Throughout The Fires of Lust she situates the twin themes of morality and medicine in the social and material world that medieval people inhabited. Being the most fundamental biological goal, studying it is bound to reveal a good deal about the mores and thoughts of its practitioners. Also of importance are the vast amount of treatises written by clerics, but to what degree these sexual prescriptions written by nerds in monasteries were known by the regular populace, let alone how often they were respected, is hard to know.

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. Not sure if it was just my narrator, but in the mention of the Me Too movement in the conclusion, the UK audiobook says "Harry Weinstein" instead of "Harvey"? The readability suffers as a consequence of a lack of conscientiousness about selectively deciding what details further a narrative and what are simply superfluous. or falling into the trap of believing an absence of evidence for some behaviours and attitudes means they didn’t happen. This is a VERY good overview on the topic for anyone interested in an introduction to medieval sex and sexuality.

History is written by the victors, but not so for the history of sex: most of what we know of sex in the middle ages comes from court records in which sexual crimes are judged, and medieval literature, which is filled with sexual innuendos. What all of these individuals had in common, besides their sexual transgressions, was a genuine contrition for their sins. We can sometimes reconstruct their general material culture, but how they understood and experienced their lives is lost.

A lively and readable account rooted in a deep knowledge of the scholarly literature on sexuality in medieval western Europe.The Australian ‘This lively, engaging study combines a scholarly rigour with a sharp eye for telling detail, told in a fluid style that keeps the pages turning. The book is then split into different topics, explaining each one by drawing on details from real life cases and incidents drawn from legal and church records and chroniclers and so on in a simple fashion, very often with little extra interpretation or influence of her own personal thoughts. Alicia Spencer-Hall, BBC History Magazine ‘I can’t think of more brilliant Christmas book to give to one’s significant other if they have even a passing interest in medieval Europe or the rich and extraordinary sex life of its inhabitants. The Victorians put up considerable barriers against coitus, believing that buttons, buckles, and corsets would frustrate physical intimacy — lovers were supposed to be kept at bay until matrimony. The modern survey, which asks a hundred people questions about their sex lives and then converts their answers into globalising statements about ‘the majority of people’ is just as unreliable as the medieval evidence.