‘Give Me Chastity’: Masculinity and Attitudes to Chastity and Celibacy in the Middle Ages

Abstract

Augustine of Hippo's plea to 'give me chastity and continence, but not yet' has resonated with modern readers and writers as the 'natural' reaction of men (and to a lesser extent, women) to the demands of Christianity for the restriction or even avoidance of sexual activity by believers. 1 Augustine's ambivalent response to the competing expectations and attractions of the Roman and Christian cultures in which he lived was an expression of his own belief in the flawed nature of the human soul, its desire to do the right thing but its often tragic inability to sustain that in the face of the temptations of the flesh, but it can also be understood as the product of disparate conceptions of appropriate masculinity. Augustine lived in a world which both applauded the virile expression of sexuality before and during marriage, and held up an ideal of masculine self-restraint and submission of the body's various appetites to the will. Nor was this straightforwardly a distinction between Christian and Roman values. If Christians valued virginity and chastity, it was also true that most Christians married, and Stoic values of self-restraint were an important influence on the development of Christian attitudes to sexual behaviour. 2 While the late Antique world acknowledged the competing attractions of chastity and sexuality for men, more recent writing has paid much less attention to the attractions and significance of the non-sexual life for men in the Middle Ages. There have been extensive studies of the attractions of virginity, chaste or spiritual marriage and vowed widowhood for women, including considerations of the social, spiritual and physical benefits to be gained from its adoption, which have addressed a range of issues, largely focusing on the use of gendered behaviour and expectation. 3 But there has been very little written on laymen, and almost exclusively in contexts where the failure to produce an heir had political consequences. 4 That attitude may be beginning to change, and this article explores some of the evidence for an interest in chastity and celibacy on the part of laymen in late medieval England. 5 The relative absence of such consideration for medieval men is partly a product of the relatively undeveloped state of the field of late medieval masculinity, which has largely focused on high status men, but is partly also a product of the development of a late twentieth/early twenty-first century blind spot about male sexuality. We have moved from a position of heteronormativity which developed (according to different scholars) sometime between the Reformation and the nineteenth century, and which

Beyond the ‘Religious Turn’? Past, Present and Future Perspectives in Gender History

“…Pat Cullum also discusses chastity and the significance of spiritual rather than physical virginity in her essay on the attractions of the celibate life for late-medieval English laymen. 64 Married men, she notes, could affirm their virginal status by entering monastic life later in old age; the appeal of lay celibacy was evident in cults of virgin bishops and saints as well as in the popular lives of virgin kings whose non-sexual existence symbolised the unity, peace and sexual well-being of the kingdom and its subjects. Cullum makes the important point that despite celibacy remaining the only sanctioned alternative to marriage within many religions, and being attributed superior spiritual authority within Roman Catholicism, it is non-sexual rather than homosexual men who have disappeared from view in recent histories of sexuality.…”

Episcopal Virginity in Medieval England

“…This meant that a cleric was only truly chaste if he not only renounced all sexual partners, but also eschewed all forms of sexual activity, including masturbation and impure thoughts 15. Furthermore, it was possible both to lose one’s virginity without having sexual relations of any kind, and also to regain spiritual virginity even after sexual relations had taken place 16. The deeply problematic nature of clerical sexuality, and especially of clerical virginity, is illustrated by the case of a young monk who had been physically attacked by a demon.…”