ABSTRACT
Legal sources are particularly rich in information on sexuality throughout the Middle Ages. The early Germanic laws regulated adultery and other sexual crimes. Religious penitentials continued and expanded such regulation. Legal attention to sexual matters increased with the development of canon law, and moral legislation was secularized with the growth of royal law codes. The sources listed below include secular and ecclesiastical laws, as well as trial records and local statutes and regulations. This bibliography does not include manuscript collections, which a full study of legal sources requires. The work of James Brundage (item 323) is an indispensable guide to the canon law sources, and Pierre Payer’s work (item 468) covers the penitentials. There are no comparable comprehensive guides to the secular legal sources.
