Little More Than Bodies: The Sex Lives of Peasants

---

We all got here through fucking, but seemingly, no one agrees about how to fuck. And there are multiple areas of disagreement about the act itself—how often to have sex, what age to start, when to abstain, in which positions, which orifices, who to have as partners, etc. How we choose to engage with these ideas about how to fuck and put them into practice in our own sex lives shows how we choose to live in the world, what we believe. I’ve been studying this conundrum through an abstraction; I’ve developed a curiosity about, perhaps an obsession with the sex lives of peasants. I can’t stop thinking how exactly peasant women fucked, and I’m hardly the only one. 

Within the last few years, the gender roles, sex lives, and body politics of women in the Middle Ages have been everywhere, for those of us who pay attention. Books like The Once and Future Sex (2024), Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife (2024), The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women (2024), Femina (2022), Fires of Lust (2021), Medieval Bodies (2018), Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England (2022) have coincided with the rise of the millennial sex novels. Many of these books examine how medieval concepts about women’s bodies and roles in society continue to inform our modern ideas about women’s partnerships, marriages, and sexual experiences. They’re also ideal reading for highbrow perverts. 

The Met Cloisters have also caught on with their recent show, The Spectrum of Desire, using medieval art to explore ideas of gender nonconformity, love, and sex. The famous image of the side wound of Christ—which looks very much like a vulva—from The Prayer Book of Bonne of Luxembourg is featured prominently in the exhibition. The 2021 film The Last Duel, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Adam Driver and Matt Damon, follows a historical court case of rape in the 1380s, centering on medieval suppositions of how the female body is meant to respond differently to marital sex, adultery, and rape. Recent novels have been turned to the lives (and bodies) of peasants too: A.K. Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches, Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch, Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona, even Robert Glück’s 1994 novel Margery Kempe was recently reissued by NYRB. Her mind is on peasants too, I whispered to myself, when Chappell Roan donned sexy chainmail armor for her MTV Video Music Awards look last year, as she shot flaming arrows at a castle background. She sang “Good Luck, Babe!,” a song about giving up on a closeted lover, who fails to embrace their same-sex feelings in a heteronormative world. Her performance is an allusion to Joan of Arc, who was burned at the stake for cross-dressing (and generally becoming too powerful for an illiterate peasant girl). 

Though thinking about sex preoccupies me, it does have its merits. Our sex lives ultimately reveal the most about us. In The Fires of Lust, Katherine Harvey writes, “Although sexual intercourse is, in essence, a bodily function, individual attitudes and experiences are always shaped by the world in which one lives—by legal constraints, by medical ideas and (in many societies, including medieval Europe) by religious beliefs.” Beyond simply understanding how we live our lives, understanding our sex lives also explains the power structures one inhabits, practices, and lives within. There is a method behind reading the personal life section on Wikipedia first. Being nosy is, in fact, advantageous. 

For peasants, ideas on how to fuck were a matter of life and death during the Middle Ages—as well as the afterlife. Sex was uniformly bad in the Middle Ages. Harvey explains; “troublingly, sex became the means by which Original Sin was transmitted; because sex was impossible without lust, children who were conceived through intercourse inevitably received this taint,” and therefore, “the surest way to avoid hellfire was to remain a virgin.” The Catholic Church taught two possible scenarios for how to fuck: within marriage or not at all, by way of chastity under holy orders. In other words, medieval women, theoretically, had a very simple choice: have sex with husbands (wives) or not have sex at all (virgins, nuns). In The Once and Future Sex, Eleanor Janega writes, “To have sex was to surrender to the corruption of the Mortal World.” While choosing to have sex in the Middle Ages was dangerous for the soul, there were also risks involved for the physical body because not having sex was deadly. According to humoral theory that guided medieval medical thinking, sex eliminates excess fluids, which if retained in  the body, could throw off the balance of humors. Young virgins were the perfect humoral balance, but if they became particularly ornery, they could be “helped by having a midwife rub them or by having vaginal suppositories inserted,” to induce orgasm, as noted in Virgins: A Cultural History by Anke Bernau. 

However, this had to be done by midwives as a medical procedure, while masturbation to induce orgasm was considered sodomy, a rather broad term that included orgasm or its pursuits by any other means than heterosexual, penetrative sex. Nocturnal emission was also technically sodomy! Excreting too much, that is too many orgasms, could also be very bad: “too much sex could dry out the body, causing symptoms like hair loss, heart and lung problems, and kidney failure. The eyes and brain were thought to be particularly vulnerable to such drying,” Harvey explains. In the Middle Ages, one could indeed go blind from too many orgasms! 

There was much theological and legal writing about “the marriage debt”—spouses owing each other their bodies for sexual intercourse, outside of sex with purely reproductive purposes, as a healthy outlet for their sinful urges of lust. However, Harvey explains, “[the marriage debt] certainly did not mean that couples were allowed to have unlimited sex.” Sex within marriage did not so simply make sex good. Chaste marriages were also common, in which sex was foregone entirely. Sex outside and before marriage was bad, but sex was not considered truly premarital sex if it was occurring between a betrothal (a sharing of vows between a couple, with or without a witness) and a blessing by a priest in a church, a period that our modern minds would think of as an engagement. For reproduction, the orgasm was essential, and many considered it impossible to conceive without: Women needed to produce their own seed brought forth through orgasm. Medical texts sometimes suggested foreplay as a fix for infertility, while legal texts debated whether conception disproved claims of rape.

If sex was understood as a couple “fitting together” in the right way to conceive, then the very literal medieval thinking was that “It was important that a man choose a partner whose genitals were compatible with his own: a man with a short penis needed a small woman, whereas a man with a long penis should marry a big woman with long thighs,” writes Harvey. Depending on which position a child was conceived in, the fetus could form wrong, so sex from the side had real risks, and it was best to have sex in the missionary position because gravity supported the mingling seeds of man and woman. There were exceptions for other positions, but the most dangerous and sinful way to have sex was doggy style, because, as the name implies, it was very close to how animals had sex.

The stakes were rather high for peasants to know how to fuck each other, yet the potential answers were contradictory and confusing. Personal sexuality, as Foucault writes in The History of Sexuality, may indeed be a modern development, and perhaps peasants were exempt from seeing themselves as sexual individuals: in The Fires of Lust, Harvey writes, “the medieval Mind tended to see sex as something one person did to another, rather than an activity in which both partners were equally engaged.” However, Chaucer clearly shows in The Canterbury Tales that stories about bodies were well read (and told, for those who were illiterate), as well as craved and embraced by the medieval imagination. For peasants, whose life consisted of toilsome work plowing the land of their lords, their main distraction—their personal lives—remained fraught with the question of how to frantically fuck each other, braving brimstone and hellfire and blindness to reach climax. This quandary made the sex lives of the Middle Ages a very rich environment to produce the wackiest stories about the body. Without Foucault, Marx, Freud (or even Luther) at work turning sex into discourse, the medieval imagination ran rampant and unchecked, especially toward the mysterious and peculiar female body. If the cock could become hard and move without will during an erection, so too, the logic goes, the womb must wander around inside when it was ravenous. 

We have told ourselves many stories about our bodies, which change how we move through the world in both the public and the private spheres. It’s the body that determines how a person is meant to fit into the world: the type of labor they should perform, what role they are supposed to play, what to eat, what clothes to wear, with whom to be partnered, when and how frequently to reproduce. And, of course, how to fuck. Melissa Febos writes, in Body Work, that “Our access to pleasure is determined, to some extent, by the story we’ve been told about what a body like ours deserves.” Our ability to understand and experience desire and intimacy, even transformation, is interconnected to the ideas of the body. It’s peasant women who are the perfect case study to examine these interlocking ideas of the body and sex. 

Women’s bodies during the Middle Ages were the site of some of the most fascinating and creative stories told about bodies. The bodies of virgins made a hissing sound when they urinated, women’s seed was lethal, the womb had seven chambers, leper’s semen could turn to putrid vapor inside the womb, which could spread disease to the next penis that entered the woman. Most importantly, though, in the Middle Ages, women were obsessed with sex—much more than men. Hetta Howes writes in Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife, “As part of this medical interpretation of gender, women were also believed by many to be sex-mad, unable to restrain themselves and practically incapable of remaining faithful to any one partner.” This is a major tenet of medieval sexuality—women had unsated sexual appetites and were therefore inherently dangerous. Women wanted to have sex while menstruating, pregnant, or postmenopausal. Women were often lazy and idle because they were so frequently thinking about sex. Total depraved sex freaks. 

The bodies of saints and biblical figures were the topic of highly intellectual debate for the highbrow perverts of the Middle Ages. Particular attention was paid to the body of the Virgin Mary: Jesus’s immaculate conception led to questions about Mary experiencing orgasm when God impregnated her and whether her own seed was involved in forming Jesus. Harvey writes, “There was a strong desire to separate the Virgin from not only the indignities of sexual intercourse, but also the related contaminations of the female body,” meaning she was perhaps free from menstruation, afterbirth, or pain from childbirth, as well as remaining a virgin for life. In 1146, when the Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Bernard, the co-founder of the Knights Templar, she sprayed milk from her lactating breast into his mouth. Also of interest was prelapsarian sex. It was believed that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, Janega writes, “could simply will their genitals to work, much as we might decide to move our arms or legs” in order to achieve conception. After the fall of man and introduction of Original Sin into the world (mostly through the woman, Eve’s fault), “No longer having perfect control over their genitals, Adam and Eve’s bodies were as disobedient as they had been to the Lord’s commands.” Now, in order to conceive, men and women must debase themselves by rubbing into each other and creating sinful lust to stimulate their genitals, reminding themselves of their fallen nature. 

The bodies of a peasant woman and of a noblewoman on whose land the peasant woman toils—in the field, alongside men to be clear—find themselves understanding female bodies through similar constructs while living starkly different sexual realities. While aristocratic women were doomed to political marriages for purposes of producing heirs, peasants remained a degree removed from these anxieties around inheritance. Most peasants were serfs, an unfree class that did not own land but rather worked on land owned by lords. For peasants, this reality allowed marriage to be decided through more personal choices, while the ruling classes had arranged marriages for political alliances and monetary gain. While medieval courts were full of (usually sexless) games of courtly love played between aristocrats in mismatched marriages, peasants were fucking each other wildly. Howes writes of Capellanus saying, “only rich people could truly experience love. Peasants, too unintelligent to comprehend the ennobling force that drove knights to chivalric acts, simply copulated like animals.” Peasants were the lowest of society, and they were probably also having the most rewarding sex lives. It also meant that the dynamic between peasant husband and peasant wife could become more hyperfocused on—with the imagination running rampant—the differences between male and female bodies. Peasants were, after all, little more than bodies. 

Perhaps what makes peasants an ideal subject for studying sexuality is that it’s impossible to make any sweeping claims. With peasants being illiterate and no diaries left to reveal their inner lives, they’ve truly had the last laugh. Their lives are truly private. Which is perhaps why I can’t stop imagining how peasants used to fuck—a tease! Studies of medieval history often covered a period of 1,000 years, focused entirely on Europe, and often Western Europe; huge swaths of the human population were living their lives elsewhere. Despite the understanding that women had to fit their sexuality in the container of either a wife or a virgin, clearly, there are enough complicated women everywhere you look. This is the thesis of Hetta Howes in Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: the Poet is Marie de France, Mystic is Julian of Norwich, Widow is Christine de Pizan, and Wife is Margery Kempe. These women do not fit into any neat category of medieval femininity. Kempe is also a key figure in Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramirez, which also looks at women in the Middle Ages who lived truly singular lives, not easily classified. Although the Catholic Church structured the lives of most people during the Middle Ages, there were minority religious groups who lived with different beliefs—especially vibrant Jewish populations. With the Crusades and pilgrimages to the Levant, Europe was not a closed continent. By Hette’s count, London in the Middle Ages was an even more diverse population than modern London is now. While many no doubt had flourishing sex lives in the Middle Ages, sexual violence was a rampant problem, as it remains today, most especially for girls and women. 

Although heteronormative relationships made up most medieval sex lives, queer lives and queer sex have been a part of the entire course of human history, including the Middle Ages. Harvey documents both men who had sex with men and women who had sex with women very well in The Fires of Lust, the latter confusing legal minds that struggled to comprehend how exactly women had sex with each other. While the Middle Ages mind might not have seen a difference between gender and biological sex, there’s a rich history of individuals who lived outside conventional gender norms. Biological sex was not so simply male or female in the Middle Ages; the center chamber of the seven-chamber womb was where intersex people were conceived, and Jesus himself is frequently depicted in medieval art with both male and female features. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance by Leah DeVun explores the richness of nonbinary sex and gender nonconformity in early pre-modern European thought. No one agrees on how to fuck, because no one is fucking one which way—nor have they ever.  

We have told ourselves many stories about our modern bodies, which change how we move through the world in both the public and the private sphere. However, the stories about our bodies can change. Perhaps, with time, what we tell ourselves will seem just as silly as a wandering womb. The definition of what a female body is and how it works is nebulous itself—and can shift in understanding during one woman’s own life. Between my first draft of this piece and its publication, PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome) was renamed PMOS (Polyendocrine Metabolic Ovarian Syndrome). The body is alive, changing itself with age, through reproduction, experience, and illness. Instead of producing anxiety, this transformative quality of the body is ultimately liberating; the body alone cannot restrain us. Sex allows one to work out their ideas of the body: the undesirable body can become wanted, the body meant only for labor becomes a source of private joy, a once-prized body can feel diminished in value with the absence of sexual interest. When the stories around our bodies shift—or are no longer believed—our destinies, and our desires, can move and change. When you realize your Lord and your priest are having miserable sex lives and you’re having great sex, perhaps it’s time for a peasant revolt. Radical social change can be realized on a grand scale after being tested in the microcosm of our sex lives. Sex is dangerous because it offers the power to transform established hierarchies through bodily introspection, allowing us to create our own private stories, as well as shared ones. 

The stories we tell ourselves to live, it turns out, can often be very different from the stories we once believed about ourselves, about our bodies, and about the sex we have (or don’t have). By looking at the stories believed about bodies in the past—which now seem strange, outlandish, delightfully bizarre—as well as the complex power structures that presupposed these ideas, only then can we interrogate our own stories and the way they shape our (sex) lives. The opening to Our Bodies, Ourselves explains, after women talk among themselves about their bodies and experiences with healthcare, “We were excited and our excitement was powerful. We wanted to share both the excitement and the material we were learning with our sisters. We saw ourselves differently and our lives began to change.” We begin to tell new stories.