A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

by Barbara W. Tuchman

Given the non-privacy of medieval life, little about sexual habits was likely to be hidden from the unmarried girl, noble or otherwise. That the Chevalier de La Tour Landry really designed his tales of carnality for the moral edification of his motherless daughters need not be taken at face value, but it is interesting that this was his excuse. His book covers lechery, fornication, and rape, with examples drawn from Lot’s daughters, the incest of Tamar, and cases nearer home, such as the lady who loved a squire and contrived to be with him by telling her husband she had vowed divers pilgrimages so that he let her go where she list, or another lady who was told by a knight that if she were wise and good she would not “come to men’s chambers by nights darkly without candle nor to coll and kiss men in her bed alone as she did.” Life in the castle was evidently easy-going. Knights and ladies stayed up late, “singing, playing and japing and making such noise they could not have heard thunder,” and “when one of the men held his hand under one of the women’s clothes,” he had his arm broken by the angry husband. Entertainment was not only the recital of lofty epics of chivalrous if tedious adultery. The coarse comic fabliaux in quick rhymed couplets, satiric, obscene, often cruel or grotesque, were told for laughs like dirty stories of any age, to noble as well as bourgeois audiences. Often written by court poets in parody of the romances, they treated sex more as pratfall than en...