Eleanor Janega’s “Once and Future Sex”

The true, weird, horny history of medieval gender and sex.

The Once and Future Sex is Eleanor Janega’s new history of gender and sex in the medieval age, describing the weird and horny ways of medieval Europeans, which are far gnarlier and more complicated than the story we get from “traditionalists” who want us to believe that their ideas about gender roles reflect a fixed part of human nature, and that modern attitudes are an attempt to rewrite history.

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393867817

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/#going-medieval

Janega is a fantastic and hilarious medievalists whose blog, “Going Medieval” is essential reading, offering a well-informed and profane counterpoints to the ideologically driven, just-so stories that get rolled out to explain why progressive ideas are doomed. Some of my favorite installments:

• I assure you, medieval people bathed
• On courtly love and pick up artists
• If you’re going to talk about the Dark Ages, you had better be right