![]() He should cleanse his penis as soon as possible, either with his own urine or with vinegar and water. The 14th-century English physician John of Gaddesden suggested several protective measures that a man should take after having sexual relations with a woman he believed to be leprous. Placed within the context of contemporary medical ideas, Arnaud’s fears over his tryst with a prostitute made perfect sense.įortunately for Arnaud, and many others, it was often possible to treat sexually transmitted leprosy. Sores would soon appear on his genitals, before spreading around his body. When the penis of the healthy man came into contact with this vapour, the heat of his body would ensure that it was absorbed through his open pores. The Prose Salernitan Questions, a 13th-century medical text, explained how a woman might be left unharmed after having intercourse with a leper, but her next lover would contract the disease: the coldness of the female complexion meant that the leper’s semen would remain in the woman’s uterus, where it would turn to putrid vapour. Moreover, the concerns of the people of Southwark were rooted in medical theory. Sometimes, for example, local authorities took preventative action: a set of regulations from 15th-century Southwark banished women with a ‘burning sickness’ (probably gonorrhoea) from the local stews (brothels). In fact, the medieval tendency to see disease as sexual sin was not solely based on moral judgments – there were also strong medical elements.Ĭoncerns about the sexual transmission of disease via prostitutes were often addressed in an entirely rational manner. Much has been made of the medieval tendency to interpret disease as a product of sexual sin. Among the various medical miracles attributed to St Thomas Becket, for example, was the cure of Odo de Beaumont, who became leprous immediately after a late-12th-century visit to a prostitute. Many medieval men found themselves with undesirable symptoms after a brothel visit, and attributed their plight to their sexual behaviour. ![]() ![]() I was terrified and thought I had caught leprosy I thereupon swore that in future I would never sleep with a woman again.Īrnaud’s tale is not unusual. And after I had perpetrated this sin my face began to swell. Several years later, he confessed this lapse to the Inquisition, explaining that: At the time they were burning the lepers, I was living in Toulouse one day I did it with a prostitute. One day in the early 14th century, when Arnaud was a student, he had sex with a prostitute. The case of the French cleric Arnaud de Verniolle illustrates the sophistication of medieval sexuality. Christian beliefs interacted with medieval medical theories to help shape some surprising and sophisticated ideas about sex, and a wide variety of different sexual practices, long before the sexual revolution. ![]() While Christian ideals indeed influenced medieval attitudes to sex, they were rather more complex than contemporary prejudices suggest. Many prevailing presumptions about the sex lives of our medieval ancestors are rooted in the erroneous belief that they lived in an unsophisticated age of religious fanaticism and medical ignorance. In reality, the history of human sexuality is far more interesting and wild. Then in the mid-20th century things changed forever when, in Philip Larkin’s oft-quoted words, ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’ Those who fell short of the high moral standards that church, state and society demanded of them faced ostracism and punishment. For centuries, the people of the Christian West lived in a state of sexual repression, straitjacketed by an overwhelming fear of sin, combined with a complete lack of knowledge about their own bodies. ![]() In the popular imagination, the history of sex is a straightforward one. ![]()
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