ABSTRACT
With the victory of Christianity and the barbarians, the relations of men and women sank to a pitch of brutality which had been unknown in the ancient world for many centuries. The ancient world was vicious, but not brutal. In the Dark Ages, religion and barbarism combined to degrade the sexual Side of life. In marriage, the wife had no rights; outside marriage, since all was sin, there was no object in curbing the natural beastliness of the uncivilised male. The immorality of the Middle Ages was widespread and disgusting; bishops lived in open sin with their own daughters, and archbishops promoted their male favourites to neighbouring sees. 1 There was a growing belief in the celibacy of the clergy, but practice did not keep pace with precept. Pope Gregory VII made immense exertions to cause priests to put away their concubines, yet so late as the time of Abélard we find him regarding it as possible, though scandalous, for him to marry Héloïse. It was only towards the end of the thirteenth century that the celibacy of the clergy was rigidly enforced. The clergy, of course, continued to have illicit relations with women, though they could not give any dignity or beauty to these relations owing to the fact that they themselves considered them immoral and impure. Nor could the Church, in view of its ascetic outlook on sex, do anything whatever to beautify the conception of love. To do this was necessarily the work of the laity.
