Medieval penitential sex flowchart
Penitentials were handbooks listing many sins a confessor could be expected to encounter during private confession and the appropriate penances he should assign for each act (or the appropriate moneys the penitent should pay to commute a penance).
They were first compiled by Irish monks in the 6th century when the practice of private confession began to supersede the public confessions of sins and imposition of penances of early Christianity and spread to the continent, continuing to be published through the 12th century even though they were officially condemned by the Catholic Church during the Council of Paris in 829.
The penances tended to be things like fasts, repetitions of psalms on your knees or standing, giving alms, and the sins were everything from fornication to murder. But it’s the fornication that took up the lion’s share of these handbooks, and every conceivable act was detailed along with the (heavy) price it exacted in penance.
Here’s an example from Corpus Christi College’s Corpus 190 of the Canons of Theodore:
Whoever fornicates with an effeminate male or with another man or with an animal must fast for 10 years.
Elsewhere it says that whoever fornicates with an animal must fast 15 years and sodomites must fast for 7 years.
If the effeminate male (bædling) fornicates with another effeminate male (bædling), (he is to) do penance for 10 years.
Whoever does this unintentionally (unwærlice) once must fast for 4 years; if it is habitual, as Basil says, for 15 years if he is not in orders and also one year (less?) so as a woman does. If it is a boy, for the first time, 2 years; if he does it again, 4 years.
If he is a boy, for the first time, 2 years; if he does it again, 4 years.
If he fornicates interfemorally (between the limbs), he must fast for 1 year or the 3 40-day periods.
If he defiles himself (masturbates), he is to abstain from meat for four days.
He who desires to fornicate (with) himself (i.e., to masturbate) and is not able to do so, he must fast for 40 days or 20 days.
If he is a boy and does it often, either he is to fast 20 days or one is to whip him.
If a woman fornicates [with another woman?] she must do penance for 3 years.
If she touches herself in the same way, i.e., in emulation of fornication, she must repent for 1 year.
One penance applies to a widow and a virgin; more (penance) is earned by her who has a husband if she fornicates.
Whoever ejaculates seed into the mouth, that is the worst evil. From someone it was judged that they repent this up to the end of their lives.
And it goes on and on like that. Marriage is no cure either, because there are endless strictures against marital sex as well. If it’s not procreative, it’s fornication. If it’s done on a holy day, it’s fornication. You see above what happens if it’s oral: you get a life sentence of penance.
The penitential writers saw marital sex as a concession, not as a right or even a gift from God. The pleasure it brought was inherently sinful, a gateway to lust, so sex within marriage should be carefully contained and scheduled to ensure the most possible procreation and the least possible pleasure. Married couples had to abstain regularly or the very state of their marriage would degenerate into an illegitimate and sinful union. Even the children born of sex during a period where the couple should have abstained — mainly based on the Church’s liturgical calendar and on the wife’s reproductive cycle — were to be considered bastards.
Which brings us to the inspiration of today’s little historical sermon. Many years ago in college I read a fascinating book called Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by University of Kansas history professor emeritus James A. Brundage. It’s a remarkable analysis of Medieval authorities’ legal proscriptions about sex, starting with ancient Roman and Greek law codes, then moving on to Medieval strictures as seen in the penitentials, canon law, Germanic legal statutes, and ever so much more.
I regularly think of the chapter on the penitentials in particular, mainly because of one truly awesome flowchart. Unfortunately my copy of the book is squirreled away in my parents’ attic along with many of its college tome brethren, so yesterday when it popped into my head that I really need to blog about this greatest of historical graphs, I thought “Hey! There’s an interweb now! I bet I can find it online.” And so by Thor’s hammer I did.
It seems the chart has made a strong impression on many other people as well, and since Brundage’s book is standard in Medieval history and in history of sexuality studies, I am far from alone in wishing to pay it homage.
What it is is a flowchart Brundage compiled from many penitentials which helps the pious man figure out if he can have lawful intercourse. (Click for the large version.)
Genius, is it not? I bet you’ll find yourself thinking “STOP! SIN!” at random/randy times now too. 
That’s not to say that Medieval folks actually lived according to the flowchart rules, of course. There’s always a huge gap between proscription and reality. People did it then like we do it now: whenever they could. But it is a fascinating glimpse into the both prurient and ascetic world of Medieval confessor literature, and what kind of standards Medieval people might have measured themselves against.
I’m in deep deep trouble Livius!
You’re going to have to fast like a mofo, my friend.
How does one fast for 10 years?
Maybe it’s a Ramadan thing where you don’t eat between sunrise and sunset. Or else they could be referring to abstaining from eating meat or fish. There seem to have been several levels of fasting.
No, the no-food-during-daylight fast is only Muslim. Christian fasting does not, basically, mean NOT to eat – that is a misunderstanding. It means rather WHAT to eat: that is, to abstain from a range of foods such as meat – as you rightly state.
However, some saints did impose on themselves a kind of fasting which also implied eating less, for instance, only once a day; or only feeding from bread and water (number of times a day unspecified). In other words, fasting could in some cases take on what we would today call an anorectic character – of trying to eat as little as possible.
But that was in special and rare cases, not the ordinary case.
Ordinary people’s fasting prescribed from outside as a penance would “only” mean only not to eat meat, or drink wine, or however the forbidden things were defined. Of allowed foods, there was no restriction as to amount. One was allowed to eat one’s fill. This is also the way it is today in monasteries – in eastern (orthodox) christianity, for instance, there are very long fasting periods several times each year – forty days before easter, I think, and others of the same length. In these periods, they do not consume meat, oil/butter, egg or wine – but they eat DELICIOUS food during this period, not least in the monasteries! – since they have learnt to cook such fasting dishes especially well. (It is worth visiting an orthodox monastery just for trying those dishes!) Moreover, a recent health examination of monks of the Mount Athos showed that they rarely or never got cancer, though living to a very high age; the fasting periods, and their diet as a whole, is extremely beneficial. A book has now been written on it passing on the diet to people outside just for its health effects.
Thank you kindly for the fasting facts.
Somehow I can’t help thinking of the Pet Shop Boys.
Everything I long to do no matter when or where or who, has one thing in common too: STOP! SIN!
When I was a Young Thing in a Catholic girls’ high school, they had these “dating manuals” in the back of the library–they were old even then–that had a female body sort of blocked into segments like one of those cows where they mark out the cuts of meat. The segments indicated whether letting a guy touch you there was a mortal or venial sin, and even gave you a sense of how much purgatory time you’d have to do if you died before you could confess said transgressions. So if you were getting groped in the back seat of a car, and The Blob got you (in horror movies monsters always get you when you’re making out in cars), you might have to spend like 10,000 years in Purgatory if your date’s hand was in the Mortal Sin Zone (otherwise known as the “down there).
That’s pretty hilarious. I assume you all wrote copious graffiti on every page. My Catholic school didn’t have give us any manuals. They just positioned nuns all over the place at dances.
I sense a plot to encourage folks who’ve given one hummer to keep putting out. You earned lifetime penance with the first one; now you might as well just spread some happiness!
Good point. Also, once you give your first blow job everything else on the list becomes fair game. Hello farm animals, wives, and lots and lots of masturbation.
Considering this was the medieval Europe you forgot about young boys
Oh, that’s a given.
Let’s leave me out of it, and just speak in the abstract, okay?
One. I meant one.
I would suggest another book that i believe would go perfectly with this one.
John Boswell: Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality; Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
In this one you will find out why I mentioned young boys in my previous comment. Lets just say the Romans and Christians up to the 8 century were – lets just say that they were very open minded people.
I’ll be sure to check it out. As far as I know, Romans were not in fact terribly accepting of man-on-man sexuality. They openly derided the Greeks for their appreciation of the erastes-erominos relationship.
That’s the reason fellating is a worse sin than being fellated in the penitentials (which began being written long before the 8th c.): because it was considered a submissive, effeminate posture.
Well as far as this book goes one can depict from it that Romans were not only opened for man-to-man action, they actually were very pro of it. But only as you said this went for active homosexuality not the passive one. For example if it came out that a man from the higher social classes was indulging himself in passive homosexual relations he could even loose roman citizenship. But there were of course exceptions like Octavian August who supposedly still a boy passively gave him self to his uncle Julius Cezar.
There were many rumors about Julius Caesar’s sexuality, inlcuding the one about him having sex with Octavian and another even more long-lived one that he had had a sexual relationship with King Nicomedes of Bithynia as a young man. These rumors weren’t considered a positive or even neutral thing, though. They were malicious gossip spread to impugn his dignitas.
To blacken the man – if i remember correctly the accusations were that with the Bithynian king Julius was passive.
Leaving this aside, what is more interesting is than the lyrics of 6-8 century that was very fond of man-man relations and than how it died away to the 11 century. What is more interesting is how with the uprising of renaissance the world saw the magnitude of homosexual lyrics expand from years 1050-1150 and than die away till the second half of the 19 century.
Allah You are the Most Praised and Trust Worthy One. We seek Your Divine Help, Forgiveness, and Protection. May G-d Help us sincerely repent. May G-d Help us perform and complete our fasting. May G-d Help us better our souls in virtue before our time of death. Amin.