Some people, including the New York Times columnist David Brooks, like looking backwards in history with nostalgia and a few sniffles of regret. They go to fine colleges, study history, and imagine they're in love with a perfect time of order and decorum and regularity. (See the Brooks column.)
Their heads are filled with fairy tales of lovely ladies, knights in armor, romantic castles, and the soft sounds of a lute in the evening.
And the order. Oh, the order of things! As the Catholic fantasist C.S. Lewis did, Brooks evidently loves the Medieval order of things.
The reality of our Dark Ages is something else: skin infections caused by poor hygiene, rotting teeth, body odors, open ditches filled with raw sewage, more people in rags than in finery, and epidemics everywhere killing people like flies.
David-Brooksian "down-market" people, the poor, were of course in the most pervasive misery. The poor always get the worst of it. The poor are the miserati.
And over it all hovered the enormity and power of the Church, the supposedly celibate Church officials obsessed with sex, insisting that sex was disgusting, lust the work of the Devil, and intercourse permitted only for procreation.
The Church hated science, hated actually looking at things. Dissection of the human body by physicians was forbidden. Galileo had to beg forgiveness for looking at the stars with a telescope. Any announced observation that contradicted Church dogma was considered heresy and punishable by burning at the stake. (How many came out of the cloisters to witness the agony of burning flesh?)
Poor King Arthur and his knights. Fiction Arthur is, and he's probably thankful for it. Who the hell would want to live in the Middle Ages except some befuddled conservatives whacked out on the sweet vermouth in their Manhattans?
Was the Medieval Church's hatred of sex from the mouth of Jesus? Was any of it in the Bible? None of it, to be sure. The so-called Church Fathers themselves wrote the rule book that twisted human sexuality.
Augustine declared the act of intercourse was fundamentally disgusting.
Arnobius called it filthy and degrading.
Methodius called it unseemly.
Jerome called it unclean.
Tertulliam called it shameful.
Ambrose called it a defilement.
Between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance, a vicious hatred of sexuality in all its forms was preached by a monolithic Church that had power over life and death in the Western world. That power is more or less dissipated now, but the daily lives of all of us are still strained by the hatreds of a small group of Church leaders who seem to have had some problems with their sexuality.
Historians like to focus on the ramifications of "courtly love", but that focus concerns the upper class woman, and it tells us little about the life of the majority of women in Medieval society. Ordinary Medieval women did not have troubadours singing love songs to them.
What sort of life did ordinary people have? What evidence is there that upper class styles trickled down to influence lower class styles? Not much evidence at all. Brooksian down-market miserati never had much of the drippings from above.
Such a lovely time. From the beginning to the end of the Middle Ages, women were considered to be inferior to men, and wives were considered as chattel of their husbands. Women were owned by their husbands, owned like cows.
In the European Middle Ages, women had short childhoods. They were marriageable at twelve and were usually married by fourteen. Rich girls might be married as young as five and betrothed even younger. By twenty, a woman usually had a number of children, and by thirty, if she survived the ordeal of multiple births, she might be widowed and remarried -- or a grandmother.
The Medieval woman was essentially a vessel for procreation, a baby-maker. And of course the demand of the Church was that babies had to be made without lust.
The Medieval Church decreed lust to be sinful even if a man and woman were married. A husband committed a sin by lust for his wife, even in thought. Make the babies, but don't commit the sin of lust while you do it.
The obsession of the Medieval Church with sex is startling. One current rationale is that it logically derives from the idea of Original Sin, the sin being the sudden awakening of lust, and repression of lust is therefore essential for salvation. But it's more likely that the so-called Church "fathers" such as Jerome and Aquinas were bedeviled by various personal sexual problems. Another possibility is that the obsession was deliberate -- a mechanism to solidify power over the laity -- but that assumes a Machiavellian understanding of mob psychology that doesn't fit with the evidence that the people in the Church hierarchy were not clever at all. Definitely not clever.
It has been said before, but it bears repeating: During the Middle Ages, the Church, by its efforts to repress human sexuality, turned Europe into a vast insane asylum. Any attempt to white-wash or avoid this reality is a disservice to the public.
Anyone who needs nostalgia for a bygone insane asylum ought to find a time in history with less of a stench of unreason.