by Kate Lister
They conclude that this too is achieved by causing victims to hallucinate, and that witches do not really keep ‘dicks’ (1836) in trees as pets. Given how fascinated witches seem to be with cursing the ‘dibble’ (1796), it is little wonder that magical causes had to be considered in a charge of impotence.
When Hincmar, the archbishop of Rheims (AD 806–882) was asked to advise on King Lothar of Francia’s attempt to divorce his wife, Queen Theutberga, he responded with the treatise On the Divorce of King Lothar and Queen Theutberg. Here, Hincmar suggests that the king’s favourite mistress, Waldrada, had bewitched him into no longer having sex with his wife.15 Hincmar was certain that ‘sorceresses and magicians … working of the Devil’ could render a man impotent and prevent a marriage from being consummated. If this should happen, Hincmar recommended the couple ‘make a pure confession of all their sins to God and a priest with a contrite heart and humble spirit’.
With many tears and very generous almsgiving, and prayers and fasting, they should make satisfaction to the Lord, by whose judgement, at their own deserving and unwillingly, they have deserved to be deprived of that blessing which the Lord gave to our first parents in paradise before sin.16
One of the most famous cases of magically induced impotence was that of King Philip Augustus of France (1180–1223), who claimed he had been unable to consummate his marriage to Ingeborg of Denmark because he had been bewitched. By all accounts the king had been looking forward to marrying Ingeborg, yet the day after the wedding he wanted the marriage declared void. Three months after the wedding, Philip’s council had produced a spurious family tree to try and prove the king and Ingeborg were related and therefore couldn’t marry. When Ingeborg protested about this, the king naturally claimed he had been rendered impotent through magic. He later directly accused Ingeborg herself of witchcraft and of cursing him. None of this convinced Pope Innocent III and Philip was ordered to stay married to Ingeborg. Philip’s response was to lock Ingeborg away in the chateau of Étampes and marry Agnes of Merania in 1196. The pope was so enraged that not only did he refuse to recognise this marriage, but he ordered all churches in France to be shut up for nine months and imposed an edict that rendered any child born during this period illegitimate. After this scandal, Pope Innocent III ruled that marriage could no longer be annulled on grounds of magically induced impotence.17
Wives continued to seek an annulment to their marriages on grounds of impotence until the eighteenth century, though the practice of congress was largely abandoned by the seventeenth century.18 However, penile humiliation continued to be a feature of the divorce court throughout the eighteenth century as the proceedings were often published as lurid erotica. Unscrupulous publishers such as Edmund Curll and George Abbot distributed numerous compilations of scandalous court records, including The Case of Impotency; and Cases of Divorce for Several Causes in 1714, and Cases of Impotency as Debated in England in 1719. ‘Wise matrons’ may no longer have been required to examine a chap’s ‘virile member’, but these texts made sure every detail of a husband’s sexual dysfunction was made public.
Viagra turned twenty years old in 2018, and this is surely something worth celebrating. The successful treatment of erectile dysfunction has allowed millions of people to get their mojo back. It is also worth remembering all those throughout history who have not been able to access such treatment, and how important sexual function is to a person’s well-being. If you ever pop a blue pill, please remember to give a full salute to all the ‘useless members’ who entered the history books because they were accused of not being able to enter anything else.
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* Decretum is an enormous collection of papal letters, penitentials and the writings of various Church fathers that was compiled by Bishop Ivo of Chartres (d. 1115). Here, Ivo printed a letter from Pope Gregory II (AD 669–731) which declared if a husband and wife could not have sex and refused to live together ‘as brother and sister’, the marriage could be annulled. Given the sheer size of Ivo’s work, it wasn’t a bestseller. However, around 1139 a canon lawyer known only as Gratian compiled a collection of canon law, now known as the Gratian Decretum, that also argued impotence was grounds for annulment. The Gratian Decretum quickly became the textbook for European law schools, and impotence was recognised as a legal deal breaker. Quoted in Catherine Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 57 and ‘The Medieval Canon Law Virtual Library’, Web.Colby.Edu, 2018
1 John Tozzi and Jared Hopkins, ‘The Little Blue Pill: an Oral History of Viagra’, Bloomberg, 2018
2 Dawn Connelly, ‘Three Decades of Viagra’, The Pharmaceutical Journal, 2017
3 ‘Cover Page’, Time, 1998.
4 Stanley E. Althof and others, ‘Self-Esteem, Confidence, and Relationships in Men Treated with Sildenafil Citrate for Erectile Dysfunction’, Journal of General Internal Medicine, 21.10 (2006), 1069–74
5 Stephanie B. Hoffman, ‘Behind Closed Doors: Impotence Trials and the Trans-Historical Right to Martial Policy’, Boston University Law Review, 89 (2009), 1725–52, p. 1732.
6 Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages, p. 61.
7 Jacqueline Murray, ‘On the Origins and Role of “Wise Women” in Causes for Annulment on the Grounds of Male Impotence’, Journal of Medieval History, 16.3 (1990), pp. 235–49, p. 243.
8 Quoted in Frederik Pedersen, Marriage Disputes in Medieval England (London: Hambledon, 2000), p. 117.
9 Frederick Pederson, ‘Motives for Murder: The Role of Sir Ralph Paynel in the Murder of William Cantilupe’, in Continuity, Change and Pragmatism in the Law: Essays in Honour of Professor Angelo Forte (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 2016), pp. 69–95, p. 83.
10 Quoted in Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: Social History of Women in England 450–1500 (London: Phoenix Press, 1995), p. 116.
11 Quoted in Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages, p. 44.
12 P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Malleus Maleficarum (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), Kindle edition, locations 2844–45.
13 Ibid., locations 2897–99.
14 Ibid., locations 2931–3.
15 Hincmar of Rheims, De Divortio Lotharii Regis Et Theutbergae Regina, ed. by Letha Böhringer (Hanover: MGH, 1992), p. 217.
16 Hincmar of Rheims, De Nuptiis Stephani Et Filiae Regimundi Comiti (Berlin: MGH, 1939), p. 105.
17 See Rider, Magic and Impotence in the Middle Ages, pp. 72–4.
18 Hoffman, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, p. 1727.
SEX
AND
FOOD
Staff of Life
Sex and Bread
There’s no denying it: food and sex are two pleasures intimately connected in the human psyche. Admittedly, literally mixing the two (or ‘sploshing’, to use the vernacular) can lead to a steep dry-cleaning bill and a lifetime ban from the salad bar at Pizza Hut, but the point remains: food is sexy. Countless eating metaphors can be employed to describe sex acts: ‘eating’ pussy, ‘sucking’ dick, ‘tasting’ or wanting to ‘devour’ a lover, for example. Every Valentine’s Day, sweethearts gift each other with taste sensations (chocolates, wine, oysters, etc.), and sex goddess Nigella Lawson made her name fellating buttered parsnips.
We employ many of the same senses when we eat as we do when we have sex: sight, smell, taste, touch, etc. Both can bring feelings of comfort and love, as well as guilt and shame. Both over- and under-eating have been linked to sexual frustration and sexual trauma.1 And, of course, both eating and sex are pleasurable activities that can be shared, or indulged in alone. As it says in Proverbs 9:17: ‘Stolen waters are sweet, and bread eaten in secret is pleasant.’2
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Some foods are sexier than others. Champagne and caviar are decidedly more seductive than Um Bongo and a can of Spam, though you may disagree. Bread might not immediately strike you as erotic, but the staff of life has some surprisingly kinky secrets in its larder. For a start, the bread-making process is laden with innuendo. After it has been firmly kneaded, bread is put into a hot oven where it swells and rises, and then it’s all finished off with a sticky glaze. The suggestive links between rising bread and rising penises, and hot ovens and hot vulvas, can be found back in AD 79, in the Roman town of Pompeii. During an excavation of the ancient city, a terracotta plaque with a projecting penis was discovered above the oven of a bakery, bearing the inscription hic habitat felicitas (‘here dwells happiness’).3
One man makes dough as another stokes the fire for the oven. There is bread on the tables and trays and baskets are piled in stacks. Sixteenth-century coloured etching.
The potential for doughy double entendres was not lost on the Anglo-Saxons either. The Exeter Book was compiled by clerics sometime in the tenth century and it contains a number of gloriously smutty riddles, like ‘Riddle 45’:
I have heard of something or other growing up in the corner. swelling and groaning, heaving up its covers.
A mind-proud woman, some prince’s daughter, seized it boneless with her hands, a tumescent thing, covered it with her dress.4
The answer is, of course, bread dough (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). As well as providing ample material for such risqué jokes, bread can be fashioned into all kinds of rude shapes. In his epigrams, the Roman satirist Martial (AD 40–104) joked about bread dildos, claiming that sexual urges could be placated by nibbling on penis-shaped bread instead of the real thing. ‘If you want to satisfy your hunger you can eat my Priapus; you may gnaw his very appendage, yet you will be undefiled.’5 Whether or not anyone has actually pleasured themselves with a loaf, fertility festivals have been celebrated with phallic- and yonic-shaped breads for thousands of years.
The Greco-Egyptian author Athenaeus of Naucratis (AD 170–223) described how the harvest goddess Demeter was worshipped in Sicily with a sweet bread called mulloi that was shaped like a vulva.6 There is also evidence that genital-shaped breads were baked to celebrate Easter throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern period. Writing in 1825, French historian Jacques-Antoine Dulaure (1755–1835) quotes from a sixteenth-century book by Johannes Bruerinus Campegius that details ‘the degeneracy of manners, when Christians themselves can delight in obscenities and immodest things even among their articles of food’. Dulaure goes on to describe how penis breads were still being baked to celebrate Easter in the lower Limousin and Brive areas of France, whereas the citizens of Clermont in Avignon celebrated Christ’s resurrection with a vulva-shaped bread.7 Writing in 1865, Thomas Wright claimed that phallus breads were still being baked in Saintonge ‘as offerings at Easter, and are carried and presented from house to house’.8 It is entirely possible that the Easter tradition of hot cross buns may descended from the ancient custom of celebrating fertility and the spring with knob bread.
A baker is loading uncooked dough into an oven, as baked loaves are carried away by a woman. Woodcut by J. Amman (1539–1591).
Not only has bread been fashioned into sexually suggestive shapes throughout history, it has also been used in love spells. Throughout the Middle Ages, various church authorities were thoughtful enough to print books for priests listing the appropriate penance for various sins that parishioners would confess to; these books are known as ‘penitentials’. The earliest date to the sixth century in Ireland and they are a gold mine for anyone studying medieval sexuality, as the Church was nothing if not thorough (and imaginative) when it came to indexing sexual sin. One of the best known penitentials is Decretum by Bishop Burchard of Worms (c.950–1025). Here, the good bishop lists numerous penances for sexual sin that involve ingesting bodily fluid, ranging from swallowing semen (seven years’ penance on fast days), through to wives tricking their husbands into drinking their menstrual blood (five years’ penance on fast days).9 Burchard is particularly concerned with women rubbing different types of food on their bodies to cast spells over men. These spells could be designed to kill their husbands, like this one:
Have you done what some women are accustomed to doing? They take off their clothes and smear honey all over their naked body. With the honey on their body they roll themselves back and forth over wheat on a sheet spread on the ground. They carefully collect all the grains of wheat sticking to their moist body, put them in a mill, turn the mill in the opposite direction of the sun, grind the wheat into flour, and bake bread from it. They then serve it to their husbands to eat, who then grow weak and die. If you have, you should do penance for forty days on bread and water.10
Or, they can be love/lust spells, like this one:
Have you done what some women are wont to do? They take a live fish and put it in their vagina, keeping it there for a while until it is dead. Then they cook or roast it and give it to their husbands to eat, doing this in order to make men be more ardent in their love for them. If you have, you should do two years of penance on the appointed fast days.11
Before you kick off your knickers and head to the nearest koi pond, let’s take a moment to think of the science at work here. To the medieval mind this made perfect sense. Touch and transference were very important to both medieval medicine and superstition. Many medieval aphrodisiacs attempt to transfer sexual potency from source to subject via ingestion. For example, sparrows were once considered to be symbols of lust. When Chaucer wants to describe one of the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales (the Summoner) as being oversexed, he describes him as being as ‘hot and lecherous as a sparrow’.12 So medieval physicians believed that by eating lustful sparrows, patients with a flagging libido could absorb some of this lust themselves.13 The vulva was obviously associated with lust, so it stood to reason that being spiked with a fish that had died in the ‘glory hole’ (1930) would inflame a man’s senses.
Burchard of Worms was also concerned about women baking bread with their little chefs, and he has a penance for this too:
Have you done what some women are accustomed to do? They lie face down on the ground, uncover their buttocks, and tell someone to make bread on their naked buttocks. When they have cooked it, they give it to their husbands to eat. They do this to make them more ardent in their love for them. If you have, you should do two years of penance on the appointed fast days.14
You might be forgiven for thinking that all this is the product of an overactive imagination and a night on the communion wine, but you’d be wrong. Kneading bread with your naughty bits is recorded again almost six hundred years later, only by this time it’s called ‘Cocklebread’, and has a song and a dance to go with it. George Peele’s 1595 play The Old Wives’ Tale contains these lines:
Fair maiden, white and red.
Stroke me smooth, and comb my head.
And thou shalt have some cockell-bread.15
In A Jovial Crew (1641), Richard Brome also refers to young women who ‘mould cocklebread’, dance ‘clatterdepouch’, and ‘hannykin booby’.16 But it is the author John Aubrey (1626–97) who gives the most detailed account of how cocklebread was prepared. Aubrey writes of young women and their ‘wanton sport’, the ‘moulding of Cocklebread’. Aubrey describes how ‘young wenches’ would ‘get upon a Tableboard, and as they gather-up their knees and their Coates with their hands as high as they can, and then they wabble to and fro with the Buttocks as if they were kneading the Dough with their Arses’. While doing their wabbling, the women would sing:
Sixteenth-century woodcarving of two people making bread.
My dame is sick, and gone to bed.
And I’ll go mould my cocklebread!
Up with my heels and down with my head,
And this is the way to mould cocklebread.
Once baked, the bread would be delivered to that special someone and left to inflame their lust (or
at least their lower intestines). Aubrey calls this a ‘relique of natural magik’ and goes on to suggest that ‘cockle’ derives from an Anglo-Saxon word meaning ‘arse’, which is supported by the sixteenth-century term ‘hot cockles’ – meaning to have sex.17 Think about that the next time you’re ‘warming the cockles of your heart’. Cocklebread turns up again in Victorian texts, only by then it’s a children’s game, divorced from all naughtiness (and bread), where you squat on your haunches and rock to and fro singing a song about your granny. If only they’d known.
In 2015, pussy loafs made a brief but memorable comeback when feminist blogger Zoe Stavri used the yeast of her thrush infection to bake sourdough.18 Unlike the ‘wanton wenches’ Aubrey wrote about, this was not done to try and seduce someone, but to make a statement about cultural attitudes towards the vulva. It would be fair to say that Stavri’s bread strongly divided opinions, and despite widespread coverage online, the recipe never really caught on.
Despite such gallant efforts, genital-based cooking techniques have witnessed a noticeable decline since the seventeenth century, though if you ask me a revival is due. Perhaps Delia Smith or Mary Berry could lead the way in reviving these old traditions. But I imagine health and safety would frown on confectionery moulded from genitalia and would mandate some kind of hair net be used. It does seem safer to stick to a box of Milk Tray. Although should a lover ever approach you carrying an oddly squashed farmhouse loaf, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
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1 See Johann F. Kinzl and others, ‘Partnership, Sexuality, and Sexual Disorders in Morbidly Obese Women: Consequences of Weight Loss After Gastric Banding’, Obesity Surgery, 11.4 (2001), 455–8 https://doi.org/10.1381/096089201321209323; Sarah R. Holzer and others, ‘Mediational Significance of PTSD in the Relationship of Sexual Trauma and Eating Disorders’, Child Abuse & Neglect, 32.5 (2008), 561–6
