Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (19 page)

The masses of early European peasantry never studied Saint Augustine. Nearly all could not read. Rather, they relied on their local clerics to translate the word of God into comprehensible terms. Abstruse questions about the divinity of Christ or the nature of the Trinity were irrelevant in the villages and farms. What did concern people, and what priests spent much of their time addressing, was sex. Clerics were the moral police of the early Middle Ages. They taught that deliverance from hell depended on avoiding sex whenever possible and having it, when necessary, in limited ways.

The broad outlines of Christian sex policy were crafted by the likes of Augustine and Jerome, but for more than five hundred years the real business was accomplished in church confessionals. Many of the priests and penitents must have known each other well, but in the dark of the confessional booth their relations were anything but neighborly. When priests took on the role of confessors, they were no longer old friends or spiritual guides: They were judges who sized up the penitents’ misdeeds and meted out the consequences. The sacrament of confession required penitents to divulge every detail of their sex lives—their dreams, emissions, positions, infidelities. As nearly everything people did sexually was forbidden, the process must have been terrifying. Upon hearing the confessions, the priests consulted handbooks called penitentials, which assigned specific penances for every sin. The penitentials were the church’s field guides for ranking good and bad sexual behavior.

The handbooks were not written by the top officials of the church but compiled locally, and varied considerably from parish to parish. Despite their differences, they all delivered the same basic message: All sex was dirty and polluting, but some kinds of sex were worse than others. Some penitentials listed hundreds of different sex acts and thoughts, each carrying its own penance. The purpose of doing penance, which usually consisted of fasting along with additional restrictions on sexual conduct, was to earn God’s forgiveness, but some sins required more forgiveness than others. “Just as it is more abominable to mix [a man] with a mule than with a male,” one penitential held, “so it is a more irrational crime [to mix] with a male than with a female.” Similarly, a wet dream was not as sinful as masturbating while awake.

The first penitentials came out of the grim wastes of sixth-century Ireland, where abstinence among Christians had become a fetish. One well-admired hermit named Scothian tested his virtue by living in the same room with two “pointy-breasted” women who tried to arouse him every day. When he could bear no more temptation, he jumped into a tub of cold water. In this environment the Celtic missionary Saint Columbanus wrote his guidebook, which he brought from Ireland to England and the Continent. The utility of a catalogue of sins and corresponding penances was quickly understood, and soon penitentials were being compiled throughout Europe, each adapting itself to local priorities. The process went on until at least the twelfth century, when they were in use everywhere confession was taken.

Some penitentials suggested lines of questioning for priests to smoke out sinful behavior. One eleventh-century guidebook required that men be asked: “Have you coupled with your wife or another woman from behind, like dogs?” The same book required that women be asked about aphrodisiacs, lesbianism, bestiality, masturbation, abortions, oral consumption of semen, and the use of their menstrual blood as a love charm. Saint Albertus Magnus said such detail was required because of the “monstrous things heard these days in confession,” but others worried that too much hot talk in the confessional was counterproductive. In 821, Theodulf of Orléans warned confessors not to put ideas into people’s heads with such detailed questions:

There are many vices recorded in the penitential which it is not proper for a person to know. Therefore, the priest ought not to question him about everything, lest, perhaps, when he goes away he be persuaded by the devil to fall into one of the crimes of which he had been previously ignorant.

For the same reasons, Pope Nicholas I told Bulgarian churchmen a few years later not even to
show
penitential handbooks to laymen.

The penitentials prohibited sex between husbands and wives during the first three days of marriage as well as Sundays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, the three Lents, the weeks following Easter, the days preceding the Pentecost, the two months around Christmas, and hundreds of other holy days, not to mention during a woman’s pregnancy, lactation, or menstruation. At best, that left about four days per month. Even then, there were strict rules. Sex was never to take place during the daytime, and there was to be no fondling or lewd kisses ever. One handbook forbade husbands from seeing their wives naked. No sexual positions other than the missionary, male-on-top variety were allowed, because they were animal-like and too stimulating. Oral and anal sex were punishable by up to twenty-five years of fasting and abstinence. After sex took place, moreover, people were expected to vigorously wash themselves and avoid going to church.

With such a battery of restrictions, sex was always risky. Many married couples presumably avoided making embarrassing revelations to their priests, but their silence could not have erased their fear of divine punishment. Priests told their congregations harrowing stories of children born with defects or leprosy because they were conceived during forbidden periods. As hard as it was to do penance, it seems that many married people were still forthcoming in confession. How else could the writer of one penitential even know about a wife mixing an aphrodisiac using her husband’s semen, or a couple compulsively engaging in fellatio, or another couple practicing rear-entry sex in a standing position to accommodate the husband’s obesity? All of these were forbidden, and assigned penances.

If married couples were supposed to act like monks most of the time, priests and nuns were under even tighter sexual restrictions. Marriage among the clergy was common until finally forbidden in the eleventh century, but the church exhorted coupled priests to have “chaste marriages,” meaning that they were to abstain from having sex with their wives. Church authorities were not fooled by priests who kept servant women in their houses or monasteries, either. As early as 325 AD, all females were barred from cohabitating with priests except their mothers and women who were “above suspicion.”

Sex with an unmarried woman brought one year of penance for a layman, but a cleric could expect to incur three to seven years of fasting, and a bishop twelve. If a priest took another man’s wife to bed, one penitential demanded that he live on bread and water for up to twelve years, depending on his rank. A further range of penalties applied when a church official used enchantment to spark his partner’s desire: “If anyone has used magic to excite love . . . let him do penance on bread and water for a whole year, if a cleric . . . if a deacon, for two; if a priest, three.” A lonely monk who took a cow as his lover would be punished twice as severely as the lay owner of the beast would be for committing the same sin.

Every penitential forbade masturbation, but priests gave each other light penances for it. The ninth-century
Paenitentiale Bigotianum
gave a three-week penance to self-abusing priests while forcing lay offenders to repent for up to a full year. Clerics also seemed to expect that their religious meditations would be interrupted by sexual thoughts. The
Canons
of Theodore gave a priest only a week of penance if he ejaculated with “thoughts alone”—but the book radically increased the punishment if he erupted in the company of a woman. For laymen, the punishment for masturbation depended on who did it and how it was accomplished. Women, for example, were punished more harshly than men for using artificial aids. Men who used mechanical help were required to undergo only forty days of penance, while a woman’s use of a dildo carried a penance of one year if she used it alone and three years if she shared it with another woman.

Masturbation came in for much harsher treatment in later centuries. In 1388, the French theologian Jean Gerson deemed it an abomination that led to sodomy. He wrote an entire treatise for priests to use on hearing the confessions of masturbators. Gerson recognized that few boys or men were ready to confess to the act, so he counseled priests to take a blunt approach: “Friend, didn’t you touch or rub your member the way boys usually do?” If the penitents still refused to disclose their offenses, priests were to remind them how serious it was to lie in confession. He also recommended a series of cooling-off exercises for masturbators such as frequent prayer, flagellation, dousing of cold water, and spitting on the ground while renouncing the devil.

The writers of the penitentials also universally condemned homosexual activity, but, as with masturbation, the penances varied depending on what one did and how often. According to one Irish penitential, boys experimenting with anal sex were to do penance for two years, men were given three years for the same commission, and habitual offenders, seven. Some confessors imposed lifelong sentences for fellatio (whether performed by men or women). Lesbianism was also treated harshly, especially when compared with other sexual crimes. One German penitential mandated three years of fasting for it—the same penance given to a man who raped a widow or virgin.

People’s close proximity to livestock is reflected in the benign treatment the early penitentials accorded for bestiality. At first it was treated merely as a form of masturbation, but eventually the penances became more severe—especially if the offender was a cleric. One penitential seemed to understand that boys were prone to experiment with animals, but that was expected to end with the coming of adulthood. Boys confessing to bestiality were given only forty days’ penance, while adults were ordered to do one year’s worth. The animals were treated with much less compassion: Theodore’s penitential demanded that “animals polluted by coitus with men are to be killed and their flesh thrown to dogs.”

Perhaps one reason animals received so little mercy was that they had no money to pay anyone off. Many penitentials allowed sinners to buy their way out of atonement. This kept church coffers full and allowed people of means to avoid the fuss and embarrassment of doing penance. Newlyweds who wanted to consummate their marriage on their wedding night, when sex was normally forbidden, could usually get the divine go-ahead by giving the church some money. In England, the one-year penance for having sex during Lent could be ignored upon payment of a substantial sum. Another penitential allowed a rich man to avoid a seven-year fast by paying 840 men to fast with him for three days.

Despite inevitable corruption in the atonement process, penitentials provided Christians with clear guidance as to what they could do with their bodies, and at what cost. A man who had sex with a pig knew that he was being less offensive to God than he would be if he had anal intercourse with his wife, and women in some regions knew they could draw a longer period of penance for performing fellatio on a man than for killing him outright. We can’t know the extent to which the penitentials were actually followed, but it is safe to assume that many offenders tried to fall in line: Fear of damnation is a hard burden for a believer to bear, even if it means having sex only a few days per month. The population of Europe declined from the year 500 to 1050 (approximately)—the period when the penitentials held their greatest influence. As later Christian law allowed married couples to engage in sex more often, the population began to grow. There are, of course, dozens of good reasons for such broad demographic changes, but every explanation must accept the simple truth: Population growth depends on plentiful intercourse.

The penitentials were gradually replaced after the new millennium by general laws enforced by formal courts, but the former’s influence would be felt for centuries. Sex in all its forms retained its immoral stench, and we can still smell it. As recently as 1980, Pope John Paul II declared that married men were morally guilty of adultery if they felt passionate sexual desire for their wives—an attitude we can trace directly back to the early medieval period and the gloomy moral universe of the penitentials.
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SEX ON DEMAND: RAPE, THE MARITAL DEBT, AND THE
DROIT DE SEIGNEUR

Rape was not condoned in the Middle Ages, but neither was there much concern about it. Only in the rarest of cases was it taken seriously as an act of violence. Rape was seen by late medieval/early Renaissance courts as a kind of mating ritual, after which the attackers and victims were required to marry each other. Even where rape was explicitly condemned, the courts looked for ways to go easy on the accused attackers, either by ruling that the females had consented to the sex or that they should have submitted to the man under the circumstances.

Rape disputes traditionally focused less on sex than on money. Roman law viewed rape as a species of theft: the abduction of female property from her guardians. Women were little different than horses or furniture. As Christianity took hold in Rome, rape was patchily redefined as a sexual crime in itself, but the law still remained very hard on the victims. Wellborn girls could be executed along with their abductors if they were found to be willing. In many cases, females were punished even if they did not consent, on the theory that they could have put up more effective resistance. Furthermore, if their maids or chaperones were found to have helped the rapist come into the house, molten lead was poured down the servants’ gullets.

In the sixth century, the Roman emperor Justinian made the abduction or rape of females a capital crime, applicable to all classes. The families of the victims were allowed to kill the culprit if they caught him in the act. To prevent payoffs, females were barred from marrying their ravishers. These changes were significant in that they defined rape as a crime not only against property, but also against women. However, the concept did not endure, and did little in the end to protect females from forced sex or marriage by capture.