Safe sex.... in the Middle Ages
When most people think of the Middle ages, they don't picture an era of open-minded European society, free from societal restrictions. To be frank, people who lived in the middle ages had to operate under harsh societal rules. Not even the rich could escape societal conformity and duty. One of the most encroaching and meddling rules that everyone had to follow were the rules involving sex. But rules have never stopped humans from doing things they want to do.
They just invented ways to not get caught. And sex is an activity that has always enticed humans. There are over 8 billion of us, and it's not because babies are easy and pleasant to raise! From the orgasms to the hormonal changes and seeing a person you are very attracted to completely naked, there are many reasons why humans love having sex so much. But sex is a form of expression, and the powers that be in society and institutions feel the need to control human behavior and expression.
So when it came to sex, they invented ways to have safe sex and prevent birth and pregnancy. In the middle ages, the church and the king had dozens of rules around what was supposed to happen in the bedroom of an unmarried and married couple.
The ultimate safe sex practice, virginity
We all know about the image of the gentle maiden virgin of the past. In the middle ages and every other period before the 1940s and the invention of birth control, women had to stay virgins until they were married. There were no wild sexual stories for her to look up to, and if there were, the woman in the story was most likely a villain or the victim of a cautionary tale.
If a woman does not want to get pregnant before she's married, then the most reliable safe sexual practice she can perform is simply not having sex. But of course, you cannot tell human beings to not do something and then expect them to actually not do it. Also, married couples were supposed to have sex with each other.
Sex was a divine command for married couples so that they could have a baby and create a family, which would then honor God and also improve the community and future of the local village. Most villages had about a hundred families, and each had to do their duty to God and the community. So a spouse could feign a headache so many times.
If the couple could not get pregnant, there were some places in Europe and Asia where their marriage was not seen as real in the eyes of God, and both could remarry. But it was still shameful.
Virginity was so prized in the past. There was even the belief that those who died as virgins would receive a higher reward than anyone else in heaven, besides that martyr. But only a few types of Christianity had this view. But all sects and denominations viewed purity and virginity as a duty of all women. Technically, men were supposed to follow virginity rules as well, but the enforcement of their rules was relaxed compared to the rules forced on women.
Obviously, that is because women can get pregnant and men cannot. Plus, a man does not truly know if a child is his. There was no way to get a DNA test; that is why female purity and virginity were so unbelievably important. It ensured that the husband cared for his flesh and blood and not another man's child.
The rules regarding sex, as dictated by the church.
Throughout history, humans have been boning and screwing, no matter their marital status. If you were to survey the entire human population, I believe that you would find that very few people waited until marriage to have sex. The rest were secretly doing the vertical tango with the local hunter, milkmaid, blacksmith, tailor, shopkeeper, or hot farmer's daughter from down the road.
To support this claim, you should know that several hospitals around the 1900s conducted a study, and they found that only half of the babies born were to married couples. The other half of the babies were from betrothed people who could not wait until marriage to have sex and
But the free expression of human sexuality was not something that society prized. So the higher institutions restrict sexual activity, even though the men in power had mistresses!! Talk about hypocritical!! In the era of the Middle Ages, who was allowed to have sex, when they were allowed to have it, the reasons they could have sex, and the punishments a person had to face if they were to break these rules were all dictated by the church.
Because there was no effective birth control like we have now in the modern era, the chance of becoming pregnant from a 20-minute tryst in the woods was an ever-looming threat to married couples, spouses who were getting a little action on the side, and unmarried people who did not want to wait to tie the knot.
So, people in the middle ages had to invent ways to prevent pregnancy. Some methods were more effective than others. Here are a few ways they used to prevent the births of bastard children.
● People engage in non-penetrative sex as much as they can. Handjobs, blowjobs, and homemade masturbatory devices were secretly everywhere.
● Women who had given birth relied heavily on nursing their children to prevent pregnancy. However, we know now that breastfeeding doesn't stop all women from becoming pregnant.
● Women inserted a mixture of lily root and rue into the vagina before sex. This was to stop the sperm from traveling to the higher part of the vaginal canal.
● Tufts of wool were inserted deep into the vaginal canal to catch sperm. Then the woman had to remove the wool with a long tool, as the thrusting usually pushed the wool deep inside her.
● Cedar oil, a type of gum, was also used to catch semen before it traveled deeper into the vaginal canal. It was also found to be a light spermicide.
● Women who had just engaged in sex were told to carry the cutout womb of a goat that never had offspring. This was an ineffective method, unless it supposed to prevent the husband from seeking sexual congress with their wife because she smelled like goat blood.
● Eating a piece of jet, which is known to be quite gross.
● Some women were even told to sneeze at the exact moment a man had an ejaculation. The through process around this remedy was thought that the contraction of the muscle prevented the sperm from traveling higher into the vaginal canal. This remedy sounds like it was made up to make fun of the naive girl whose parents sheltered her all of her young life. It also sounds like a tip modern middle schooler would share with other middle school girls in the bathroom.
And, as always, people very much relied on the pull-out method to prevent pregnancy. When a heterosexual couple engaged in sex using the pull-out method, a man was supposed to pull out of a woman before his orgasm and ejaculation. However, we now know that sperm lives inside of the precum. So the pull-out method isn't useful unless the man already has a very low sperm count.
Abortion in the middle ages
Despite the church's rules on abortion, it was a well-known practice that many women, mostly the rich and the ruling classes, along with royalty, had access to.
Because of the limited Medical Technology at that time, there were two ways to invoke an abortion. One way was to have the fetus removed with primitive medical tools. The other was by drinking a solution that could induce a miscarriage.
Inducing a miscarriage was a proven technique that women from all backgrounds could rely on in the event of an unwanted pregnancy.
Prostitutes who became pregnant regularly sought out healers and doctors who could give them miscarriage-inducing solutions.
One solution was Red Willow root cooked wine mixed with matter and marshmallow, barley flour, egg white, and cooked into small cookies or wafers.
However, if a woman was caught taking the solution that induced miscarriage, she could go to prison for ten years or more or be exiled from the entire community, and her family would live on in shame.
Safe sex that saves your soul too
However, since we are talking about the Middle Ages, we need to expand our definition of safe sex. Not only is safe sex practiced to prevent pregnancy and STDs, but we must also add a secondary meaning which is the practice of God-ordained sexual abstinence periods.
To practice safe sex that keeps your soul from going to hell, there were certain days where even married couples were not allowed to have sex. And depending on the calendar that a country followed, there could be over 150 days ordained to be free from sex.
Don't have too much sex, even if you are married.
But why was sex between married couples regulated by the church? You see, the Bible describes the church and its members as the bride and God as the groom. So when a person got married, their spouse was subsequently viewed as a third member of the marriage, which could take the importance of the marriage away from God. So getting married meant that you were part of a supernatural threesome. Sounds kind of kinky to me!
The church educated everyone on when it was ok to have sex. People couldn't have sex on Sundays because it was Lord's day, and they also couldn't have sex on Thursdays or Fridays because those were the days in which they had to prepare for communion. Married couples had to abide by these laws as well.
Lent is an important religious period overseen by the Catholic church. This event usually lasted from 42 to 62 days, and it was during this time, people had to abstain from sex along with their other sins. Christians couldn't have sex on Christmas Ever or Christmas or during the Feast of Pentecost, which lasted 60 days!! And if there was an important holiday involving a Saint, you had better keep your hands to yourself when you laid down next to your spouse for the night.
And if you think that the sexy peasant girl from across the river could bypass all of God's laws and give you a pregnancy-free medieval blowjob, well, there was a law against that too. In some countries and territories, not even a married couple could give each other handjobs or blowjobs. All legal sex had to be penetrative vaginal sex so the couple could have the chance of becoming pregnant. If the woman could not become pregnant, it wasn't legal or moral sex.
Modern, safe sex practice could have helped those in the middle ages.
The medical technologies and knowledge that we have now are so unbelievably advanced compared to the Middle Ages it's not even a true comparison. While people in the Middle Ages could only rely on observation and flawed medical textbooks to treat patients. But we can microscopically analyze bodies, clinically advanced drugs, and life-saving machines that can extend a person's life when their body is in dire distress. And we also know about bacteria, viruses, and germs.
If there's one technology that would help the people in the Middle Ages, that would have to be the male and female condoms. They had condoms in the past, but they were made from intestines, and that's gross.
Another technology that would help the people of the past is vaccines. So many babies could have lived through measles, and the mother would not have to keep getting pregnant.
Conclusion
Although the Catholic and Christian churches still exist today, only the people practicing those religions have to follow their sexual rules. But if you decide to fuck and pray your sins away the next day, the police aren't going to arrest you. And no matter what your marital status is, women now have the right to birth control and Plan B, and men can buy all the fleshlights and ribbed condoms they want. Thank God and the Saint for that!