Sex: Sex Life In The Medieval Mind

“Women is but Satan’s bate, poison for men’s soul” (Inside the Medieval Mind: Sex). In the Medieval Times, marriage was defined only as an alliance between families, a trade of property, which included the wife (Inside the Medieval Mind: Sex). Once a woman married, all her goods became the husband’s estate as well. No one really married for love as today’s people do. That is until the Reformation of the Church began. Marriage, family, and even sex life had been altered. To begin, in this time period women were not respected nor understood. Many writers who were clerics described women to be the roots of all evil and there were many beliefs that made this statement sound valid. Men were seen as victims to women who were believed to have a copious number of sexual desires. Even the female anatomy was deemed as evil. For example, medieval science stated a woman’s menstrual cycle was caused by a woman’s sexual desires and the only way to get rid of the menstrual blood was to be sexually active. That, if the woman did not purge herself of this seed, she would experience convulsions, fainting fits, and …show more content…
Women were not seen as partners to their husbands but instead property. If a woman had wealth, she was likely to have a husband claiming that fortune and her. The men were able to treat their wives as they wanted just as one would allow with ones property. Inside the Medieval Mind: Sex documentary provides an example, “it is legal for a man to beat his wife when she wrongs him, provided he never kills nor maims her” (Inside the Medieval Mind: Sex). Women had very little value to their men but that all began to change during the twelfth century in Southern France. Poets sang about sexual passion, putting women on a pedestal (Inside the Medieval Mind: Sex). The idea of women and love brought different emotions than ever before. It was here that the idea of falling in love was