The prevalence of slavery in Ancient Rome impacted the sex lives of Roman men, both free and slave. One of the ways it did was by how people thought about male-to-male sexual intercourse.In Classical Athens, there was a common practice of pederasty among men of different ages: an older man was a sort of tutor […]
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The Ancient Romans were not shy about generating erotic sex scenes in their art and literature. In the Late Empire of the second and third centuries, so much evidence surrounding the pleasures of sex abounded that it can be easy to imagine the Romans (well, the male citizen Romans) solely as pleasure-seeking sensualists.But we also
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Here is a picture of the Flemish artist Hans Memling’s _Allegory of Chastity_, and although it was done in the 15th century, it testifies to the long-term effects of Christianity’s radical sexual revolution that had begun a millennium and a half before.Here you see Chastity, besieged by the lions of sexual behavior that would threaten
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The Italian city of Ravenna boasts the highest concentration of mosaics from the Late Antique period of Roman history. And featured here you see one of the most famous — a scene from the Procession of the Virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo. Set against the tiled background of shimmering gold, these two women calmly march forward.
Portion of the Italian Mosaic “The Procession of the Virgins in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo” Read More »
Wanna know a crazy thing that a lot of British and American people were interested in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?: masturbation. Moralists and medical writers freaked the heck out over “onanism,” a term that Victorians liked using for wanking, jerking off, sailing the taco, flicking the bean, etc, etc.Anti-masturbation diatribes have
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Everything has a history, including menstruation. Shown here is rock art from Western Australia’s indigenous peoples depicting two women dancing and menstruating.The cultural history of how societies have dealt with women’s menses is fascinating, but so too is the research done by evolutionary biologists. We have not all experienced periods in the same way throughout
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Camp followers have been part of military history since soldiers have been deployed, but the French kept up a regulated system of prostitutes to serve their armies well into the 20th century. These were the “BMCs” or “Bordelles Militaires de Champagne,” aka Military Field Bordellos.In fact, they really only got going during the colonial wars
Yesterday’s post featured a successful entrepreneur (Walt Disney) whose Utopian community failed to come to fruition. Today I am looking at a Utopian community which grew into a successful corporate enterprise, almost despite itself. And here I am talking about Oneida, the New York-based silverware company (see second image for vintage silverware photo). And incongruously,
Time for a slice of poetry history! Reader, may I introduce you to one Arnaut Daniel, a late 12th-century troubadour from Provençe in southern France, and most likely candidate for the invention of the _sestina_? This image is from a 13th-century manuscript, which is as contemporary as we can get.Admittedly, neither Daniel nor the sestina
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Yup, you are seeing what you think you are seeing: it’s a sex scene, and it comes from the Lupanar of Pompeii, the largest brothel discovered in the famous Ancient Roman city. “Lupanar” translates both as “brothel” and “wolf-den,” and another name for a prostitute is “lupa”. Calling a sex worker a wolf is
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This is a Sheela-na-gig: a type of statue or carving found on European Christian buildings from the Central Middle Ages showing a naked woman overtly displaying her vulva. Whatever messages they were intended to make — fertility blessing, pagan remnant, or grotesque ridicule — contrasted with the high value of female virginity promoted by the
This fleshy female figure, found facing frontal with felines (haha say that ten times fast) comes from one of the earliest human civilizations that developed agriculture, the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük. The ruins are wonders, spanning thousands of years from 7,500-6,400 BCE, built up layer upon layer of 18 levels. Çatalhöyük gives lots of evidence
This post is three days past the memorial day of the person featured here, Saint Agatha of Sicily. She’s one of my favorite regulars in the history of Christian artwork — right along the arrows all over St Sebastian and St Lucy with her eyeballs or Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel or John with
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Do readers here have any examples of people in history who were reviled in their own time but now you sort of root for them? Elizabeth Cresswell (shown here from a contemporary engraving) is one of those people for me. Throughout much of the 17th century, she was the subject of public distain, ridiculed in
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In recognition of St Valentine’s Day, I thought I had better write about demon sex in the Middle Ages. And Church theologians thought this actually happened, where demons could appear to a woman and have sex with her, making her pregnant. The character Merlin from Medieval Arthurian legend, was born from a woman and
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Today in my Early Medieval Europe history class, I had one of the funnest discussions ever that bridged from talking about Medieval ideas about sex (“only okay if done to make a baby”) to a 20th-century pregnancy test my students thought sounded perfectly Medieval. And this would be “the rabbit test,” and it involved
This is a 14th-century painting of Saint Euphrosyne of Alexandria, who was one of the “monachoparthenoi”, a Medieval Greek term for “monk-virgins.” These were young women who disguised themselves as monks so that they could avoid marriage and live a life devoted to spiritual contemplation in male monasteries. It was a bit of a trend,
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The Catholic Church had a tremendous influence in Medieval society. This did not mean that folks didn’t write about sex, however. These two figures from a 14th-century manuscript show a monk and a nun canoodling with each other. They weren’t supposed to be doing that, btw. The writings about sex undertaken by Constantinus Africanus (died
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The interwebs are all a-flutter this week over the pronoun identification of this Roman emperor, Elagabalus, né Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. The given name is confusing enough, being a pastiche of other famous Ancients, but historians are more confounded by other aspects of Elagabalus. As an article from last week’s _Guardian_ put it: “Was Roman emperor
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Miracle stories from the early Middle Ages include some accounts of saints who could successfully induce abortions. One such legend is from a seventh-century book of the life and miracles of the Irish St. Brigid of Kildare, who was said to have died around 525 CE. In the story, a woman had sex for pleasure
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