BBC: Inside the Medieval Mind – Sex (2009)

Professor Robin Bartlett unearths remarkable evidence of the complex passions of men and women in the Middle Ages as his series exploring the medieval psyche continues. Investigating the private lives of these people, he shows how this extraordinary period shaped them.

In a time when the Church preached hatred of the flesh and promoted the cult of virginity, Professor Bartlett quotes some of the questions the 11th-century Church recommended priests to ask their parishioners, such
as: “Have you committed fornication with your step-mother, your sister-in-law, your son’s fiancée or your mother?”

Despite the rigid doctrine of the Church at this time, it was the medieval world that gave birth to the modern concept of romantic love. Twelfth-century troubadours began to sing songs of love to women in which they were suddenly goddesses to be adored. For the upper classes at least, the rules of love were reinvented in lengthy treatises, the heroes and heroines of love celebrated in poems: Lancelot and Guinevere, and Tristan and Iseult.

Professor Bartlett also delves into the tragic story of real-life lovers Abelard and Heloise – Abelard the great scholar, Heloise the niece of a canon at the cathedral of Notre Dame. Their love letters from the 12th century are astonishing in their frankness, passion andwillingness to break conventions.

Sex investigates the private lives of medieval men and women, looking at the theories of sexual difference, the realities of male/female relationships and courtly romance, and the attitudes of the Church and wider society to marriage, sex and sexual practice, homosexuality, virginity and the celibate vocation.

Screens:

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