Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (21 page)

Legal authorities in Venice treated rape as a kind of seduction. In 1455, a man named Blasio took ten-year-old Maria by force, after which he made a promise of marriage to the girl’s family. The family accepted the offer, and the problem appeared to be solved. Only after Blasio disappeared did legal proceedings begin. He was found and brought to court, then sentenced to a beating and jail. He was also to give Maria’s family money for her dowry. The court then told Blasio he could avoid punishment if he made good on his promise to marry Maria. He accepted the deal immediately.

In cases where marriage between rapist and victim was not an option (as when they came from incompatible social classes), Venetian authorities punished the crime severely. In 1320, a cloth merchant’s son made the grave mistake of raping a nobleman’s daughter. He fled the city. In his absence, the authorities banned him perpetually, and also ruled that if he ever did return he would be dragged around the city, have his hands cut off, and then be hanged in Piazza San Marco. Presumably, he did not return.
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NO CAN DO: IMPOTENCE AND FRIGIDITY

Rape cases involved men who were capable of having sex, albeit with unwilling partners, but even when both parties were amenable, it didn’t always go as planned. Sometimes it didn’t go at all. Medieval law treated impotence in the same contradictory way it dealt with all carnal relations. Sex was inherently wrong, but husbands and wives still owed each other sexual submission, at least enough to prevent adultery and generate children. A person’s inability to perform sexually—that is, to pay the “marital debt”—was one of very few allowable grounds for divorce. The trick for the courts was separating cases of true incapacity from ruses.

The issue of impotence was tied to the thorny question of when marriages began and ended. It was not until 1563 that a formal ceremony with a priest was required for a marriage to be valid. Before then, marriages began when the couple consented to wed each other and sealed the union with sex. The medieval marriage chapel could thus be a bed or a patch of soft ground. Most people never bothered to have formal weddings, and when they did their offspring were often in attendance. The key event that made the marriage was the initial sexual encounter, which both ensured that the marriage could be fruitful and activated the marital debt.

Couples usually conducted sexual “test drives” with each other before letting the world know they were married; but not everyone did so, and if impotence ended the sexual relations (or prevented them from ever beginning) the marriage could end too. The hard part was determining why sex had stopped, and how long the couple should keep trying. In 1206, Pope Innocent III weighed in on a case in which the wife’s vagina was apparently unable to accommodate her husband’s member. The pope ruled that the marriage should be declared null, and that both parties were free to find more fitting partners. However, if the woman’s capacity was later increased through surgery or natural maturation, the pope said, she was to return to her former husband. In the event the woman remarried and was made more capacious through successful intercourse with her second husband, the pope also held that she should end that marriage and resume the first. Had the good pontiff known anything of the realities of married life, he might have realized that his solution would cause more problems than it would solve.

In cases of male impotence, the main issue was to determine whether the problem was permanent or temporary, and whether or not the husband or wife was fabricating the claim in order to obtain a divorce. In one English case, the court turned a team of prostitutes loose on the husband to test his capacity for arousal. He failed to rise. One of the women later testified that she had “exposed her naked breasts, and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the said John . . . the whole time aforesaid the said penis was scarcely three inches long . . . remaining without any increase or decrease.” The poor man was cursed by the prostitutes for “presuming to marry a young woman, defrauding her as he could not serve and please her better than that.” In another case, the court-appointed prostitute testified that the husband was “large enough for any woman living in this world.” Presumably, no divorce was granted.

In fifteenth-century Venice, a man named Nicolò disputed his wife’s accusation of impotence and arranged a public inspection by prostitutes to prove his virility. He took a scribe, his boss, and a priest to a brothel, where he hired two women. Soon after he started in with one of the women, he called the priest over. The priest testified that Nicolò had placed the clergyman’s hand on his erect penis, bragging: “Look here, I am a man, even though some say I cannot get it up.” Nicolò then had intercourse with the prostitute on a bench while the witnesses watched, after which he smeared his ejaculate on the hands of the scribe. Nicolò’s successful sexual performance continued into the night.

Not all men had Nicolò’s ardor, however, and many blamed their sexual shortcomings on the sorcery of women. Dark magic was often suspected when a man was impotent with one woman but functional with another. Usually it was pinned on the husband’s next sexual partner, as reflected in the penitentials. One penitential made women go through seven years of repentance for using “magic art [to take] away the ability to have intercourse from men.” Another required priests to grill women about whether or not they had been casting spells:

Have you done what some adulterous women are accustomed to do? When first they learn that their lovers want to take legitimate wives, they extinguish the men’s desire by some magic art, so that they cannot be of use to their legitimate wives, or have intercourse with them. If you have done this or taught others, you should do penance for forty days on bread and water.

Magically caused impotence was a common ground for men trying to divorce their wives, even at the highest levels of society. France’s King Philip II Augustus (1180–1223) claimed that his wife, Ingeborg of Denmark, had bewitched him to the point where he could not consummate the union. People speculated that he discovered on the wedding night that she was not a virgin or had some kind of hidden deformity—or that she simply had bad breath. Regardless, Ingeborg herself claimed that the union had in fact been sealed with sex. The divorce was not granted. Philip then locked Ingeborg up in grimy quarters and married his true love, Agnes of Merania, with whom he fathered several children. Only after Agnes’s death and Pope Innocent III’s relentless work on behalf of Ingeborg did Philip take her back.

Judging by some of the potions in circulation used to quell men’s sexual energy, it is a wonder that more impotence cases did not end up as homicides. One medieval Arab
grimoire
, translated into Spanish as the
Picatrix
, suggested that women try the following process to calm men down:

Take half a drachm each of the brain of a black cat and mandrake seed. Mix these two together and blend them very well. Afterwards make an image of wax, and make a hole in the top of the head, through which you force the abovementioned mixture. Then make an iron needle and push that needle into the image, in the place where he enjoys a woman. Then take four drachms of pig’s blood, two drachms of hare’s rennet and swallow’s brain, and a pound each of sheep’s milk and myrtle sap. Mix all of the above together and give it as a drink to him whose desire for a woman you wish to take away, and fumigate the image with two drachms each of incense and galbanum mixed together. And what you wish will happen.

Assuming that the man only became impotent and did not die from this poison, the
Picatrix
advised a less invasive method of undoing the spell. The sorceress should make new wax images of herself and the stricken man, wait for the right moment, and then join the dolls together in an embrace, also bathing them together in rosewater.
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PROSTITUTION: A MOSTLY UNHOLY INSTITUTION

Medieval sex law reached its irrational zenith when it came to sex for sale. The prostitute was everything Christian society despised: She had prodigious sex outside marriage, practiced contraception, aborted her children, lured husbands from their wives, and left men poisoned before God. Yet this paragon of sin was not only tolerated much of the time, she was often pimped by both religious and secular authorities for healthy profits. There were periodic measures to stamp out prostitution, to be sure, but the utility of prostitutes as money machines was too great for any of these efforts to last.

Christian ambivalence about prostitution reaches back to Saint Augustine himself, who, we will remember, condemned all sexual desire as unclean and wicked. At the same time, he recognized that men were going to follow the call of their gonads. There was nothing worse than a prostitute, but Augustine also saw that if they were pulled from circulation, men’s lust would seep everywhere and pollute the world. Prostitutes were damned, but their souls were to be sacrificed for the betterment of good society. Nearly one thousand years later, the influential theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas had the same outlook: “Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace: take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.” Taking this thinking one step further, church and city authorities concluded that so long as there was a need to clean out human muck, they should make some money in the process.

Thus was born the licensed brothel, a factory of evil serving the common good. By 1358, the Grand Council of Venice would declare that prostitution was “absolutely indispensable to the world.” Besides filling the coffers of the ruling classes, official whorehouses were thought to allow good maidens to guard their virginity. Once married, women also could keep their marriages pure by letting their husbands satisfy their unusual sexual demands outside the home. Indeed, the more institutionalized prostitution became, the more it was lauded as a bastion of family values. In 1403, the city of Florence set up an “Office of Honesty,” which established a municipal brothel. It was believed that the birthrate was falling because too many men were experimenting with homosexuality before they reached marriageable age. If men accustomed themselves to sex with attractive women, it was hoped, they would avoid “the filthiness of the horrible crime which is the vice of sodomy” and choose nice girls to marry.

The specialized skills of prostitutes were always in high demand. We have already seen how they were used as experts in courtroom impotency disputes, but that was far from all. Successful prostitutes had a deep understanding of local townsmen’s sexual skills. Some recognized the value of such information, and made money off it. One London tart built a business as a consultant to girls contemplating marriage, telling them of their potential husbands’ sexual strengths and weaknesses. Her bad review of one man caused a wealthy widow to back out of a marriage, and the man sued the prostitute for the loss of the money he would have made in the union.

Brothels owned by local businesspeople were heavily taxed. Municipalities also supported their own brothels, which must have generated much better profit margins. In the fifteenth century, the city of Dijon and its surrounding area had a population of less than ten thousand, yet the city supported a public bordello and eighteen private establishments. In Strasbourg, there were fifty-seven brothels in six streets alone. Prostitutes worked in the city cathedral’s bell tower, where they were called “swallows,” and in an establishment owned by the city’s bishop. The church’s involvement in prostitution was never hidden. In 1457, the archbishop of Mainz granted the brothel franchise to an aristocratic family, which raises the question of how an archbishop had the right to run brothels in the first place. The law establishing the Avignon city brothel gave the local abbess the key and charged her with keeping order there and making sure revenues were collected. In 1608, the Dominicans of Perpignan even collected alms from their congregants for the refurbishment of the order’s bordello.

In Paris, prostitution was confined to certain neighborhoods close to the city center, often near institutes of higher learning. While masters of rhetoric and theology delivered lectures in the upper rooms, working women delivered their own brand of knowledge downstairs. The university in Toulouse split the proceeds of the town’s brothel with the city. Oxford and Cambridge universities, however, were not so liberally inclined; in 1461, the chancellor of Oxford was authorized to “banish from a circumference of ten miles around the said university all bawds, whores and incontinent women,” which he seems to have done with relish.

THE TOLERANCE OF prostitution during the Middle Ages was neither consistent nor universal. There was no shortage of efforts to stamp it out. The saintly Louis IX of France, for example, closed the brothels before he set off on a Crusade—only to find that the prostitutes he had banished had followed his army all the way to the Holy Land. Cities also expelled their prostitutes periodically, but never for very long. Venice banished prostitution in 1266 and again in 1314, but by the early sixteenth century an interested customer could make use of an official directory of prostitutes, which set out prices, specialties, and contact information.

City and church authorities were often more interested in protecting their own brothels from competition—especially from freelancers—than in eradicating the practice entirely. They also restricted whom the women could take on as customers. Jewish men, for example, were often barred from patronizing Christian prostitutes, which was in line with general prohibitions against sex between Jewish men and Christian women. Avignon threatened Jewish men with the loss of a foot for walking into a public brothel. In Venice, prostitutes were also at risk of punishment if they knowingly took Jews on as customers, as one record reflects: