When people think about the Middle Ages sex, medieval porn isn’t usually the first thing they think of. There’s a lot of good reasons for this but one of the biggest is that the medieval period—which runs from the ‘fall of Rome’ in 476 to the sixteenth century was a really long time ago. The sources that survive to...
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When we think about history of sex toys, we tend to think that they are a modern invention. After all, until very recently they were still incredibly taboo, and the sort of thing that only ever showed up in media as a punchline in movies and sitcoms. While the harnessing of electricity certainly means we now have a range...
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When we talk about masturbating now, most of us don’t immediately think of women. Instead, the term conjures up ideas of men, who we often consider as the more overtly sexual gender. For ancient and medieval people, however, onanism, the Latin term for wanking, was perhaps more likely to be associated with women. Indeed, women were considered to be...
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When we think about women and sex or women’s sexuality, one of the things that we are told most often and clearly is that women are not very sexual. The reasons we are given for this idea vary widely: women are from Venus and therefore romance is more important to them than sex, so the only reason that most...
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If someone says the words “sex history”, the Middle Ages probably aren’t the first thing that springs to mind. The term usually conjures up the old myth about Victorians inventing vibrators to masturbate hysterical women or images of Masters and Johnson finally applying a “scientific” approach to sexuality. After all, how can the overtly religious and misogynist world of the...
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