Rosalie Gilbert > Quotes

“The intimate lives of Medieval women were as complex and as complicated as ours today, with very little being clear cut and many of the issues relating to sexual relationships having distinctly blurry edges. Women then, as now, loved and lost, hoped and schemed, laughed and cried, were lifted up and cast down.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“By the time the eleventh century rolled around, Burchard of Worms was busy scribing away at his book of penitent questions for the confessional.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“A more perplexing sight in Medieval manuscripts are those in-bed scenes where the crowned lady is fondly embracing a dragon whilst her anxious husband is either outside the door or looking in through a window. There’s quite a few of them. They’re delightful.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“In Paris, the city sex workers banded together and made a large charitable donation to the cathedral of Notre Dame. The funds were to provide a stained-glass window in one of the chapels.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Surely, if Hollywood has taught us anything, it’s that chastity belts were a thing and they were to avoid rape and pregnancy and that Medieval women wore them all the time in Ye Olde Medieval Days of Yore. Yes? Uh, no.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“It’s also interesting to note that there are as many existing male chastity belts as there are female ones, each designed to stop arousal with spikes pointing inwards around the groin. Those crazy Victorians.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“The Victorian era was full of smug people who were quite delighted with their own society and how clever it was and concluded loudly in literature everywhere what an awful, backwards, uncultured, and uncivilised society everyone before their own had been.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Peter Damien wrote in his Book of Gomorrah: Woman is Satan’s bait…poison for men’s souls! I’m pretty sure he wasn’t getting any.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“he takes the things a woman might do with food a step further and asks in all apparent seriousness: Did you do what some women are used to doing: they take a live fish, introduce it into their vagina, and hold it there until it is dead; and after cooking or grilling this fish, they feed it to their husbands so that it ignites more love for them?”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“One entry from the diocese of Lincoln, in England, reads like this: Widow Gybscott is a common defamer of her neighbours. …which seems no different from the gossipy old women in communities everywhere.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“On the whole, everything known to women about pregnancy could be summed up in one word: suffering. If there was a pregnancy, expect a whole heap of extensive suffering.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“It’s ironic that the term frigid when applied to a woman today has connotations that she is either unwilling or not desirous of sex and as cold as an iceberg, whereas in the Medieval sense, a cold woman meant that she craved it.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“The tricky thing with history is that often the name of something has been around for a long time, but the thing the name belongs to has changed and no longer means what it originally did.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Hinemar seemed a little shy about mentioning dildos at all, let alone what to call them, and had to settle for certain instrument of diabolical operation which is a ripping phrase, really.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Virgins were not only a valuable commodity; their very purity could, according to legend, lure unicorns. Even if actual unicorns were mythical, it can be said that virgins did attract a number of beasts who had a horn where their brain should be.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin or in another skin, and she will not conceive. Call me sceptical, but do I actually think that this would work? I don’t.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“be? Let’s refer to our favourite lady medic, Trotula, again. Where would we be without her?”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Medieval women did the best they could. And who can ask for more than that?”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“The higher the class of the girl, the less likely she be left unchaperoned and the more likely that her future husband and sex partner was to be determined for her.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Penalties for raping a virgin were extremely severe as a good marriage afterwards was next to impossible.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Let’s refer to our favourite lady medic, Trotula, again. Where would we be without her?”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Breastfeeding and poor nutrition provided a certain amount of contraceptive measure for a peasant woman, which was fortunate as these measures were free.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Lesbians? Vicious? Viciously defending their right to not have their sexual organs dictated to by a supposedly celibate clergyman, perhaps.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“More sauna and wine as well! I’m feeling a little doubtful about the extinguishing of the lust with this method. I really am.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Let‘s take a look at the last couple. No sex within the walls of a church? They had to tell people that? Were the sermons so intensely thrilling that the congregation were whipped into a frenzy of sexual excitement and couldn’t wait to get home to express their passions in private?”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Clement of Alexandria made no bones about it when he wrote about women generally in Pedagogue II. Every woman should be overwhelmed with shame at the thought that she is a woman.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“many women who were cloistered together for long periods of time without sex were, according to both doctors and their religious counterparts, setting themselves up for emotional problems as well, which might only be cured by exorcism. Exorcism. Okay then.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“John was yet another man of the cloth spreading the love of the Lord in a very personal and intimate way with his housekeepers. He might like to consider a valet in the future, or perhaps, do his own dusting and dishes. Yes. That might be best for everyone all round.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“The practice of leaving an unwanted baby with a church was known as oblation.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women

“Have you tasted your husband’s semen in order to make his love for you burn greater through your diabolical deeds? If you have, you should do seven years of penance on the appointed fast days.”
― Rosalie Gilbert, The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women