ABSTRACT
Penance was an institution of incalculable importance in medieval and Renaissance Europe. The codification of accepted and interdicted sexual acts within diverse texts on penance is an integral part of masculinity's elaboration as an intertextual process, as was the formulation of laws concerning the male body and its necessary usages in both ecclesiastical and civil legal texts. Sexual transgressions had no place in marriage from this ecclesiastical perspective, since copulation served merely as a means of 'consummating' the union between husband and wife, while sexual pleasure was not a necessary component of married life. Some of the most important civil law texts of the Middle Ages depict a rather severe portrait of matrimony and sexuality, which were strictly regulated within the social world that they helped to structure. The desires of men and women were secondary to the economic, even mercantile relationships that marriage established between families.
