Sin, lust, provocation, invitation to procreate… Until now, the attempt to explain the images of explicit sex in the sculpture of Romanesque temples has received various interpretations, all sewn together by a common thread: strangeness, surprise and, finally, the cultural shock resulting from observing the Middle Ages from the 21st century. None of these theories has finished offering a natural, convincing and definitive explanation for the representation of women showing their vulva, of monks displaying a giant phallus or of couples openly making love on the stone. The beginning of this fall brought two new works that shed light on the conception of sex almost a millennium ago: to the book The fires of lust (Attic of Books, August 2024), by British historian Katherine Harvey, has just been added Sex in the Romanesque period (Review), where the Vitorian specialist Isabel Mellén (1986) tries to escape the dominant cliché, inviting logical reflection: What if all these images that make you blush today were only the faithful reflection of the behaviors of that era ?
Isabel Mellén affirms that her book “is part of a line of renewal”, in the flow of research in recent years which seeks to restore color to this false dark Middle Ages constructed in the 19th century. “Until now, people have felt more or less comfortable with knowledge inherited from the 19th and 20th centuries, a patriarchal idea that places white, European, heterosexual men at the top; Today, this idea is collapsing, as minorities reclaim their role in history,” he reflects. Concerning sex and its representation almost a millennium ago, the art historian – who also uses her training as a doctor of philosophy in this work – believes that the vision we had until now is only “knowledge created from a single point of view”. with a series of contemporary prejudices of our time which, unintentionally, we transfer to our past.
Now, what does Mellén propose to interpret all these images immortalized in stone – many of which border on the grotesque – without falling into prejudices? The author of Sex in the Romanesque period He tries to situate himself in the mentality, in the perspective of each social class, of each of these individuals. “A lady, whose obligation was to have sexual relations in order to give birth to as many children as possible, did not see a scene of explicit intercourse in the same way as a prostitute or a clergyman on whom the celibacy,” he said. People from the same era (in this case, avoiding anachronisms) with “different worldviews”. Supported by previous studies, the author focuses the analysis on the mentality of the nobility, promoters of the temples where many of these sexual messages will be inscribed; the clergy, who try to influence and modify the sexual behavior of the faithful and of society itself, a group of spectators “among whom were marginalized groups, such as women or homosexuals”, he reveals .
A turning point in the 11th century
“I don’t know if people in the Middle Ages were happy or not, but the truth is that sex was not traumatic for them.” This is perhaps one of the statements that best defines Mellén’s proposition, which identifies this shock in contemporary society. The first trauma concerns the body and the way of showing it. “The rigorous (extreme) ecclesiastical mentality was born in the 11th century and gradually permeates society, until it reaches this taboo on corporeality that we have inherited,” he affirms. “Today, there are situations as absurd as naked bodies being censored on social networks, while there is a lot of pornography accessible on the Internet,” he illustrates. On the other hand, “genitality was an everyday thing in medieval society, where there was no privacy,” retorts the author of Alava.
Sexuality was not only normalized, but it was (very) desirable for the social class Mellén focused on in this work: the nobility. The lineage had to be perpetuated with a long lineage, even through what is called eugenics: parents had sexual relations with each other to seek purity of blood, thus incurring incest. “They had very exuberant sexual habits, because having more children favored the lineage, it didn’t matter whether they were bastards or bastards,” explains the historian, who concludes: “The family was above the individual, therefore sex occupied a central place. . And in this context, the woman was the protagonist. If lineage gave the right to govern, “women held political power: giving birth was their sacrifice”.
And it is in this context – in the need for nobility to perpetuate itself – that, according to Mellén, sexual scenes in Romanesque temples are best understood. “Naked people appear, couples make love, women show their vulvas, men show giant phalluses… I connect all this to noble values, to the need to procreate; This is why pregnant women or women frequently appear at the time of childbirth,” he gives an example.
Fawns, ode to sex
Sex in the Romanesque period It is also a map on which to trace the very frequent explicit sex scenes immortalized in many churches of Romanesque chronology, about which countless theories have been spread. However, it is the collegiate church of San Pedro de Cervatos (Cantabria) which has always attracted the most attention from experts and the curious, given the profusion of these scenes. Representation of sin? Call to chastity? Quite the contrary. Isabel Mellén applies her personal method. “What is shown in Cervatos is a party, a party in which there are musicians, dancers, people who drink, acrobats, people who have sex or who show their genitals, women who give birth …” From his point of view, “it is a festive atmosphere of overflowing sexuality that I connect to the conception of marriage of the nobility at that time”, he suggests.
But for what? The art historian traced the origins of the foundation of the Cantabrian temple, until finding its promoters: a family of aristocrats who built the building to bury themselves inside. “At that time, noble marriages were celebrated at the gates of the temple, publicly; The iconography is adapted to the couple’s first sexual relationship (a wedding night, with witnesses included), which was said to happen again,” explains the author of the research. Thus, according to his analysis, the sexual iconography of San Pedro de Cervatos is… the decor, the decoration of a wedding celebration, in the service of “the exaltation of the values of nobility”.
That is to say, this new work changes black for white, prohibition for celebration, in a society perhaps much more open than one imagined, in which there was also room for feelings, even among the rich classes. “Noble marriages were just an obligatory contract between families, but one thing was law and another was desire: both men and women had extramarital affairs and there was no problem,” analyzes Mellén . On one condition, women had to be careful not to conceive outside of marriage, that is, to avoid incorporating outside blood into the lineage. With the exception of vaginal penetration, the author comments, women and men have tried all kinds of sexual positions. This atmosphere was represented, for example, in an orgy immortalized in stone in one of the capitals of the small church of Santiago de los Caballeros, outside the city walls of Zamora.
The Church, the dark side
But someone had to stop the party. A part of the clergy – an extreme minority, according to the writer Alava – has been trying since the 11th century to link sexual practice to the idea of sin. Another question is whether these people were willing to adopt these assumptions (or were compliant enough). “When one reads the documents, it seems that a society overflowing with sex could be changed overnight, but that was not the case: people, rather than listening to the clerics, laughed at them” , says Mellén, who refers to the literature of the time: “They considered them to be sexually obsessed and represented them, for example, with the figure of the outgoing monk, with an enormous phallus, where there was a certain mockery. »
So, for now, the Church must be content with trying to bring order to its ranks in a historic period of discredit, where positions are bought and sold (simony) or, quite simply, returned to people who lack a vocation (Nicolaisism). . This crusade against sex will not fall on deaf ears, however. It will eventually impose itself: “It begins in a small ecclesiastical core, which wants to change sexual habits and gain power, and, in the end, they end up getting into everyone’s bed,” analyzes the historian. This society concerned by high infant mortality, but not by sexual practice, will end up adopting the dark side, the taboo, in the face of an extremely closed mentality (the religious one), which persecutes even the very fact of masturbation.
There remains a question, not unimportant, that must be answered. Did the Church agree with the explicit messages displayed on the capitals and corbels (support of Romanesque sculpture) which represented nudes and orgies? Isabel Mellén specifies: “The temples were not of the Church, but, for the most part, of a private nature; “A church could be built by royalty, a noble family or a council, in addition to the bishops themselves. » According to this point of view, the proliferation of temples was not the naive response to an emerging religiosity, but rather an element of power in a kind of game of thrones that contemporary society, ours, has inherited. And sex had a central role. Even if today there is a barrier, this trauma you speak of Sex in the Romanesque period.
