ABSTRACT
One feature of the popular view of the sexual instinct is that it is absent in childhood and only awakens in the period of life described as puberty. It is true that in the literature of the subject one occasionally comes across remarks upon precocious sexual activity in small children upon erections, masturbation and even activities resembling coitus. Sigmund Freud himself exemplifies the mutation on a personal scale. It took him some years to become reconciled to the implications of his presumed discovery. A late ninth-century Bobbio MS now in the Ambrosian Library represents a missing source of Cummean’s Penitential. The medieval western theology of the matter, deriving of course from Augustine, is in essence that children are born with original sin, which is washed away at baptism, and are then blameless for at least a few years until, around the age of seven, they develop a capacity for acquired or personal sin.
