By exploring their sex lives, the book brings ordinary medieval people to life and reveals details of their most personal thoughts and experiences. The book is then split into different topics, explaining each one by drawing on details from real life cases and incidents drawn from legal and church records and chroniclers and so on in a simple fashion, very often with little extra interpretation or influence of her own personal thoughts. The Victorians put up considerable barriers against coitus, believing that buttons, buckles, and corsets would frustrate physical intimacy — lovers were supposed to be kept at bay until matrimony. There are passionate stories and horrible ones but the infatuation with the Middle Ages as a period so far and almost subhuman compared to our own allows us the pleasure of not recognizing our own flaws: something Harvey forces us to confront. Also of importance are the vast amount of treatises written by clerics, but to what degree these sexual prescriptions written by nerds in monasteries were known by the regular populace, let alone how often they were respected, is hard to know.

Harvey notes that “According to the other monks, the elderly pair spent much of their time reading in the kitchen.

Although Oda lived as a nun for many years after this incident, her hagiographer presented her as a martyr for virginity. Perhaps the ultimate embodiment of such penitence was Mary Magdalene, whose cult exploded in popularity around 1200. There is no better guide to what occurs betwixt the sheets of the medieval bedroom than Katherine Harvey. T he Irish Times ‘An entertaining but thoughtful study, descriptive without becoming didactic or pedantic. The medieval Magdalene was a composite of several biblical Marys and bore little resemblance to the woman depicted in the Gospels.

This is an interesting topic but I think it would have been better placed earlier in the book, before the reader gets to the more serious topics. She has written an entertaining but thoughtful study, descriptive without becoming didactic or pedantic. The Fires of Lust is a really solid synthesis of recent scholarship on the history of sex and sexuality in medieval Europe, written with a beginner audience in mind. The readability suffers as a consequence of a lack of conscientiousness about selectively deciding what details further a narrative and what are simply superfluous. In the eleventh century, the virgin king emerged as a significant figure; Edward the Confessor, the English king whose death without issue in 1066 led to the Norman Conquest, is probably the best known.History is written by the victors, but not so for the history of sex: most of what we know of sex in the middle ages comes from court records in which sexual crimes are judged, and medieval literature, which is filled with sexual innuendos. I would warn anyone looking at this book to check content warnings below before proceeding as it does contain some heavy, dark subjects. The Australian ‘This lively, engaging study combines a scholarly rigour with a sharp eye for telling detail, told in a fluid style that keeps the pages turning.