Happened to read Medieval Sexuality - A casebook which is a collection of essays edited by April Harper and Caroline Proctor. Was my first introduction to history of sexuality. As it was my first dip it's hard to show any critisism on the essays. Hopefully the forum will provide the necessary E.
I liked the book and it's essays. I especially found Joyce E. Salisbury's take on early christian hermits' changing views on sexuality very interesting. Salisbury's thesis is that those guys and ladies were taken more or less by surprise when after leaving Roman society they still had sexual urges even in their hermitage:
"This is the same lesson they learned about sex: the classical Romans were wrong; sex is a force that lay in the human heart, not in society. As the desert fathers and mothers considered the temptations that beset them, they moved in ever-narrowing circles from outside to within, and they learned that sex is not a social disease. This article will follow their path as they redefined sexuality in a way that shaped medieval (and modern) views."
Transitions in history are always interesting, like the gradual change from polytheism to christianity during Roman empire and how it applied to perceptions of sexuality. I don't have the knowledge to argue with her, but I think she concentrates a bit too much on men and seems to kind of sidestep the female hermits in her essay. All she says about women is that they didn't seem to have a problem with their sexual urges outside society - only men did:
"Holy women, too, saw men, but the texts do not indicate that this was a problem for them. Tertullian expressed the prevailing opinion that sight stimulated a man’s lust more than a woman’s; he claimed that men enjoyed looking at women, and women enjoyed being the object of their gaze. This analysis seems to have been shared by women in the desert, for they were not troubled by men’s looks. The gender difference is shown in one saying from the Apothegmata: on a journey a monk met some nuns and when he saw them he turned off the road. The abbess said to him: “If you had been a true monk, you would not have looked to see that we are women.” It was the men, not the women, who were so troubled by a glance that they looked aside. When it came to the temptations of lust, the desert wisdom indicated that it troubled men much more than women, so for the remainder of this article, like Cassian, I will focus on men’s experience."
Methinks it's hogwash to assume that women did not have problems with their sexual urges just because "the texts don't indicate". I don't believe that for a moment! Based on possibly anachronist personal experience, it does sound incredible to me. Maybe "the texts don't indicate" it just because Salisbury haven't read them all, or included them all, or there were not many texts by women that survived. I don't know. Maybe someone else here knows.
Anyway, it's good book. Lotsa interesting stuff which was new at least to me. Though the book's editors seemed to think that combination of sex&history is something to laugh about.
"My final thanks go to my co-editor, Caroline Proctor, for not laughing when I said “Let’s have a conference on sex!” and for laughing a lot between that day and the completion of this project."
"And finally to April Harper, for her brilliant and constant friendship, for keeping me laughing throughout this process and above all for saying “Let’s have a conference on sex!” in the first place."
No, no, no, sex is Serious Business, more serious than Internet, and ancient sex even more so: without it we'd all be nonexistent. We are the living proof that ancient people had lotsa sex and so we should celebrate it, not laugh at it.
But how did they go about it? As a profound aspect of humanity our sexuality runs trough societies and ages, both shaping them and being shaped (very little, methinks) by various contemporary norms, attitudes and perceptions. What have those been? And how and why they have varied and changed in times?
So ITT lets talk about sex and sexuality in historiographic context.
You know good museums, websites, books, pieces of art, documentaries, ideas, thoughs on the subject? Please share.
I liked the book and it's essays. I especially found Joyce E. Salisbury's take on early christian hermits' changing views on sexuality very interesting. Salisbury's thesis is that those guys and ladies were taken more or less by surprise when after leaving Roman society they still had sexual urges even in their hermitage:
"This is the same lesson they learned about sex: the classical Romans were wrong; sex is a force that lay in the human heart, not in society. As the desert fathers and mothers considered the temptations that beset them, they moved in ever-narrowing circles from outside to within, and they learned that sex is not a social disease. This article will follow their path as they redefined sexuality in a way that shaped medieval (and modern) views."
Transitions in history are always interesting, like the gradual change from polytheism to christianity during Roman empire and how it applied to perceptions of sexuality. I don't have the knowledge to argue with her, but I think she concentrates a bit too much on men and seems to kind of sidestep the female hermits in her essay. All she says about women is that they didn't seem to have a problem with their sexual urges outside society - only men did:
"Holy women, too, saw men, but the texts do not indicate that this was a problem for them. Tertullian expressed the prevailing opinion that sight stimulated a man’s lust more than a woman’s; he claimed that men enjoyed looking at women, and women enjoyed being the object of their gaze. This analysis seems to have been shared by women in the desert, for they were not troubled by men’s looks. The gender difference is shown in one saying from the Apothegmata: on a journey a monk met some nuns and when he saw them he turned off the road. The abbess said to him: “If you had been a true monk, you would not have looked to see that we are women.” It was the men, not the women, who were so troubled by a glance that they looked aside. When it came to the temptations of lust, the desert wisdom indicated that it troubled men much more than women, so for the remainder of this article, like Cassian, I will focus on men’s experience."
Methinks it's hogwash to assume that women did not have problems with their sexual urges just because "the texts don't indicate". I don't believe that for a moment! Based on possibly anachronist personal experience, it does sound incredible to me. Maybe "the texts don't indicate" it just because Salisbury haven't read them all, or included them all, or there were not many texts by women that survived. I don't know. Maybe someone else here knows.
Anyway, it's good book. Lotsa interesting stuff which was new at least to me. Though the book's editors seemed to think that combination of sex&history is something to laugh about.
"My final thanks go to my co-editor, Caroline Proctor, for not laughing when I said “Let’s have a conference on sex!” and for laughing a lot between that day and the completion of this project."
"And finally to April Harper, for her brilliant and constant friendship, for keeping me laughing throughout this process and above all for saying “Let’s have a conference on sex!” in the first place."
No, no, no, sex is Serious Business, more serious than Internet, and ancient sex even more so: without it we'd all be nonexistent. We are the living proof that ancient people had lotsa sex and so we should celebrate it, not laugh at it.
But how did they go about it? As a profound aspect of humanity our sexuality runs trough societies and ages, both shaping them and being shaped (very little, methinks) by various contemporary norms, attitudes and perceptions. What have those been? And how and why they have varied and changed in times?
So ITT lets talk about sex and sexuality in historiographic context.
You know good museums, websites, books, pieces of art, documentaries, ideas, thoughs on the subject? Please share.
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