Introduction

Every human society attempts to control sexual behavior, since sex represents a rich source of conflicts that can disrupt orderly social processes. Human sexu­ality is too powerful and explosive a force for any society to allow its members complete sexual freedom.

Historians and others in recent decades have begun to appreciate that sexual beliefs and practices exert power, not only over individual conduct, but also over the ways in which institutions themselves grow and develop. Marriage, adultery, fornication, prostitution, rape, sodomy, and celibacy—all have sig­nificant bearings upon property interests, household structure, and notions about morality, among many other things.

During the Middle Ages a peculiarly Western sexual ethos gradually took shape in Europe. The canon law played a crucial role in its formation, and much medieval sex law remains firmly embedded in modern law, thought, and prac­tice. Early medieval intellectuals inherited and blended together notions about sexual ethics and propriety that they found in the writings of ancient philoso­phers, lawyers, and moralists. On these foundations, later medieval authorities constructed a more comprehensive and systematic sexual doctrine. For better and for worse, major elements of this medieval doctrine concerning sex still dominate our lives.

Medieval beliefs about sexual morality rested upon basic ideas borrowed in large part from non-Christian sources in late antiquity. Many sexual beliefs and attitudes common in medieval Europe were Christian by adoption, not by ori­gin.

Detailed treatments of ideas about sex and a well-developed rationale to sup­' port them did not appear in Christian literature until the fourth and fifth cen­turies, the patristic age. Sexual morality became a central Christian issue only during the generation of St. Jerome and St. Augustine. It is not coincidental that the period in which Christians began to formulate their ideas about sexual ethics clearly and explicitly was also the period in which Christianity secured the support of the Roman government. Christianity during this period became a Roman legal institution, both in the sense that Christians were protected by law from religious persecution and in the further sense that the Christian Church was beginning to create its own religious law, which relied heavily on the power of the state and was often enforced by public authority.

The attitudes and views of patristic writers about sexual morality were both original and derivative. They were derivative in that they echoed views about these subjects voiced by other educated people (some Christian, some not) in their own generation and the generations immediately preceding theirs. They were original in that they brought together elements that had never previously been combined.

Christian notions about sexual morals consisted in large part of ancient no­tions about proper behavior cloaked in a soutane rather than a toga. Stoicism (or more accurately, certain varieties of Stoic thought) furnished the Church Fathers with many of their central ideas about sexual conduct. What was origi­nal in patristic sexual morality was its singular mixture of Stoic ethical ideas with ancient religious beliefs about ritual purity, supported by a theological ra­tionale based in large part on the Hebrew scriptures. Christian sexual morality is a complex assemblage of pagan and Jewish purity regulations, linked with primitive beliefs about the relationship between sex and the holy, joined to Stoic teachings about sexual ethics, and bound together by a patchwork of doc­trinal theories largely invented in the fourth and fifth centuries.^[4]

Christian sexual morality began to take shape as doctrine during the fourth and fifth centuries; it gradually began to be transformed into law beginning in the mid-sixth century. When I say that sexual morality became doctrine, I mean that the views on sex expressed by the Fathers slowly took coherent form and began to be integrated into a larger body of theological ideas about anthro­pology, psychology, and cosmology. When I say that this body of beliefs com­menced to be transformed into law, I mean that it began to be expressed as rules of conduct to which Christians were obliged to conform under penalty of dis­agreeable sanctions.

During the early Middle Ages, patristic doctrines on sexual morality were gradually accepted as part of the developing canon law of the Church.

Until the fourteenth century, canon law retained a virtual monopoly on legal control of lust and its physical manifestations. Laymen and secular courts prior to that time occasionally asserted jurisdiction over rape, more rarely over adul­tery and prostitution; otherwise they left sexual matters to the Church courts. After about 1300 and especially after 1350, however, municipalities and other lay authorities moved with greater urgency and increasing effectiveness into the business of imposing limits and controls upon sexual conduct, especially nonmarital or extramarital sexual relationships. The sixteenth-century Refor­mation gave still greater impetus to this Iaicization of jurisdiction over sex matters. Protestant princes welcomed the Reformers’ attacks on canon law and took the opportunity to extend their jurisdiction over matrimonial litigation and sex crimes. Despite this, however, an astonishing amount of medieval sex law remained intact, even in the most staunchly Protestant regions.^[6] In those parts of Europe that remained within the Roman obedience, jurisdiction over sexual transgressions also passed largely into the hands of lay authorities, al­though the Church retained control over marriage law in a few Catholic coun­tries until late in the twentieth century.

The terms “Western” and “Christian” are SufRciently vague that I should say something about how I have used them in this study. “Western” includes, but is not limited to, the institutions, values, and especially the laws of Western Eu­rope, together with the dominant cultures of regions successfully colonized by Europeans in modern times.^[7]1 have not attempted to deal with the sexual be­liefs and laws of Eastern Christendom or of other non-Western religions, al­though I have included a brief sketch of Jewish sex law and its implications for Christian beliefs.

An even broader meaning is attached to “Christian” in these pages. When I refer to people and regions as Christian, I mean that they predominantly pro­fess one or another brand of Christianity; but the label “Christian” also applies to many other individuals who, while not formally affiliated with any church, nonetheless subscribe tacitly (often unconsciously) to Christian values, includ­ing Christian sexual ethics.

As mentioned earlier, most medieval beliefs about sex bore little relationship to any statements of Christ. If “Christian” means what Jesus of Nazareth is re­ported to have taught, then there is not much Christian teaching about sexu­ality to discuss. Jesus was in favor of marriage (although apparently he did not practice it) and he opposed adultery (which is a special case of his general con­demnation of deception and infidelity). He also seems to have disapproved of promiscuity and commercial sex, although he scandalized some of his contem­poraries by befriending prostitutes. But it remained for medieval Church au­thorities, confident of the authenticity of their own beliefs, to wrap their views on sex and the family in the mantle of Christian orthodoxy.

Not every opinion aired by medieval canonists and theologians, to be sure, received official recognition. Medieval European society was notably pluralistic and encompassed diverse views about the morality of various kinds of sexual behavior and about the role that law (as opposed to less public and less formal sanctions) ought to play in controlling them. Despite claims to the contrary, Christian sexual ethics have been neither uniform nor static. Instead, Christian views of sex have changed over time as the Church has adapted itself to changes in society. It is not surprising that this should be true, but since the contrary is often asserted, it is important to be clear about the matter from the outset.⁷

Three major patterns of sexual doctrine underlie the diverse beliefs about sexual morality that have been current in Western Christendom since the pa­tristic period. One pattern centered on the reproductive function of sex and established nature and the natural as the criterion of what was licit; the second focused on the notion that sex was impure, a source of shame and defilement; the third emphasized sexual relations as a source of intimacy, as a symbol and expression of conjugal love. Medieval writers placed greater emphasis upon the first two patterns, but at various times prior to the Reformation, and in many segments of Christian society since then, all three approaches and the conse­quences deduced from them have been held and taught in various combinations.

Another key element in shaping the medieval sexual ethos was the devel­oped legal systems that arose in Western Europe after a.d. iioo. As noted above, the adjudication of sexual transgressions, whether in Church tribunals or in secular courts, turned upon norms that the canon lawyers enunciated. As legal regulation of sexual behavior in medieval Europe gradually changed over time, the views of ecclesiastical lawyers and law teachers largely shaped the changes that occurred.

The three approaches to sexuality outlined above shaped the main contours

’Assertions of this kind are a routine part of the rhetoric of papal declarations about sexual matters; see e.g., Pope Paul VI, Humanae vitae § n, and Pope John Paul II, Fa­miliaris consortio § 29. But cf. Willy Rordorff, “Marriage in the New Testament and in the Early Church, ” Journal of Ecclesiastical History [cited hereafter as JEH] 20 (1969) 193 and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “L’attitude a Vegard du petit enfant et les Conduites sexuelles dans Ia civilisation occidentale: structures ancienncs ct evolution,” Annales de demographie Iiistorique (1973) 195.

of medieval sexual teaching. The doctrines constructed by medieval thinkers have furnished the foundations for sexual theory and practice in the West today. Thus, the legal regulation of marriage and divorce, together with the outlawing of bigamy and polygamy and the imposition of criminal sanctions on fornica­tion, adultery, sodomy, fellatio, cunnilingus, and bestiality—whether these ac­tivities are pursued for fun or profit—are all based in large measure upon ideas and beliefs about sexual morality that became law in Christian Europe during the Middle Ages. Other medieval legal doctrines have been abandoned al­together or modified radically during the past four centuries, as a result of changes in the economy, in social structure, in political systems, and in personal beliefs. Yet Western standards of acceptable sexual behavior have remained re­markably conservative, despite radical changes in the religious context from which they sprang. Basic innovations in this area of the law have been uncom­mon during the post-Reformation centuries.

As part of our medieval heritage, most of us still retain a deeply ingrained belief that sex is shameful and that respectable people should conduct their sex­ual activities in private, hidden in the dark. We normally do not mention sexual matters in polite society save in the most indirect ways. These attitudes and beliefs are largely consequences of patristic and early medieval religious teach­ings holding that sex was a source of moral defilement, spiritual pollution, and ritual impurity; hence, the argument ran, human sexuality was something to be ashamed of because it was both a result and a source of sin.^[8]

The belief that sex, despite the superficial glamor sometimes attached to it, is at worst disgusting and at best absurd remains deeply ingrained in our cul­tural assumptions. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-82), for example, considered sex­ual intercourse a ludicrous contrivance and marveled at the Creator s lapse in taste when He made human reproduction depend on sexual coupling:

I could be content [wrote Browne] that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetu­ate the world without this trivial and worldly way of union: it is the foolishest act a wise man commits in all his life, nor is there anything that will more deject his cooled imagination when he shall consider what an odd and unworthy piece of folly he hath committed.^[9]

The other side of this pervasive disdain for sex is the veneration (but not always the practice) of the ideal of chastity. The exaltation of sexual abstinence implies a rejection and disapproval of sex for pleasure, of recreational sex, and above all of promiscuity. Western Christians have historically accepted (and at some level most of us still maintain) an unarticulated allegiance to an ascetic ideal of sexual morals: the less sex, the better; the more, the worse. Implicit in this is a belief that virtue demands self-control, and self-control means a rejec­tion of pleasure: whatever feels good is probably wrong.

Christian teaching since the patristic period has postulated a tension be­tween salvation and pleasure: most influential Christian thinkers have nurtured a gloomy suspicion that the one cannot be attained without renouncing the other. Similarly the medieval Church long remained suspicious, even hostile, toward family ties. The Church’s leaders suspected that conjugal affection and parental love often disguised sensual entanglements and worldly values. For that reason, theologians and canonists saw little value in family attachments. These views had momentous consequences for the ways in which medieval people defined and described their intimate relationships and emotions. The same notions continue to shape assumptions about sex and intimacy in the late twentieth century.^[10]

Yet another common belief about sexual matters in the Western Christian tradition is the notion that “nature” constitutes a reliable test of the morality of various types of sexual behavior. What is “natural” often means whatever is thought (correctly or not) to be the usual practice of the majority. Thus hetero­sexual marital intercourse at night in the missionary position is identified as “natural” for human beings and hence morally acceptable. Other coital posi­tions in other circumstances are morally dubious or wrong. But “natural,” in this context, is ambiguous, and medieval writers used the term as inconsistently as Unreflective moralists still do. Thus, for example, mammals other than hu­mans do not usually copulate in the missionary position; many of them mate in such a way that the male penetrates the female from the rear. Moralists there­fore reject dog-style coitus as unnatural for humans, because it is common among animals of other species. For other types of sexual behavior, however, the test of what is natural becomes, inconsistently enough, the sexual behavior of other animals. Thus homosexual relations and masturbation are labeled “un­natural” because it is widely (but incorrectly) believed that animals do not en­gage in these practices. In point of fact, every type of copulation that can be conceived, every posture that is anatomically possible, every “unnatural” de­viation that can be imagined occurs somewhere in “nature.” Despite this, the ambiguous distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” sex remains ingrained in the vocabulary and value systems of Western Christian societies.^[11]

Western Christendom has been more restrictive in its interdiction of sensual pleasure than most other human societies. Western Christians have commonly associated sensuality with sin, guilt, and fear of damnation. This has, among other things, placed severe restraints in many Western societies on the display of affection between husband and wife, between parent and child, or between one friend and another, lest displays of feeling and affection arouse sexual re­sponses or be suspected of cloaking lascivious advances. Virtue has come to be identified with sexual abstinence, purity with the rejection of sexuality, and emotional repression with maturity.^[12] While other societies have sensed that sexuality involves great power—often represented by phallic symbols of vari­ous kinds—and hence must be exercised with restraint, few of them have car­ried the fear of sexuality to the point of loathing and disgust, as Western Chris­tians have done.

Christian ideas about sex so permeate Western mentality that we generally accept them without examining them or identifying them as particularly Chris­tian, although people in other societies find them distinctly odd as well as dis­tinctively Western. One of these peculiar attitudes is the tendency to identify morals primarily, even exclusively, with sexual behavior. When, for instance, Lionel Smith Beale a century ago published a book under the title Our Moral­ity and the Moral Question, neither he nor his readers seem to have thought it remarkable that the only moral questions raised in the book had to do with sex. Or, to cite a legal example, the legislators who drafted and adopted the Mann Act in 1910 knew perfectly well when they spoke in that Act of transporting women in interstate commerce “for any... immoral purpose” that it was ex­clusively sexual immorality that they meant.^[13]

The medieval sexual tradition fabricated powerful taboos that have colored the lives of men and women for scores of generations. While these taboos have provided a framework within which people have been and continue to be able to make choices about their personal conduct, they have also exacted an enor­mous toll in misery and despair. Both individuals and Western society as a whole have been poorer as a result.

Loading sexual relations with a freight of sin and guilt is not, of course, ex­clusively either a Western or a Christian phenomenon. Both traditional Jewish and Islamic cultures, for example, demand conformity to religious standards of sexual behavior and impose stringent moral sanctions upon those who deviate from the religious norms. But neither Judaism nor Islam has identified sex as something intrinsically evil or as the central element in morality, as Christian writers have often done.

The Christian horror of sex has for centuries placed enormous strain on indi­vidual consciences and self-esteem in the Western world. This tradition has had the effect of banishing sex from polite and rational discussion, making sexual relations something to be pursued secretly, furtively, and in the dark, even be­tween married persons for whom these activities are usually legal. Christian morality has created sexual sin on a massive scale, with the bizarre result that well-intentioned married men and women have scarcely been able to beget a child without pangs of conscience and mortal dread, lest they enjoy the experi­ence and die before they repent their pleasure.^[14]

There is no necessary reason to label sex as either virtuous or vile. But al­though sex may be morally indifferent in itself, the devices adopted to control it are seldom morally neutral. Medieval society required, as all societies do, some kinds of control that would channel sexual drives into outlets that people were prepared to accept and tolerate. The appropriateness and value of retaining me­dieval sexual ethics in the modern world requires thoughtful evaluation, not unreflecting acceptance. The mechanisms employed in medieval Europe to re­strain sexual behavior within acceptable limits were devised to meet needs and assumptions quite different from our own. The coercive power of Church and state at that time could scarcely ever be exercised efficiently or effectively over great distances or for long periods of time, as they can now. In addition, the rationale that underlay medieval mechanisms for restraining sexual activity de­pended upon assumptions about the nature of the universe, the workings of human psychology, anatomy, and physiology, and the relationship between God and man that are no longer widely shared in the industrialized societies of the developed world. This study will explore how the system of sexual control in a world we have half-forgotten has shaped the one in which we live.