Hello everyone and welcome to the history of England. Episode 149, sex, childbirth and children.

And indeed welcome to the third hand, bust for a while, in the miniseries that forms

my feeble attempt to broaden the coverage, range and appeal of the King's Battles and

Politics podcast. And today we have three topics, sex and the medieval physiology, childbirth,

and something about how to bring up children in the medieval world. I have to note that

it's faintly ironic, is it not, that the episodes I drew from a book on medieval women

should be the only two I have produced which have the explicit tag on them in iTunes,

I seriously do not know how to interpret that. But can I confess that I can feel the

PC ice cracking beneath me as I speak? So as I say I thought I'd do a segment on sex

and let's start there. It'll be short. Madness I hear you say, at a madness. For those

of you with a nervous disposition who don't like seeing podcasts as get themselves into

trouble, turn away now. Okay, are you so turned? For those of you still with me, let's

start with some basics, with Galen, Aristotle and Herpocrates, who between them defined

the basic medical understanding of the medieval world. And of course we should also start with

the church, and it's attitude towards sex. And given that the first shall be last, let's

start with the church. The common assumption about the medieval church is that they thought

sex was just a bad idea and to be avoided. And indeed in the welter of faintly absurd

rules about when you couldn't have sex, which I think we've outed before, that doesn't

seem like a bad assumption. But actually it is a little more complicated than that. Because

God told Adam and Eve to go forth and multiply and hate it or loathe it, that meant sex.

Sex was clearly part of God's plan. Now there might be a lucky few who could withdraw

from the world and avoid it in a monastery and such like. But if everyone did that, humanity

...