As Harvey mentions in the beginning of her book, programs such as Game of Thrones make out individuals of the past to be inhumane with sexual violence running rampant when the reality of the situation is much more complicated. It’s still worth remembering the people at the end of this shortened timespan were as distant from those at the start of it as we are from them. Sex was something men did to women, preferably during marriage, though female pleasure was important because without it conception couldn’t occur. Katherine Harvey knows when to pull back from treating the content lightly, and the result is very effective.

It's definitely written with classroom use in mind, but I'd also recommend it for anyone who wants to know more about the subject. These Roman girls were the heroines of highly formulaic tales in which they converted to Christianity against the wishes of their pagan families and died in defence of their faith and their virginity, often after undergoing extreme physical and mental trials. Some of it the content is bleak, of course; the chapters focusing on sex work and sexual violence, in particular, make for difficult reading. Reading Katherine Harvey’s The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages, I found myself thinking: weird, weirder and, occasionally, whoa! The story of Simon the goat-lover is just one of hundreds of weird and wonderful anecdotes that rub together in Katherine Harvey’s jaunty study of late-medieval sex .As I mentioned earlier, it humanizes medieval citizens, allowing us to understand their thought processes in a way beyond “this: bad. Throughout The Fires of Lust she situates the twin themes of morality and medicine in the social and material world that medieval people inhabited. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

Each of the chapters is very clear and well-defined, and there is very little repetition - a personal pet peeve of mine that books like this are sometimes prone to. Thomas Filbin is a book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Boston Sunday Globe, and Hudson Review.For example, the book briefly cite evidence from Siete Partidas without definition or introduction or context about the text. We can sometimes reconstruct their general material culture, but how they understood and experienced their lives is lost.