Moissac Sculpture, Women, and Medieval Sodomy

This sculpture, coming from a porch from the abbey church at Moissac and dating between 1120-1135, shows a woman in hell being tortured for her sins of lust. Her long hair, draped over her face, draws attention to her sexual moral depravity, as two snakes bite her breasts as they coil around her genitalia. On the left, a grimacing demon seems to assist the torture. So if we needed any evidence for just how awful the Medieval Church thought unbridled female sexuality was, here it is.

To be fair, legal prosecution of what the Church and secular authorities considered “deviant” escalated against both men and women in the thirteenth century. It was in this century that laws punishing sodomy really manifested in Western Europe. Ruth Karras writes about how such legislation might have come in the wake of an assembly in the Crusader States at Nablus in 1120, which is the first place that sodomy was decreed to be punishable by burning.

Now “sodomy” was a nebulous term in the Middle Ages, frequently meaning “any sex act that was not penis-in-vagina,” and thus not necessarily directed against men engaging in anal sex. Indeed, the _Livres de jostice et de plet_, written in 13th-century Orléans region, was the first to explicitly punish female same-sex acts, and it used the term “sodomy” to describe them.

However, talk about and punishment directed against women who had sex with each other was notably rare in Medieval sources. This was not because the relevant authorities were pro-lesbian, but for several other reasons. Here I quote Judith Bennett’s list (assembled by Ruth Karras): “they (the women having sex with each other) did not bother people because they did not prevent women from bearing legal children to legal husbands, because they did not involve penises, because they did not involve sperm, and because of pervasive misogyny that made anything women did not matter very much.”