Sex in the Middle Ages

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2021

⏱️ 24 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Please note that this episode contains conversation about sex that you might not want to listen to in the presence of children.

What did medieval people really think about sex, and were those thoughts all that different from ours today?

The medieval humoral system of medicine suggested that it was possible to die from having too much-or too little-sex, while the Roman Catholic Church taught that virginity was the ideal state. Holy men and women committed themselves to lifelong abstinence in the name of religion. Everyone was forced to conform to restrictive rules about sex and could be harshly punished for getting it wrong. More familiarly, medieval people faced challenges in finding a suitable partner and also struggled with many of the same social issues that we face today.

Dan is joined by Katherine Harvey, Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and author of ‘The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages’. Katherine holds a PhD in Medieval History from King’s College London and has published widely on medieval topics, including sexuality, gender, emotions and the body. Join Dan and Katherine as they discuss sex through the ages, as relating to general attitudes, frequency, religion and marriage.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History here. It's New Year's Eve, which means a couple of things.
0:04.0	One is at 2021 is drawing to an end. But more importantly, Mr. Optruder votes in the Pod Bible,
0:10.3	Best Podcast categories is nearly over. Midnight to night, Midnight, GMT, Zulu time. It's all over.
0:18.4	The competition is closed. Now, you know when you're young? Look at my kids and think,
0:22.2	well, look at those kids, they could do anything. They could win an FA Cup. They could play first
0:25.9	base for the Yankees. They could become Supreme NATO Commander Europe. They could be a scientist.
0:30.4	They could win Nobel Prize. They could win a Pulitzer. They could do anything. Now, as you get older,
0:34.4	there's like a funnel. And you just get squidged in, ever for now at my age. I'm not going to win
0:39.4	Nobel Prize. I'm not going to win. I'm not going to play professional sport in any way, shape or form.
0:46.1	Slowly, the opportunities just fall away because of very incompetence, laziness or lack of
0:50.5	imagination. What's left to you is a very narrow set of opportunities. And what is left to me,
0:56.4	Dan Snow, age 43, is this opportunity to win a regional podcast competition for most
1:03.6	informative podcasts. It is what it is. It is what it is. And in this position, I find myself in,
1:09.0	it is probably best to win most informative podcasts in the Pod Bible Awards because not doing
1:13.9	so would be marginally worse. I'm not saying it's the life I wanted when I was a kid, folks. I'm
1:18.4	not saying this is the Mars mission, first human on different planet kind of accolade I was expecting
1:23.5	to get when I was 10, but it's an accolade nonetheless. So long story short, get over to Pod Bible,
1:29.1	podcast awards, just Google it or follow the link in this info on this New Year's Eve and make an
1:35.1	old man very happy. In the meantime, folks, because it's also New Year's Eve, our minds are turning
1:40.8	to sex, particularly sex in the middle ages, the middle ages, not middle age in the middle ages,
1:46.9	all right. We're talking to Kate Harvey. She's an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck University of
1:51.7	London. She is an absolute legend. She knows everything about sexuality, gender, emotions and the
	...

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