The permutations of amatory complications in the social frame of the Middle Ages, involving peasant and noble, troubadour and harlot, occasional damsels, poets, mistresses and concubines, resulted sometimes in a frantic movement toward chastity. Renunciation of carnal delights, of the amor naturalis that implied physical and sensual love only, became a pose, then a principle, then a habit, however, at times, it might be infringed or dishonored.
Chastity belts were devised by departing warriors to enforce continence upon their wives. Chastity tests, ingeniously contrived, became popular experiments in sexual restraints. It was the vogue, and the vogue became mores. Just as Tristan and Yseult slept with a naked sword between them.
And in excessive cases there was the weird but apparently effective device, for propagation purposes only, of the chemise cagoule.
And always, in the wake of these temporary waves of contrition or repentance, there followed, as a consequence of plague, violence, political unrest, banditry and war, a terrifying unleashing of all human inhibitions, a bacchanalian orgy of prolonged lechery and debauchery, reminiscent of Thucydides’ dramatic account of the Athenian plague during the Peloponnesian War.
In the aftermath of these lecheries there arose perplexities, complications in erotic directions, incapacity through perversions and excesses: and a consequent hungry, voracious quest for remedial measures: drugs and drinks devised by itinerant traders, nostrums compounded by wily serfs and jongleurs, alchemical elixirs distilled in secret dens by putative adepts.
Women, in an amatory sense, were far from neglected in the Middle Ages. Many handbooks appeared that offered hints and guidance on dress, deportment, osculation and its limitations, social behavior, cleanliness, bathing and washing.
And if the object of the woman’s passion was preoccupied elsewhere, or hesitant, or indifferent to her insistence or her personal charms, there was always recourse to the potion, by means of which she could have her way.
In France, in the Middle Ages, prostitution was so rampant and seeped into the life of the people and the nobility to such an alarming extent that the pious King Saint Louis, who flourished in the thirteenth century, promulgated a series of stringent decrees against prostitutes.