Conclusions: The Church and the Regulation of Sexual Behavior in the Early Middle Ages

The work of Rcgino of Priim typifies the common teaching of the Western Church concerning proper sexual behavior at the beginning of the tenth cen­tury. Churchmen had reached agreement by this period that only married per­sons should have sex and that they should do so primarily in order to conceive children.

The aversion to sex that had become a central feature of Christian thought by the tenth century reflected a further characteristic of the early medieval Church: the ascendency of the monastic ideal and the presumption that ascetic virtues represented the highest form of Christian life. By the tenth century, monks, who were bound to a rule of complete sexual abstinence, had imposed on Europe’s married population rules of periodic continence that made mar­riage more sexually frustrating than celibacy. At the same time, influential fig­ures in this period increasingly favored imposing celibacy upon the secular clergy as well as monks. Although marriage was not generally prohibited to clerics in the tenth century, authorities often exhorted clerics in the West to cast their wives, concubines, and children out of their homes and to embrace a celibate virtue that few secular clerics seem to have desired.

The penitentials, as we have seen, gave central prominence to sexual of­fenses; in so doing they implicitly told both confessor and penitent that sexual purity was the key element in Christian morality. The penitentials also re­inforced the belief that there was a hierarchy of sexual offenses and subtly pro­pounded a slightly different ordering of that hierarchy than appears in the writ­ings of earlier Church authorities. Whereas earlier writers paid only scant attention to masturbation and homosexual practices, the penitentials often pre­scribed stern penances for homosexual activities and slight ones for masturba­tion. The implicit message was that homosexuality was among the most heinous offenses in the catalogue of sins.^[695] Solitary masturbation, by contrast, ranked as the least serious sexual indulgence. The reordered emphases on masturbatory and homosexual activities that surfaced in the penitentials mirrored the experi­ence and concerns of the monastic environment in which most penitential writ­ers received their spiritual and intellectual formation. Their handbooks en­sured that monastic beliefs about these types of sexual behavior would be imparted, both directly and indirectly, to the laity.

The penitentials also fostered the emergence of a distinctively ecclesiastical view of marriage. The clerical model of marriage promoted the concept that

marriage was a lifelong committment; accordingly this paradigm restricted di­vorce, prohibited remarriage following divorce, and discouraged second mar­riages following the death of a first spouse.^[696] The ecclesiastical view of marriage was by no means universally accepted in the tenth century, but it gradually se­cured endorsement even from lay authorities as the norm for Christian married conduct—this was reflected in Carolingian divorce legislation, for example, as well as in the penitentials and the dogmatic assertions of churchmen.

Although early medieval Churchmen sometimes linked ecclesiastical doc­trines concerning marriage and sex to the reproductive needs of humankind, the clerical elite seemed largely indifferent to the social consequences of their matrimonial doctrines.^[698]

But the restrictions that the Church placed on sexual activity, marital and nonmarital, entailed serious consequences. Ideas about sexual propriety that took shape during the early Middle Ages took solid institutional root in the fol­lowing period. During the tenth century, civil authorities also began to adopt restrictive policies on sex and marriage propounded by earlier generations of churchmen. The process of systematically converting Church doctrines about sex into legal prescriptions was just commencing around the year 1000.