Status Updates From Sex Before Sexuality: A Pre...

Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) advised that married people might engage in sex if they wanted children but any pleasure they experienced (which he acknowledged as inevitable) would always be sinful (‘this lawful mingling of spouses cannot be done without pleasures of the flesh’). The sin was minor and could be remedied with regular prayer, but a stain.

Ascetics’ (the Greek ascesis means ‘exercise’), those who subjected their bodies to strict dietary, sexual and other forms of physical discipline, were literally ‘athletes’ of God.

A common ranking [of sexual sins] ran thus: fornication, adultery, incest, violation or debauchery, abduction-rape (raptus) and the ‘vice against nature’ (which generally encompassed all acts which could not result in procreation, including use of contraceptives, masturbation, anal or oral sex, same-sex practices and bestiality).

Both the word ‘sexuality’ and our sense of it date from the nineteenth century: 1879 according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

Living in an age when homosexuality, heterosexuality and other sexual categories familiar to us did not yet exist and women, youths and children were available for the possession of more powerful men, Jean, Duc de Berry, took delight in the faces and bodies in a manner congruent with the pleasure he took in books and objets made for him by the greatest artists of his day.