ICYMI this is my last blog for the year, so I am being true to myself and yelling about sex and racist attempts to whitewash history into an imagined pure past. https://twitter.com/GoingMedieval/status/1339285895208464385

It includes one of my favourite historical sex pictures, this guy absolutely losing it about getting a handy in a really nice park. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1), f. 191r.) I really love this pic for a lot of reasons...

Firstly it is a great call out to courtly love culture. These two are clearly extremely wealthy, and this is how they have sex. In these sort of snatched moments in awkward places.

Secondly, it shows us how popular sodomy was with medieval people. Yes, this is sodomy, because it is sex that cannot result in procreation. Yes, these people are having sex and would absolutely have thought that. We are the ones who define sex as penetrative.

It also combines these two things - courtly love often hinges on sodomy in particular because if you are having sex with someone you aren't married to, it is best to try not to get pregnant. A lot of the sex we see alluded to in courtly love contexts is therefore oral or manual.

There is also another side to this picture, it is a scene from the life of Paul the Hermit, written by St Jerome (who is famous for beating his chest with rocks in order to avoid wanking in a cave in the desert.

ALLEGEDLY according to Jerome the Roman emperor Decius used to "torture" Christian men by sending an "impure woman" to "tempt" them. Or give them handjobs or whatever. (This is not unlike impotence tests to decide divorce in the later medieval period!)

Anyway what this scene shows us, again allegedly, is Paul witnessing such a "torture". He turned his life around when he witnessed a young Christian getting a torture and biting off the tip of his tongue, then spitting it at the "impure woman" to resist the sin of lust.

Paul is like, hell yes, that is my jam, I think I will go live in the desert and also not enjoy sex.
Nice.

Anyway this is a medieval reimagining of a late antique story and it tells us pretty much what I said above. People thought that handies were the sexiest possible thing, and had to be resisted to the last. Jerome only said that Paul saw a guy get "tempted". Not get a handy.

Medieval people were like, you know what the most tempting thing is? HJs. That must be what he meant, and voila. This picture.

Anyway there are layers of meaning to everything, and sex history allows us to peel all of those back in order to understand the competing interests and desires at play. Sex has always been a complicated action with various ways to relate to it. I will never shut up about it.