Men outside of marriage

Despite the teachings of churchmen that sexual behavior outside of marriage was sinful for both men and women, medieval society in general held to the double standard by which men’s sexual transgressions were expected and disregarded or regarded far less seriously than those of women. While women’s sexual behavior was monitored and critiqued, men’s raised objections most often when it impinged on the rights of other men to the exclusive sexual services of their wives, or the virginity of their daughters. A man who had a mistress or patronized prostitutes might be seen as less than honorable, but did not come in for the same type of opprobrium as a transgressive woman. In both eastern and western Christian traditions a man who had sex with another man’s wife, a nun, or a virgin was seen as having taken something of value that belonged to another, but a man who had sex with an unmarried woman who was not a virgin committed a much lesser sin. In the Muslim tradition the latter did not sin at all. Because most of the sexual relationships in which medieval men engaged

were with women, and women have been discussed in the previous chapter, some of the material presented here will sound familiar. In this chapter we are seeing the flip side – what it looked like from the man’s point of view. A large portion of this chapter is devoted to the subject of sexual relations between men. This topic is especially prominent here because it has not been treated in previous chapters, and because such relations were especially problematic and therefore occasioned a great deal of comment (despite being considered “unmentionable”). It is important to remember, however, that the gender of one’s partner was not the main way of categorizing sexual activity in the Middle Ages. Sex between two men was illicit, but so was much sex between men and women. Anything that was not potentially reproductive, no matter who the partners were, fell into the illicit category.