Casual Sex in a medieval setting?

[skip.knox]

To be fair to the OP, who really ought to stop by once in a while, I did not read the OP as suggesting an entirely created world needed to resemble anything at all. I read it as he had already made his choices but was curious about the historical reality. We've wandered around a bit since then.

 

[FifthView]

I did not read the OP as suggesting an entirely created world needed to resemble anything at all.

Skip, there were a few areas where the OP seemed to suggest this. Here's one:

This is not to say that there can’t be a rationale in your fantasy world for sexual casualness that mirrors our current culture (at least on campus). But if you want to make your world plausible, you need to think of a rationale. I was pretty excited to watch the Shanara series recently, and when they threw in a casual roll in the hay for two of the main characters, I was done. It ruins the illusion to see modern mores in a non-modern setting.

The default had already been outlined. I.e., a default based on an understanding (however accurate or not; I'm not judging here) of medieval European culture. So to me this says that created fantasy worlds really ought to resemble our own historical world unless some rationale is created to justify the departure.

There is also an assumption here that a created world won't need a rationale for looking like our historical medieval Europe. In other words, the assumed default is self-evident? But I'm not sure it is self-evident for any other world but our own, heh. Behaviors, mores, customs, history, cultures and the like can be quite different in a created fantasy world, and the resulting attitudes towards casual sex may veer away from the general attitudes a medieval European culture had. I don't believe all these factors need explicating in fine detail within the story, as if to justify the existence of those attitudes.

Perhaps in your fantasy world you’ve already arranged for that. You have healing orders that know everything about prenatal care and childbirth, so the danger is vastly diminished (this is so in my world, the Sundered Spheres). Do those attitudes instantly vanish because the danger suddenly is less? Do all churches suddenly decide that their teachings are wrong and abandon them? Obviously, from our experience in our own world, that’s not the case.

"Do all churches...." —well, but maybe the fantasy world doesn't have churches, eh? At least, no Christian or Muslim or other Earthly churches? Perhaps the fantasy world has several different support layers—not only relating to health, but also economic—and various customs making unplanned pregnancies less dire a situation than may have been experienced by many medieval women on Earth? Or maybe the story taking place in the fantasy world is limited in scope, showing only these few people engaged in various behaviors, and as there were exceptions and variation throughout our own Earth history, these individual stories can take many routes?

sexual casualness that mirrors our current culture (at least on campus)

Here is a place that points at the murkiness of sexual attitudes in our own world, after all. Campus culture is a very tiny portion of our larger culture. I'm assuming we are talking about Western cultures. While I do think that, thanks to various factors, attitudes are generally somewhat different now than even 60, 70 years ago, I'm not sure that our wider culture is greatly more sexually casual than it was 60, 70 years ago—at least not as reflected in actual behavior. Attitudes might be a bit more relaxed, but actual sexual behaviors a little less relaxed than attitudes? But if we are going to use college campuses as a guide, heh, then that's an unfair comparison unless the story takes place in some sort of similarly elite or special, limited milieu.

There's also the question of whether we should be striving for historical accuracy, historical fact, or striving for relatable stories. I mean we don't write in medieval English after all.

 

[The Dark One]

Casual sex - in the modern sense - was made possible by the pill, the greatest change in male/female relations since the dawn of time.

But people have always been driven by their urges, it's just that there were (potentially) consequences in the past, hence the importance of marriage. There were plenty of times and places during the medieval period when a couple wanting to marry had to wait until a house became available because the village could only produce enough for a finite number of mouths. It was an economic driven morality.

 

[Insolent Lad]

There is another factor here that hasn't been brought up, one that became of considerable importance largely after the close of the Middle Ages, and that is venereal diseases. Things certainly underwent some changes in Europe with the introduction of syphilis at the close of the 15th Century. If folks know sex might kill them they may be a little less likely to indulge in casual encounters. Obviously, this did not stop a great many, considering how widespread the infections were.

Anyway, the existence of venereal diseases in both real and fantasy settings would be bound to have some effect on the culture. I can't think of reading much of this sort of thing in fantasy however, though I believe Samuel Delany did some sort of Aids-like illness in one of the Neveryon books.

 

[Miles Lacey]

The biggest problem with E F Jacob's book about the Fifteenth Century is the lack of an Index that lists anything other than places, battles and people. While looking through Jacob's book yesterday I came across an interesting thing: people were charged a fee or levy for getting married. This would've almost certainly deterred many people from getting married, especially if they were poor.

 

[The Dark One]

People still pay for a marriage license. it deters no-one.

 

[Insolent Lad]

The cost of a license may deter the poor from having a legal/official marriage but they would go ahead and live together in a common law marriage.

 

[skip.knox]

The biggest problem with E F Jacob's book about the Fifteenth Century is the lack of an Index that lists anything other than places, battles and people. While looking through Jacob's book yesterday I came across an interesting thing: people were charged a fee or levy for getting married. This would've almost certainly deterred many people from getting married, especially if they were poor.

Were charged by whom? Did it say? I'm pretty sure the Church did not charge, though tipping the priest (not to be confused with tipping the cow) has a long history. As for civil authorities, who in an isolated village would even be the authority? And how would they know? That goes even more for the urban poor. Maybe Jacobs has the particulars, but I'd bet a cup of tea he didn't provide them. I'm always suspicious of such generalities. The only time you should make a blanket statement is when it's about blankets.

 

[FifthView]

Were charged by whom? Did it say? I'm pretty sure the Church did not charge, though tipping the priest (not to be confused with tipping the cow) has a long history. As for civil authorities, who in an isolated village would even be the authority? And how would they know? That goes even more for the urban poor. Maybe Jacobs has the particulars, but I'd bet a cup of tea he didn't provide them. I'm always suspicious of such generalities. The only time you should make a blanket statement is when it's about blankets.

I've finally taken my own advice and skimmed through references to marriage in Hanawalt's book, heh. I've learned a new word: merchet.

Apparently the practice arose as a consequence of manorialism. The lord owned the land and also, by default, the peasant tenants who lived on the land. They were not slaves per se, but they had to pay the lord, often by their labor and products. Whenever a daughter was to be married, this represented a potential loss in labor for the lord, so someone would have to pay a merchet fee to the lord as compensation. Hanawalt wrote this interesting tidbit:

The merchet payments from Ramsey Abbey's Liber Gersumarum show the peasant marriage market at work. While the document does not record all marriages between 1398 and 1458, and is therefore not complete, the 426 merchet cases recorded present the broad outline of interested parties in marriages and the amounts they paid for merchet. The bride's father paid in 33 percent of the cases, and the bride paid the merchet in the same percentage of cases. The bridegroom paid in 26 percent of the cases, and another person, such as the bride's mother, paid in 8 percent of the cases. Four categories of licenses appeared in the records. The most typical (37 percent) was for a naif (villein) of the village to marry another naif of the same village. Licenses to marry people outside the village comprised 26 percent, and marriage to a freeman constituted 16 percent. In all these cases the groom was specified. But in 21 percent of the cases only a general license to marry was purchased. [Hanawalt, Barbara. The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England. Oxford University Press, 1986. p. 200]
​

Incidentally, four pages before that, Hanawalt also suggests that teenagers were less promiscuous than in modern times, with premarital pregnancies and bastardy being "infrequent (13 to 26 percent of all marriages)"—at least in the sixteenth century. She mentions however that, often, premarital pregnancy might have been desired:

Later studies have also shown that for most of these women a premarital pregnancy was a prelude to marriage and that conception may, indeed, have been necessary for the marriage to take place. Children were so important to the economy that a couple wanted to be sure of fertility before entering into a marriage. But some women had two or more illegitimate children, suggesting that a small subset of village women routinely engaged in illicit sex. The stigma of an illegitimate birth for either the mother or the child need not have been very strong in peasant society. [Ibid., 196]
​

I find these things to be fruitful considerations.

Heh.

I mean, in the context of building a fanciful world for a fantasy story. Merchet is something I would never have considered using, because I had no idea it existed. Now I think it could add some great layers, if not only to the world building but also for the plot and character conflict.

 

[skip.knox]

Wonderful! This is precisely why I keep writing about history for fantasy writers. There's a rich substratum of ideas across that thousand year span that goes unrecognized by most fantasy writers. It's not easy to get at and there aren't really any books that speak to it, and anyway it's hard to predict what will prove useful from one writer to the next. I'm very glad you found something worth considering.

 

[James Wilson]

Many good points, but it must be stated that the European medieval period is a very solid convention for fantasy in general, so what’s important about that is to not test the suspension of disbelief too much. If you push the idea of 70 sexes that is current in some places today backward into a medieval setting it’s just not going to make sense. The cultural order of the tie, exists for a reason and when it is overturned (by magic, for example) the repercussions should be reflected everywhere. A hierarchal religion is essential to making a medieval setting work, its one reason why despite hundreds of D&D novels none of them is great. Having a medieval setting with a pantheon of choose your own deities simply doesn’t work. If there’s no church, feudalism fails. Despite all its bad points, feudalism was an extremely stable system that last hundreds of years in many nations.

While college culture is admittedly a tiny portion of II society, it is over represented in literature and especially in film, and it doesn’t question itself. These self-righteous self-evident beliefs are often held uncritically and often just assumed to have always existed in all cultures. Is not he existence of casual sex that breaks me out of the suspension of disbelief, but the lack of a rationale that takes time and place into account. It’s like calling 20 men a brigade. It just doesn’t fit unless it’s got a reason that is self-consistent with the setting.

It's one of the things that bother me about the Game of Thrones series. A gargantuan feudal system twenty times the size of Europe with nothing to hold it together. Knights without any concept of chivalry, monks without religion, not even any cohesive morality allowing the practice of hypocrisy. Doesn’t even have a Roman-style Pantheon. Modern cynicism without anything to rebel against. I mean where would we be without the Victorians to sneer at?

 

[skip.knox]

I'm glad James Wilson has returned to the thread, having started it. Alas, he still hasn't said what he meant by "casual sex" in the first place, so it's hard to formulate a clear response. Even so, plenty of interesting ideas have been proffered.

I'm having trouble sorting some of the statements. For instance, "...the idea of 70 sexes..." Do you perhaps mean the stereotype of sex during the 1970s? Another example is "The cultural order of the tie..." That one has me stumped. But certainly if we make fundamental changes to human sexual relations and social values, the repercussions should be reflected everywhere. I'll drink to that, and I'll agree that many fantasy novels don't follow through on the implications of what sometimes look like arbitrary choices. That doesn't bother me too much. I look to the best for models, not to the mediocre.

As a medieval historian I have to disagree about the comments on medieval society. A hierarchical religion (a muddy phrase) is not essential to making a medieval setting work. Much of medieval life went on without reference to religion. The statement about a medieval pantheon will comes as a surprise to the denizens of Altearth, where the Roman pantheon persisted along with the Empire (it's my fantasy setting). Rather than stating that something simply doesn't work, I'd rather say it doesn't work for me, or that I've yet to see it work well. That leaves the door open for an aspiring author to surprise me.

And then there's feudalism again. It might turn into a hot button for me; I keep a spray bottle handy. But leaving aside the academic arguments about feudalism generally and feudalism as a system in particular, there's no case to be made for it to be dependent upon or derived from religion. It was secular in origin and expression.

I'll finish with my disclaimer: I make these points not to criticize the OP but with an eye to others who read these threads in the future. I feel obliged to offer another point of view on matters that touch close to my professional home. People are free to disagree, of course. The gods, all of 'em, know that historians disagree among themselves, perennially.

 

[James Wilson]

By 70 sexes I mean the current list of sexes in addition to male and female. I’ve read the list, most of which go from ridiculous to preposterous but some people believe and so long as they don’t try to force me to believe, I don’t really care.

You’re right that feudalism as a system has many definitions and most of them aren’t extremely clear. Feudalism as a overarching social order without the Roman and to a lesser degree Greek churches would not offer the social stability that made it work for so long. I do not subscribe to the notion that economics rule everything. A perfect economic system still would not solve almost any social problems. So when I’m referring to feudalism I mean the culture, not just the economic system. The church was integral to the system, in the same way the caste system keeps people in line in India (or did).

When I use the term casual, I mean it literally: without definite or serious intention; careless or offhand; passing — seeming or tending to be indifferent to what is happening; apathetic; unconcerned — without emotional intimacy or commitment

All those things.

In our present time cynicism and outright nihilism are seen as smart, but in a time when demons stalk and priests declaim and knights fight and lords lord, it might be a bit of a bigger deal. Treating WOMEN as mere nothings might be commonplace, but it doesn’t follow that the women in question agree and are reconciled to be treated with all the love and caring of a p-rn addict for his Kleenex box. Would some be so? Of course. My Sundered Spheres has many places where women are treated as third class citizens after men and horses. The city of Fenez is dedicated to the Rabbit God and is essentially a huge collection of temples where priestesses are really just prostitutes, and of course it’s very popular among sailors. It’s not that sex shouldn’t exist in fantasy novels, or that casual sex shouldn’t, it just needs a rationale that fits time and place. Of course a sailor that follows the Three Divined in the Sundered Spheres shouldn’t be messing with these ‘priestesses,’ because he took an oath at his Third Birth that he wouldn’t. However if he does, he’ll try to keep it secret, a hypocrisy common to all religions, because he doesn’t want to be known as an oath breaker. He didn’t want the church ladies sniffing at him.

I hope that clears it up a bit, at least what I was getting at.

 

[skip.knox]

I'm unfamiliar with the list.

>The church was integral to the system, in the same way the caste system keeps people in line in India
Well the RCC (Roman Catholic Church) certainly did not keep people "in line". When one looks for very long at medieval religion it quickly becomes evident that the RCC was very far from being monolithic and usually had its hands full dealing with its own priests and monks.

But I'm wandering away from the OP.

There certainly was casual sex in the Middle Ages. We can document it in a variety of ways, and scores of historians have done excellent work in the field since at least the 1970s. That said, medieval attitudes toward sex (note the plural) are not the same as modern attitudes. But fretting too much about that moves us into historicity rather than into writing fiction. I like to use the MIddle Ages for inspiration rather than something to adhere to. There are ways to thrust modern attitudes into past times--usually, but not always, for comedic effect. Everything from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to the movie A Knight's Tale.

For me, it's always story first. A well-told story can persuade me of anything, and leave me hungry for more.

 

[The Dark One]

By and large though, keeping people in line is exactly what the medieval church did. There may have been occasional issues (schisms even) with the church's own officials and other adventurers, but for the most part this is simply explained by the usual rule - ie, the majority of people just want a simple life so leave leadership to those who are compelled to lead. Those who want to lead will always justify their strategies and treacheries - somehow - and the very small part of the truth that the little people ever get to see or hear is so full of spin that the little people either file it away with their media driven prejudices or simply don't care...as long as they can get on with what's left of their lives.

Looking back from the educated vantage of the present, we can easily see how the benighted hordes were manipulated into compliance.

What will the elite historiographers of the C25 say about us?

 

[Prince of Spires]

it must be stated that the European medieval period is a very solid convention for fantasy in general, so what’s important about that is to not test the suspension of disbelief too much. I

It's not actually the European medieval period (whatever that is) that is the convention in fantasy. But rather, it is the Hollywood idea of what medieval Europe was like that is the convention. And there is a big difference between the two. The average reader will know little to nothing about real medieval life. They will have had a couple of history lessons in school which they slept through, which focused on the big events for their own culture (you find little about Byzantium in a lot of western europe history classes...). They talk about the wars, border movements, important battles and that sort of thing. They don't go into detail about what life like a peasant was like. Or how life differed between someone in southern Spain in 800 AD and someone in Scandinavia in 1300. In short, your average reader will have no clue about any of it, except for what they learned from movies and books.

So, as long as you don't go into detail about something, a reader will overlay the Hollywood idea on your medieval setting. Which means you can get away with a lot, including casual sex (as far as the average reader is concerned).

Which is not to say that you should. As everyone likes pointing out, there's a lot more to even just medieval Europe than just England from something like 1200-1400 overlaid with modern cultural ideas. But keep in mind that people will start from their Hollywood image. And anything that deviates from that needs to be "explained".

 

[FifthView]

I tend to look at vertical vs horizontal "controls" and place much, much more emphasis on horizontal controls than on vertical controls—most of the time.

Vertical: Top-down control; central authority has enforcers dispersed widely enough to maintain control over a single given aspect or many aspects of society; the rules are established up top somewhere, e.g. a supreme leader or council/legislature of sorts.

Horizontal: While top-down controls might exist, they are not as strong as what amounts to peer pressure. Using religion as an example, the public shaming or ostracism—or threat of these—acts as a control on the populace. The individuals doing this may feel strongly about whatever top-down controls exist, for instance concerning various dogmas and dictates an authority disseminates, or else they may not even think in those terms but habitually reinforce or police the attitudes and behaviors of one another. The point is that they are not official enforcers or members of that central authority. They're just other citizens living in that society.

There are places for both paradigms in stories. Sometimes creating a strong vertical control will be the thing the story needs. Other times, simply having strong horizontal controls will build the world and the conflicts a story needs. And of course there can be both, heh. For instance, you might create a world with a strong central church theocracy but set it in a time period in which ascendant mercantilism is creating new "rules" and thus horizontal controls that come into conflict with those vertical rules of the theocracy.

Applying these ideas to the issue in this thread...I suspect that medieval Europe's churches wished for ever greater vertical controls but that most of that work had to be done horizontally. Sure, there were local parishes and the like; but I'm not sure how well they were designed to exert force over the populace except through the lord of the land (pun intended) who may have co-opted the church when not being co-opted himself, and anyway a lot of villages were simply very far removed from the center of societies (or wherever the main authority had established itself.)

By and large though, keeping people in line is exactly what the medieval church did. There may have been occasional issues (schisms even) with the church's own officials and other adventurers, but for the most part this is simply explained by the usual rule - ie, the majority of people just want a simple life so leave leadership to those who are compelled to lead. Those who want to lead will always justify their strategies and treacheries - somehow - and the very small part of the truth that the little people ever get to see or hear is so full of spin that the little people either file it away with their media driven prejudices or simply don't care...as long as they can get on with what's left of their lives.

Looking back from the educated vantage of the present, we can easily see how the benighted hordes were manipulated into compliance.

What will the elite historiographers of the C25 say about us?

 

[FifthView]

For me, it's always story first. A well-told story can persuade me of anything, and leave me hungry for more.

For me, an awful lot doesn't need explanation or justification if the story is engaging. For instance, I enjoyed the two most recent Narnia movies, especially Prince Caspian, and I didn't need an explanation of why/how animals can talk in that world or why there should be multiple kings and queens—brothers and sisters!—in a single kingdom.

Different people will have different tastes, different expectations, and differing areas involving suspension of disbelief. For instance, I tried watching the new Dark Crystal show on Netflix and just couldn't get past the first episode. Too unreal-looking. Mostly, there was no dust or dirt anywhere, on any set; it was all pristine, owing to the way the movie was made. Also, I had a little trouble, though less, seeing the puppets talk but not seeing any part of the face move other than mouth and eyes heh. Anyway.

Sex is a touchy subject for lots of people. I suspect that someone who believes there are only two sexes and/or genders will be troubled by any depiction to the contrary, or at least will require an explanation of the third and fourth, etc., sexes/genders...And I wonder once again whether differences in why we pick up a fantasy novel set in medievalish times, in the first place, are differences that we have any hope of isolating and agreeing to recognize. Is it the desire to see ye old standards reborn? Dunno. I'm perpetually fascinated by this question.

All this said, however, I do agree that the story comes first. I also would admit that I have certain button issues, or reactions, that would prevent me from reading some stories. Casual sex in a medieval world is not one of those issues, although I suppose now that it is for others.

 

[The Dark One]

Don't forget that people grew up during the Age of Faith in a milieu that would have seemed self-evidently just and correct to those who sucked in its tenets with their mother's milk. The vast majority would never have queried the Divinely Appointed Order - it would never have even occurred to them - as the parish priest reminded them of their faith and duties and village life was built around the Saints' festivals.

This is both a vertical and horizontal compulsion - the very same compulsion that all people feel growing up with the natural law / superego peculiar to their own cultures.

It is one of humankind's great tragedies that everyone can see the manifest prejudice and injustice in other cultures, but can never see the same injustice in their own.

 

[FifthView]

Sure, I think a lot of people would have done this, and reacted to this, habitually, unquestioningly.

I do think a large number might have "slipped" quite a bit, much like modern Americans (or other Earthly inhabitants) occasionally driving over the speed limit, or drinking and driving, or fibbing on some tax form or on an employment application...

For me, the question of whose eyes must be avoided is simply too full and powerful a prompt, heh, whether the control is horizontal or vertical.

Don't forget that people grew up during the Age of Faith in a milieu that would have seemed self-evidently just and correct to those who sucked in its tenets with their mother's milk. The vast majority would never have queried the Divinely Appointed Order - it would never have even occurred to them - as the parish priest reminded them of their faith and duties and village life was built around the Saints' festivals.

This is both a vertical and horizontal compulsion - the very same compulsion that all people feel growing up with the natural law / superego peculiar to their own cultures.

It is one of humankind's great tragedies that everyone can see the manifest prejudice and injustice in other cultures, but can never see the same injustice in their own.