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Reddit mentions of The Fabliaux

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Reddit mentions: 1

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The Fabliaux
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Height8.1 Inches
Length5.4 Inches
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Release dateJune 2013
Weight2.1054146021 Pounds
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Found 1 comment on The Fabliaux:

u/Whoosier · 40 pointsr/AskHistorians

It depends on when, where, and who you were.

  • At any time and any place, extramarital sex among the upper classes, at least for women, was strictly forbidden, for the obvious reason of protecting the family bloodline. For this reason, women were closely watched. (Many of the stories in Boccaccio’s Decameron are premised on this watchfulness and frustrated lovers.) One could argue that the cult of “courtly love” (fin d’amor as it was called), which basically taught young noblemen to “look but not touch,” encouraged the secret and chaste adoration of a noble woman. Andreas Capellanus, who wrote out the [rules of the game] (http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/special/authors/andreas/de_amore.html) in the 12th century, advises noblemen that secret, chaste love was the best; their sexual urges could be satisfied with peasant women, who are there, literally, for the raping.

  • Depending on where you were, large towns tolerated prostitution and even legally regulated it by the 13th century. The great moral theologian Thomas Aquinas taught that prostitution should be tolerated as a lesser evil. It was like a sewer in a palace: it was nasty but without it, the whole palace would stink. The greater evils it prevented were offenses to public decency by keeping prostitutes in one house, the corruption of decent women by being in their presence, and sex between men, who might be reduced to sodomy if they couldn’t release their sexual urges since they often married late. Towns like Venice had prostitutes in the hundreds. They even organized themselves into ad hoc guilds in some places. However, all but the most educated and elegant courtesans were socially marginalized.

  • Even outside of large cities, ordinary village women, living at subsistence levels, might turn to periodic prostitution; they were not really “professional ladies” but women trying to keep their head above water. Single women who had sex with men would be stigmatized if it was habitual and flagrant—for instance, you would not set up house with a man. But an occasional role in the hay, even if it resulted in pregnancy, might be tolerated, especially since it was a sign of fertility, a much valued characteristic. The evolving theology of marriage (12th century onward) also affected sexuality, where the consent theory (marriage was formed by the mutual consent of a couple, with or without witnesses) began replacing the “concubitus” theory (where sexual consummation created the marriage). Church courts regularly dealt with cases where a man consented secretly to a marriage, consummated it in private, and then denied publicly that he had consented.

  • Clerical marriage was supposedly outlawed in the late 11th century, but it flourished all over Europe. I just read an article in the latest issue of the medieval journal Speculum (“Priestly Wives: The Role and Acceptance of Clerical Concubines in the Parishes of Late Medieval Catalunya” by Michelle Armstrong-Partida) which cites astounding percentages of priests with concubines. Thus in Girona from 1314-1346, “495 (75 percent) [of priests] kept concubines and 166 (25 percent) were engaged in casual sex.” These numbers would be lower in places like northern France where the law against clerical shacking up was better enforced, and somewhat similar (though not as high) in places like the diocese of Norwich in Enlgand where custom tolerated priests with “hearth mates.”

  • Like today, the idea of sex was constantly around. I’m reading a new collection of 13th-century French stories called fabliaux (in a [wonderful translation by Nathaniel Dubin] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Fabliaux-Nathaniel-E-Dubin/dp/0871403579/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373037076&sr=8-1&keywords=dubin+fabliaux)), which is pretty much filled with folks obsessing about sex and how to get it, which they do with regular and hilarious success. (Did I mention these stories are dirty and very, very funny?) One can see in stories for noble audiences (like Tristan and Yseut or Lancelot and Guinevere from the Arthurian cycle) that stories of adultery had a sort of titillating appeal for couples stuck in arranged marriages.

    To sum up, chastity was the ideal (and was supposedly a virtue that set the clergy apart from the laity), but it was breached in all sorts of ways, especially at the mid- to lower levels of society, where the stakes were smaller. To put it another way, the average medieval person probably got more sex than the average Redditor.

    Source: A good go-to book about medieval sexuality is Vern Bullough and James Brundage (eds.), Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (2000).

    EDIT: Worth adding that pretty much everything I described above was considered sinful, sometimes gravely so (like adultery and sodomy), but this didn't not seem to overly deter people.