Images of lust: Sexual carvings on medieval churches

by Anthony Weir

From the famous sheela-na-gigs, through all forms of exhibitionists-mermaids, centaurs, misers and priapic figures--extraordinary sculptures considered "obscene" by today's standards may be found on churches in Britain, Ireland, France and Spain. This book examines their origins and purposes and sees them not as sacrilegious figures, or symbols, nor even as idols of ancient pre-Christian religions, but as serious works that dealt with the sexual customs and salvation of medieval folk, and thus gave support to the church's moral teachings.

166 pages, Hardcover

First published January 30, 1986

Reviews

[Malcolm Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Rude', sexually explicit, carvings are not the first things that come to mind when people think about churches, or church buildings and yet in the twelfth century they were all the rage on church buildings. There even the individual stonemason left his mark, identifiable in the twenty first century, to identify that he was the carver of, say, a male with oversized genitalia, a big breasted woman flashing her vagina, both of whom negatively symbolised lust, or to use a more medieval word, concupiscence, to their twelfth century lay audience. Other carvings of corbels, below the eves of the church included the equivalent of an accordion musician to symbolise the churches dislike of secular music, what there was of it, and a man in a barrel who perhaps symbolised drunken-ness, acrobats were portrayed too, perhaps satirizing attempted non-procreative sex. There were many more symbols and this book is comprehensive about them.

Anything The twelfth century Catholic Church disliked and wanted to dissuade church members from doing or enjoying other's doing would be recreated in a cartoon/parody mini-statue form and put on the outside of the church, high up, to keep such practices, or people who did such things, at bay from the building.

The simplest point to make about these statues is that they were the most assured way for the church to put across an aggressive 'moral message' in a pre-literate society where The Bible was in Latin, and maybe only the village priest could read, and, whatever he spoke the rest of the week, he spoke in Latin throughout the Sunday service, so he was the veneer of Christianity for the village and whatever lay Christianity was it was mediated through these corbels and through the vernacular language that the laity spoke. They were unlikely to be able to read the national language of the country they lived in. Whether they lived in England, Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, etc, and they were definitely not going to be reading Latin. Twelfth century Europe was still several hundred years from the first universities.

This book is a guide to a majority of these 'moral symbols' on churches that for hundreds of years people left alone and remained incurious about. This book became the foundation for many websites and academic research that continues to this day. The author's website, based on this book, can be found at http://www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk/sat... I strongly recommend the website.

[Rita · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a very informative and readable nonfiction book about the carvings in medieval churches which might today be considered very strange and even obscene. These carvings are call sheela-na-gigs in Ireland and, sometimes, Baubos in France. They are usually found high up on the corbels of churches and may be females, males, mermaids or animals, mostly apes. They are very explicit when carefully viewed. I was particularly intrigued by the way in which acrobats and entertainers were viewed as undesirables. Then, again, those views are not so vastly different from today's views of those endeavors. The authors make a good case for these carvings to be warnings of the dangers of sin, most particularly, lust and greed. The book is full of photographs and line drawings and definitely, awakened me to some new ideas. There are a couple of difficulties in reading the book: first, that I needed to frequently consult a dictionary as I was unfamiliar with many architectural and artistic terms and, secondly, sometimes the drawing or photograph is pages away from its text reference. These are minor drawbacks. Mostly, I would now like to see some of these in-person but I fear they are off the well-beaten tourist paths in lesser known churches in central Ireland, southwestern France and northern Spain.

[Anthony Weir · Rating 4 out of 5]

A comprehensive review of one of the paperback editions of this book can be read at
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...