ABSTRACT
The sexual behavior of Christians worried medieval Church authorities. Christian moralists disapproved of all types of extramarital sex, including premarital intercourse, adultery, concubinage, and prostitution. Church fathers agreed that masturbation was immoral and forbade Christians to indulge in the practice. They feared that even unconscious sexual arousal during sleep might be sinful. Leaders of the Christian Church distinguished two overlapping categories of offences against the Church's rules: sin and crime. Sinners not only had to confess, they also needed to make reparations for their misdeeds. They could do this by performing various kinds of penitential actions. In early Christian history, when public confession was the rule, penance was also public. Many well-known confessors wrote handbooks of penance to provide guidance for priests who needed to know what penance they ought to assign for each of the transgressions that sinners reported to them.
