but at the same time it was feared, perceived as uncontrollable and dangerous.

There was no shortage of medical recipes to stimulate or calm desire, showing that female sexuality was far from invisible.
And above all, masturbation was sometimes recommended by “expert doctors”, to prevent female seed from stagnating and causing a “fluid intoxication” that would later be called hysteria.

So yes: according to medieval medicine, women produced seed useful for reproduction (and, to be fair, they weren’t completely wrong, the idea was there, it just needed refining!). Women had to experience orgasm to conceive, and husbands were expected to study their wives’ bodies carefully, so they could enjoy themselves and bear many heirs.

For the Church, sex was only lawful within marriage and only for procreation.

Everything else was a sin: adultery, extramarital relations, sodomy (a broad term covering homosexual acts, oral and anal sex), and masturbation.

The reality, however, was very different.

Cities had regulated, taxed brothels. In fact, as mentioned earlier, men were allowed to visit prostitutes: it was believed this prevented them from taking mistresses, abandoning their wives to remarry, or even committing rape (unfortunately extremely common at the time, but that will be the subject of another post).

The courts were full of lovers and extramarital affairs. And popular literature, from the French fabliaux to Boccaccio’s Decameron, spoke of sex with irony and freedom.

In the end, men and women of the fifteenth century weren’t so different from us. They sought pleasure, love, and transgression, but lived in a world that constantly judged them.

Sex was both sin and medicine, guilt and cure, prohibition and necessity.
A fragile balance that strongly reminds us of the contradictions of our own age.

If you’re curious, I also wrote about the sensual games played at court, you can find that article here.