Warner's Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England is another absolute firecracker of a book, which is exactly what we expect from this author. As a medievalist myself, I love reading books that are accessible to a non-specialist audience, which this most certainly is. Warner packs facts into an enjoyable read, and I hope many people get into medieval history through Warner's work.

This book was a well researched masterpiece. I thoroughly enjoyed the topic and how the author used original texts and records to dispel common misconceptions about marriage, relationships, and reproduction of the nobility, the merchant class, and the peasants. Well worth the read if you're interested in the topic!

I generally enjoyed this book and found it very well-sourced. However, it feels like much of the book ends up turning into "Here's a time this happened, it also happened here, and finally, here's yet another time this happened" so I may have enjoyed this book more if I tempered my expectations a bit. At some points it seems like you may get the same value by just checking out the primary sources the author mentions. I would definitely recommend this book as a reference, not a casual read.

Kathryn Warner is one of my go-to authors these days, and I usually eagerly anticipate her latest book. I was kind of hesitant about this one, as the title suggested it might enter into territory that was just unnecessary titillation and had no real value. Thankfully that didn’t happen at all.

Warner’s books on social history have proved to be particular favourites of mine: Living in Medieval England is a book I will certainly revisit. This one was also enjoyable and informative. The author started off dismissing some popular myths about Medieval marriage and relationships: the idea that everyone married in their teens and people only got married in June because of their “annual bath” are soon thrown out.

As usual, Warner draws extensively on court and administrative records. Sources which my own stint in Postgrad Research taught me are extensive and invaluable. The beauty of Medieval records is that the church courts which dealt with moral and martial matters left behind extensive records, so we can discover details which would otherwise be lost. Even I learned things: I didn’t know that it was possible to obtain a kind of annulment (more of a separation as I don’t think either party were allowed to remarry) on the grounds of domestic violence or cruelty.

I would happily recommend this to the curious, history readers and even some historians and I think I will try and get a copy sometime.

I was approved for this title on Netgalley by Pen and Sword. This did not influence my opinions on the book which are provided freely and entirely my own.

An enjoyable and concise social history, which covered a lot of the personal life of people in Medieval England. By the nature of the sources available, thr book obviously focuses a lot on the nobility, but I appreciated the efforts to show the lives of ordinary people too.

The approach is more of the display of facts than much analysis or discussion, except in a few significant places, but with a substantial amount of notes and bibliography to read more. There were many points I found very interesting and highlighted to share with others, and it definitely sparked my interest!

I would have preferred a conclusion or something to bring the various strands together at the end, and of course in such a book there were elements I would have liked to read more if (the very brief discussion of trans identities was incredibly interesting, and a shame it felt squeezed in).

Overall an interesting overview that questions some much-quoted ideas, and brings life to a long ago time.

*Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the free ARC*

This is a non fiction book looking at love, relationships and all those in betweens during the Medieval Times. While the title is a little eye catching - this book is not all about sex, but it looks at how relationships were treated and judged during the 1300s particularly from courtship to marriages including arranged marriages, marriageable age, sexual relationships from love matches to adultery as well as the processes and traditions around childbirth, infants and infant death. I also enjoyed the chapters that looked at sons versus daughters, and if people in the medieval period truly valued and loved their daughters or just always wanted sons.

As someone who loved reading historical fiction, not all in this book was new to me but I found it a helpful companion to teach me some things about the type of time periods I like to read about in books, and opened my eyes not just to how the nobility and upper class live (which these books normally follow) but also those of the poorer class and how at times they had greater freedom to marry and love than those who were wealthy.

There are sections in this book around abduction, rape, domestic abuse and child abuse and how these types of instances were treated in the medieval period (spoiler, they almost always got away with it, shock) and some of the real life examples were truly horrific to read about so just a warning about those.

I think the book ended kind of abruptly for me, there was no real conclusion or anything at the end to wrap things up and I felt a bit jolted from my reading when it immediately went from the book itself to the appendix. I don't think this book is amazing, and wouldn't class it as a must read but as a lover of historical fiction, I did find it interesting enough.

I’ve been sitting on this review for awhile because I kept questioning whether I was expecting too much from Kathryn Warner’s Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England and whether I was being too harsh, expecting things from the book that it just never was going to be. I have read pretty extensively about sexuality, sex and gender in the Middle Ages so I’m not coming into this text as an unknowledgeable beginner titillated by the subject matter or in need of a basic guide. Ultimately, reading Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England put me in the mind of the books about daily life or marriage I’d read in the 2000s and early 2010s, designed for mass consumption and everything that wasn’t heteronormative briskly passed over. It just didn’t come close to being as thorough, thought-provoking on intriguing as the research on medieval sexuality I’d already read.

So it was and is abundantly clear that I’m not the intended reader. Warner frames her work as a kind of introductory text, more interested in busting myths that no medievalist takes seriously but remain a “fact” to the general public, if not already considered a myth or male fantasy of the past (e.g. chastity belts). I don’t need that. Without needing to check the bibliography or footnotes, I recognised the influence of scholars like Ruth Mazo Karras, Joan Cadden, Kim M. Philips, Vern Bullough, Sara M. Butler, Kristen L. Geaman, Nicholas Orme, Monica Green, Caroline Dunn and more. I also saw the gaps in Warner’s work that could have been filled by scholarship that remained uncited.

However, I can see the value of the book. It’s a decent guide to the personal aspects of medieval life, particularly marriage and sexual relations between men and women. For a casual reader, it’s much easier and no doubt cheaper to pick up Warner’s book than the work of Karras, Philips, Green et al, and I appreciate that some of those authors’ work is aimed at an academic or student audience rather than a general reader and, while Warner’s work does have an academic grounding, it is aimed at a reader who doesn’t.

That is not to say that as an introductory guide it’s unproblematic or that it’s an engaging pop history. Warner’s typical style of prose works well in her more academic work (e.g. her biography, Edward II: The Unconventional King) but she shows herself unwilling or unable to change her style that will appeal to the general reader who wants a lively narrative about sex and sexuality in the Middle Ages.

Worse, her entire narrative is bogged down by the bevy of examples she provides as evidence of her claims. There were simply too many and given with only the barest of details that it was very hard to feel engaged with them. This sparsity of detail, of course, reflects the limitations of the evidence that survives. However, it is a reciting of raw data, one example blurring into the other and I ended up involuntarily skimming these sections. A good pop historian, I feel, could do much more with this material. The only diversion from this was when Warner came to subjects such as rape or abuse and her bevy of examples became a never-ending list of sickening horrors.

That being said, the dryness of the text was the lesser of the faults for me. The table of contents promised a broad array of subjects but often disguised how short the discussions on the subjects were and the fact that Warner often zeroes in on just one facet of each subject.

For instance, her chapter on incest is mainly devoted to the concept of spiritual incest (relations between persons related through a religious sacrament such baptism) and legal definitions of consanguinity that papal dispensations could take care of, giving the impression that perhaps spiritual incest was the “only” incest taboo in medieval England. It was not. There is no mention of, for instance, the contemporary horror at the rumour Richard III intended to marry his niece, Elizabeth of York, or a discussion of attitudes towards incest derived from literary sources. Warner is not a literary scholar so I don’t expect her to do this level of literary analysis herself but she does cite literary works to illustrate her chapters on marriage and male-female desire, and there is pre-existing work by scholars such as Linda Marie Rouillard (Medieval Considerations of Incest, Marriage, and Penance) and Elizabeth Archibald (Incest and the Medieval Imagination) to draw on.

A chapter on gender roles was mostly dedicated to the legal and economic roles played by women and men and whether they were “valued” by their society, though it begins with about a single page on the topic of transgender people. Most of this page is devoted to a bare-bones recital of the existence of the extremely interesting John/Eleanor Rykener and a quick reeling off of a couple examples of negative responses to crossdressing. There is a limitation of evidence but it’s rather amazing Warner didn’t delve into Rykener more because certainly the scholarship is there (and cited in her bibliography), while the thought-provoking work of Robert Mills (uncited entirely by Warner) could have provided more avenues of discussion. Once again, literary scholarship that might prove illuminative in face of a lack of solid evidence is unmentioned. One does not even have to look beyond the literary canon – The Canterbury Tales readily supplies the Pardoner, whose confused gender presentation has produced a whole host of scholarship.

One of my biggest disappointments was the section about abortion and miscarriage in which I had hoped to read about responses to miscarriage. It was a topic I hadn’t managed to find much about on my own and is important to my own research. But while the section provides some basic information about treatments of miscarriage and attitudes towards abortion, most of Warner’s discussion is a summary of Sara M. Butler’s article on cases where violent assaults occasioned miscarriage or stillbirth. It is not that Butler’s work is unimportant or should be ignored but rather that Warner gives the strong impression that miscarriage in late medieval England was primarily caused by violent assault and that abortion was primarily non-consensual. It is exceedingly doubtful that was the reality for most cases of abortion and miscarriage. The fact is that some medieval women no doubt made the choice to abort pregnancies for a variety of reasons, even if this choice has left little tangible evidence behind. The fact is that most women would have suffered miscarriages and stillbirths in an era without birth control (not to mention that chemical miscarriages are very common today). Yes, there is limited evidence but a sentence acknowledging that violent assault was not the only cause of miscarriage or reason for abortion would have been helpful to negate the prevailing and probably unintended narrative of the chapter.

The other major disappointment was the treatment of same-sex behaviour and relationships. It is one thing to read, say, 160 pages, about male-female marriages and sexual relationships knowing there is an upcoming chapter about same-sex behaviour that will surely address areas of same-sex behaviour that could be discussed under earlier subject headings. Does one, for instance, discuss the well-known “clerical vice” of sex between men in clerical orders in the section on “unchaste ecclesiastics” or in the chapter on same-sex behaviour? The answer Warner comes to is that you don’t discuss it at all.

The chapter on same-sex behaviour is a mere six pages long and most of those six pages are given over to a discussion of Edward II’s sexuality. I certainly expected Edward II to be mentioned in detail as he is the most famous example of a medieval man who very likely did have romantic and/or sexual relationships with other men, and his reign is Warner’s area of expertise. I did not appreciate that the discussion of his sexuality made up the bulk of a very short chapter and featured the disturbing rumour he might have had an affair with his own niece (not mentioned in the incest chapter) and a lengthy complaint about the hypocrisy of historians who say Edward II couldn’t possibly have had a romantic/sexual relationship with his favourites while uncritically accepting that Isabella of France had an affair with Roger Mortimer. I take Warner’s point and agree with it but it could have been made much more succinctly, particularly because she spends about half-a-page debunking the alleged affair between Isabella and Mortimer. This is in a six page chapter on same-sex relationships. It could have been a sentence. It could have been a footnote.

It’s particularly galling when Warner tells us at the start of the chapter, “space does not permit a discussion of the complex meaning of the word ‘sodomy’ in the Middle Ages”. Despite the broad use of this term in the Middle Ages, “sodomy” did refer to sexual sins between men and between men and women, thus making it directly relevant to her entire book. How does Warner has the space to debunk an affair between a man and a woman in a chapter on same-sex relationships but not to go into sodomy in more than passing detail? The discussions do not improve from there. The chapter is dedicated to telling us that things that might be read as indicating same-sex behaviour (sodomy, vices too horrible to be named, bed-sharing) might or might not be about same-sex behaviour, and that Edward II and Richard II might or might have had sex with men but that they definitely had sex with women. The initial discussion about the hypocrisy of historians denying Edward II’s possible same-sex relationships merges into a short paragraph in which Warner cites Ruth Mazo Karras about the “double standard of evidence” that requires explicit evidence of genital contact for same-sex relationships but not for relationships between men and women. This features the chapter’s sole reference to relationships between women in which we’re told there’s too little evidence to discuss them.

There are limitations of evidence and space, as Warner says, and this is particularly true when she’s chosen to focus on late medieval England, meaning she cannot cite evidence from the early or high Middle Ages or from a broader European context, but one must wonder at her priorities. There is certainly scholarship on same-sex relationships between women, from Judith M. Bennett’s famous call to explore “lesbian-like” women or the work of Bennett and Jessica Barker on the extraordinary joint tomb of Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge (which is certainly within the parameters of Warner’s book) to edited books (e.g. The Lesbian Premodern and Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages). Even the discussion of same-sex desire between men is limited to late medieval Kings of England – namely Edward II and Richard II, but Edward IV garners a short mention (there is nothing about the debates on Richard I’s sexuality as he is too early for Warner, nor Henry V’s, who isn’t). There is no mention of the sodomy accusations between Lollards and the orthodox clergy that Carolyn Dinshaw (Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern) has discussed in detail. Nor is there mention of the tomb of the “wedded brothers”, William Neville and John Clanvowe, who are buried in the same tomb, their coat of arms impaled together – a practice usually associated with married women. Unsurprisingly by this stage, there is no engagement with contemporary literature or literature studies that might prove revelatory. Not all of this would fit within six pages, of course, but surely room could have been made for some of this.

There are also subjects entirely uncovered by Warner. The existence of “love magic”, famously brought up in the accusations of witchcraft against Eleanor Cobham, the prizing of male celibacy even amongst kings, how medieval couples reacted to infertility, the devotion of women to the male Christ’s rather vaginally-shaped sidewound, and the entwined sexuality and spirituality of the medieval mystics such as Margery Kempe. Indeed, this is a largely secular retelling of the Middle Ages – references to priests having concubines and the sacrament of marriage aside. But this may well be an issue where I know more than the book contains and, in looking for these things, I am looking for a book that was never going to be the book Warner was writing. Yet all the same, it seems a rather lopsided picture of sex and sexuality in the late Middle Ages. How can we talk about sex and sexuality in medieval England without accepting the enormous rule the Church played in it and the theological underpinnings of attitudes towards sex? How can we talk about sex and sexuality in medieval England when the view of the society presented by Warner is, by and large, so heteronormative?

Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England feels like a safely heteronormative account of sex and sexuality and that anything “too queer” was safely cordoned off from the main narrative by being contained in it’s own clearly labelled and brief section that anyone squeamish, homophobic or transphobic can easily skip over. And even in those sections, we’re told that it’s possible there’s a heterosexual explanation for everything.

But maybe I’m being too hard on Warner or putting too much responsibility onto her – perhaps these were omissions or glossing-overs were due to publisher interference or stipulations. Or maybe the problem was with me, that having read so many fascinating, thought-provoking studies of medieval sexuality, Warner’s Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England is too simplistic and beginner-friendly. I am, honestly, disappointed by it – I’ve enjoyed Warner’s earlier scholarship for the most part and expected a broader and better exploration of sexuality than this. But I could only recommend this book for a casual reader looking to understand sexual/romantic relationships between men and women in the Middle Ages. For those who want more, I’d recommend starting with Ruth Mazo Karras’s Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others.

This book had a fascinating focus however I found it to be a somewhat mediocre read.
I did appreciate that it was clearly well researched and that there were multiple examples of intimacy from all different levels of medieval society included, however, I just struggled to really engage with the writing.

While this book wasn't for me, I imagine other fans of medieval history would enjoy it.

Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher, and the author for giving me a free digital copy of this book to read in exchange for an honest review.

I read other books about Sex and Sexuality in other ages and they're always informative and well researched.
This is no exception and I enjoyed it learning something new.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

The title Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England is like from tabloids, the more precise title would be Medieval England intimately. That’s the only reservation I have about this book, but I can understand that sex sells.
The advantage of this book is the fact that you can read it not only chapter by chapter, but you can also choose the part you are interested in. When selecting the latter approach, you will lose the clever chapter ordering. First, you need to be pretty to attract the other sex, then you will marry and have sex and children.
You can find interesting information on each page - men did the laundry, and one poor man drowned when doing it. Several myths are busted. Ordinary people didn’t marry young, and the reason for no weddings in May is not the fact that they washed in this month.
I like reading this book; it is for everyone interested in medieval intimacy. Many aspects described for medieval England appeared also in different parts of Europe.

Pretty easy to read and informative. Good for people wanting to know this history through different time periods or day-to-day situations of people at this specific time. Good starting point on the subject.

A fascinating, well-written, and informative look at the lives of men and women in Medieval England. This book answered many of my questions and gave real life examples from every rank of society.

This was an interesting read but more on the dull side than I would have preferred. While it is nonfiction and that can be slightly boring, this book was particularly slow and drawn out. However, it had some good information and is worth reading.

Thank you Net Galley and Pen & Sword for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I thought this was really interesting, which was why I requested it. The information was well organised and it wasn’t too long that it was boring, but had just enough information.

Thank you so much to Pen & Sword and NetGalley for an e-arc of this book.

This book wasn’t what I was expecting, and I’m still not quite sure as to it’s ultimate purpose.

The vast majority of the book was really just listing people, places and dates and what happened, but without any interpretation (sometimes a little). So I feel like I’ve come away and not really learnt anything. Perhaps this is intended as a quick reference book, and then it would somewhat fit the bill.

3 stars as there is a lot of information and that would have taken time to collate and organise.

Sex is the great constant of life. From generation to generation we do it, or we go extinct. And every generation thinks they have invented it. In this short book Kathryn Warner takes a detailed look at it, or as detailed as the sources allow.

This is a very interesting book. In seventeen chapters Warner covers the gamut of human sexuality in the later Middle Ages in England. It is well-written, and answers a lot of questions. Highly recommended

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC.

This is such a well written and constructed guide to the morals, customs and practices of sex, sexuality and marriage in Medieval England, Kathryn Warner is adept at discussing with sensitivity the topics in this book, sometimes amusing (at the start) however these go on to cover subjects such as rape, incest, abduction, consent (inc ages) sometimes hard to read, but needs to be read and understood! I particularly liked the inclusion of trans and same sex relationships , including treating them with the full respect due and didn’t diminish them in the discussion too. A well written, interesting and thoughtful insight into sex and sexuality in medieval times

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

'Sex and Sexuality in Medieval England' is a very detailed and informative book. Warner covers a breadth of topics from marriage, to incest. It is a fascinating insight into the lives of medieval England, from the highest nobility to more ordinary people, especially as so many examples are used throughout. Warner's writing style is very engaging, and particularly at the start quite humorous.

However sometimes the amout of examples did get a little overwhelming and it was more difficult to digest the information. For certain chapters I would have liked a little bit more analysis to break up the examples and make it a bit more readable. This was done in some chapters, in particular the chapter on same sex relationships, but it would have been nice to have had it throughout the entire book.

One thing that I very much appreciated was how much Warner handled more sensitive topics covered by her research. Some of the topics were difficult to read about, such as forced abduction, incest and rape. However Warner dealt with them very carefully and respectfully, which made it easier to read. Similarly the inclusion of same sex relationships and trans people was very well handled, and I was glad Warner did not ignore or minimalise them in her discussion.

Overall, despite one or two issues with the book I would thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of sex, women or medieval England.

Thank you to Netgalley and Pen and Sword for the ARC.

My biggest criticism is that the book just… ends. Maybe because it’s an unfinished proof but there was no conclusion. There was no summation and the book just went straight to the index. It was jarring and I would have liked some kind of commentary for the author about all the evidence she presented. Because the research was really good and thorough. It was well written, dealt with difficult subjects in a deft and sensitive way, and was absorbing. Lack of conclusion was really weird.

These time periods are my favourite to read about! I find them utterly fascinating and this was no exception! A lot of the information is not 100% accurate due to lack of official records but I found the author wrote it all beautifully and in a way which was understandable