Medieval Sex
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 12.9K Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Warning: this episode contains explicit language.
Medieval people weren’t prudish—far from it. Dan is joined by medieval historian Dr Eleanor Janega to explore sex, marriage, and desire in the Middle Ages. They delve into the beliefs around sodomy as “non-procreative sex”; pilgrimages as raucous release valves, raunchy art and love spells. They'll look at sex habits among the different classes, queer lives in monasteries, widows’ freedoms, abortion, STIs, and the risks of childbirth, and what purgatory had in store for the lustful. Along the way, they bust myths from chastity belts to teenage brides. A funny, frank, evidence-packed tour of how people got down—then worried about their souls.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript
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| 1:39.0 | Hey folks, just a quick heads up before you jump in. There is some pretty explicit language in this episode, |
| 1:44.5 | so you may want to rethink listening to it with your kids. |
| 1:51.8 | Hi, everybody, welcome for the show. We're talking medieval sex, courtly love, chivalric, |
| 1:58.3 | damsels in distress, chastity belts, well that's the myth. What's the reality? |
| 2:02.4 | Well, you'll be shocked to learn that most of what we think happened in medieval period was in fact invented by those uptight pesky Victorians. |
| 2:11.8 | Medieval folk were rampant. They were having sex in public in churches. Can you imagine? Pilgrimages. There was a sort of |
... |
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