Through the centuries, there were sporadic appearances of pamphlets and miscellaneous pieces that had reference to amatory aids. For instance, Le Jardin d’Amour, published in 1798 by a certain Tansillo or Tanzillo.
Every century, every country, every religious sect, had its own monstrous obscenities, its peculiar orgiastic ceremonials, its gross and bestial manifestations, and its most unhallowed erotic permutations. Some of these phenomena were of a seclusive nature, confined to initiates only. Others, more liberated or more daring, were associated with royal courts, or temple worship, or even conventual life. Erotic acts, bestial performances, tribadism and fellatio and every other abnormality were all depicted in caves and church windows, woven in tapestries, or represented in ornamental furniture, etched in books, moulded in statuary.
The Middle Ages, in particular, were the milieu, but of course not exclusively so, of political cataclysms and internecine wars, of plagues and intrigues and famine, of splendor and tournaments, jousts and crusades, and also of servitude and witchcraft, gluttony and debauchery, monastic life and religious reforms, art and poetry and lewdness.
All through the ages, notably during these middle eras, this dichotomy was prevalent and manifest. And pervading and transcending all civic conditions, all national issues, was the erotic life of the teeming, inarticulate populace and the highly literate and cultured minorities: wanton prelates and easy princesses, libidinous serving maids and poetic gallants, romantic crusaders, lechers, perverts.
The history of these times is packed with religious lusts, with worship of the genitalia, with female devotees of Priapus, with amatory flagellations and erotic feasts, with sexuality rampant in full public view, with chastity belts and barbarous contraptions. The Latin chronicles and the Latin satirical writings, the Wandering Scholars’ songs and the anecdotes and tales that amused these centuries are filled with abhorrent nudist practices, with adultery and incest, with prostitution and unholy commerce of holy devotees, with rape and sodomy. We hear of the most unbridled, the most shameless doings from the chronicles of Godefroy and of Froissart, of Benevente and Grecourt. We read of obscene banquets under kingly sponsorship, of brothels under royal patronage, of public gymnastic performances of harlots, of the debaucheries of monks and canons and students, adventurers and courtiers. We read of a monastery dedicated to prostitution, of parades of harlots, of foul sexual privileges exercised by the lords of the manor, of the ius primae noctis and the droit de cuisse, and, in short, of an array, colossal in bulk and unspeakable in content, of every conceivable erotic fact.
Through the ages, the knowledge of sexual and amatory artifices, contraptions, inducements grew and multiplied in such variety, through legend and experiment, through the accretions of poetic myths and hearsay, that a voluminous corpus was achieved. It comprehended incantations and fantasies, rare prescriptions, crude operative techniques, formulas and incisions, superstitions and alchemical products, astrological cryptograms and Satanic supplications that were all assumed to be effective in guarding or in increasing amatory potency.
Sexual procedures of all types and at varying levels were particularly prevalent in the Middle Ages. In addition, the clergy, according to the testimony of contemporary songs and monastic chronicles and incidental references in drama and satire and history, were not altogether immune to such diversions. To promote asceticism, therefore, to diminish carnal lusts, various plants and drugs and other medicaments were employed in monasteries to produce the desired anaphrodisiac condition. Agnus castus, for example, which is now identified with the chaste-tree or Abraham’s balm, was credited with having decided cooling effects and eliminating physiological urgencies.