Download PDF | Albrecht Classen, The Medieval Chastity Belt A Myth Making Process ( The New Middle Ages) ( 2007)
233 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my thanks to the many different libraries in North America and Europe that helped me find the relevant research material for this book. First of all, the Library of the University of Arizona proved to be, once again, a stellar research facility in every respect. I feel very fortunate to have this academic support right here in Tucson at the University of Arizona. I am also grateful to the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, the Library of the Universitat Marburg, the Library of the Universitat Freiburg, the Library of the Universitat Innsbruck, the Library of the Universitat Wiirzburg, the Cambridge University Library, and a number of other archives for allowing me to use their resources. Further, I would like to express my thanks to the Schloss- und Beschligemuseum, Velbert (near Essen) for their help in securing photos of chastity belts. I am also happy to acknowledge the Hanns Schell Collection in Graz, Austria, for its generous offer to provide me, free of charge, with photos of their chastity belts.
I am most grateful to my friends and colleagues, Prof. Dr. Peter Dinzelbacher, Werfen/Salzburg, and Dr. Reinhold Miinster, Wiirzburg, for providing me with so much inspiration and material important for my research. Prof. Dinzelbacher especially served as a superb sounding board for many of my questions and observations, challenging me along the way and helping me refine my arguments. Finally, my colleagues and students in the Department of German Studies, University of Arizona, provided me with a public forum to present my findings and to field their critical questions during our Lecture Series in October 2005. The Dean of the College of Humanities, Dr. Charles Tatum, helped me with a small travel grant in the summer of 2005, for which I am particularly thankful because I was not successful with other funding requests from my university. The German Academic Exchange Service provided me with a generous and most appreciated summer research grant in 2006 which made it possible to complete the work on this book in good time.
I am very grateful for the opportunity to publish my monograph on the chastity belt with Palgrave, and would like to express my thanks to Bonnie Wheeler, editor of the book series, “The New Middle Ages,” for her enthusiastic support and acceptance of my work.
Last but not least, I dedicate this volume to the companion of my life, my wife Aiko, and to the most wonderful young man I know of, my son Stephan.
INTRODUCTION
A Il studies in the field of cultural history are shaped by individual and collective mental filters that can be extremely powerful and often create difficult obstacles in our exploration of questions concerning the past to which traditional textbooks provide no answers, and which they sometimes seem to discourage us from asking in the first place. Moreover, these filters have tended to implant mythical concepts in our minds, allowing us to dream and fantasize about the past based on our own imaginations, rather than on actual situations, concrete developments, specific ideas, inventions, and events in the past.
The film and publishing industries (see, for instance, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose [1980] and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code [2003]) have successfully tapped into this enormous reservoir of myths concerning the Middle Ages, a world we tend to idealize or demonize, according to our individual attitudes, needs, and imagination because it is both far away from us to allow us to fantasize about some kind of past, and close enough to comprehend the connections to our own world. The less we know about that age, however, the more tenaciously do commonly held notions about that age influence our minds. Modern scholars sometimes complain about the infinite spread of false information about the past, only to retreat into their academic seclusion.
But this retreat is not necessary, and it amounts to self-defeat and a self-imposed delegitimization, especially since a critical discussion of the origins of some of these myths, and a careful examination of those sources that contributed to their dissemination, can provide very illuminating insights that may appeal to a wider readership as well. This approach is exciting, because the deconstruction of a myth sheds enormous light on our own cultural background and illuminates much of the educational tradition that has shaped our thinking about the past.
The study of the myth-making process involving the alleged medieval chastity belt has wider implications, because the modern fascination with this curious, somehow titillating object sheds light on many other common ideas concerning the past, such as the Middle Ages as a “dark age.” What is progress, and how do we define it, whether we think of religion, philosophy, technology, and general knowledge of our world in geographical, physical, chemical, and historical terms? Can we compare our own civilization to that of previous centuries? What measures could we use to carry out such a comparison? Of course, such questions open up a Pandora’s Box concerning many other aspects of Medieval Studies.
Technical and scientific progress is not necessarily correlated with moral and ethical progress. People’s basic instincts and emotions, such as aggression, love, hatred, friendship, passion, fear, and jealousy, have been deeply influential at all times and in all cultures. However, the history of literature, the visual arts, and music indicates that our approaches to these instincts have changed and are constantly evolving. Disturbingly, too many times people all too often project their own personal perspectives and experiences back into the past, because a simple black-and-white canvas makes it easier to claim a certain degree of knowledge and, above all, moral superiority.
Investigating how the myth of the chastity belt emerged will allow us to grasp some of the fundamental problems of historiographic epistemology, because historical and cultural knowledge is constructed and constantly subject to manipulations on behalf of vested interests. For instance, the huge field of encyclopedias, lexicons, dictionaries, and the like, clearly reveals the extent to which so-called factual information has been handed down from one author to the next, without anyone ever trying to verify or refute the evidence offered in support of their claims. This is very much the case with the idea of the chastity belt. It is extremely difficult to determine how a myth emerges and then develops, because so many different voices contribute to this process. Myths arise out of ideas, and sometimes out of concrete observations, whether they are valid or not. Mostly, their often sensational nature appeals to large and ever-expanding audiences, and soon a critical mass is established that translates the myth into the realm of factuality.
With respect to the chastity belt, for instance, it seems quite possible that some jealous husbands during the late Middle Ages hit upon an idea to control their wife’s chastity, and invented a mechanical device, although this has never been documented and would be contradicted by modern medical research as a matter of high improbability because a woman would not even survive the consequent hygienic and health problems after several days. But let’s assume that one husband indeed created such an object and might have tried it out on his wife. Its curious, if not perverse, nature probably caused rumors to spread quickly, and since the chastity belt was so intimately connected with sexuality, the gender relationship, and power structures within the family, satirical authors and artists, political propagandists, and later collectors and curators quickly and then firmly embraced the idea that the chastity belt actually existed in the Middle Ages and was in widespread use.
Once this position had been reached, the myth-making process accelerated and today it has reached a most intriguing status because of its symbolic function as a husband’s mechanical tool to control his wife’s sexuality during his absence. To malign the chastity belt as an instrument of patriarchal subjugation of a woman by her husband became, for instance, a battle cry for feminist writers who use the Middle Ages as a convenient, though certainly highly problematic, historical backdrop for their modern political agendas. This is not supposed to be a criticism of feminism, or of women’s struggle to free themselves from any kind of patriarchal subjugation today, whereas the erroneous use of allegedly “historical” examples as a warning of the consequences resulting from men’s mistreatment of women today will be the object of the critical examination here.
One of the most famous, because so hilariously satirical, references to the chastity belt as a grotesque, though only alleged, inheritance from the Middle Ages can be discovered in Woody Allen’s popular movie “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex” (1972) in which a court jester tries in vain to open the huge chastity belt on the body of his lord’s wife, the queen. The movie was based on the best-selling guidebook to human sexuality by David R. Reuben, first published in 1969, reprinted many times thereafter (last in 2000) and translated into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Hebrew, Polish, Chinese, Finnish, Vietnamese, and Russian, if not into other languages as well. As one of the many methods for birth control, Reuben also mentions the chastity belt:
Originally used during the Middle Ages by knights who wanted to defend their wives’ honor while they were defending the honor of their country, it was a sort of armored bikini. There was a screen in front to allow urination and an inch of iron between the vagina and temptation (sic!). The whole business was fastened with a large padlock. Even in those days love laughed at locksmiths (and padlocks) and many a knight returned to find his wife with a virtuous look on her face and a two-month pregnancy under her cast-iron underwear. The only thing to be said for the chastity belt is that used conscientiously it will prevent conception (and everything else).!
Woody Allen had watched a late-night television interview with Dr. Reuben and purchased the film rights to the book from producer Jack Brodsky. The production of Allen’s movie cost $2 million, but the movie’s screening grossed $8.8 million in U.S. and Canadian distribution, not counting the video production. Naturally, Dr. Reuben protested publicly against the distortions created by Allen in his movie, but the latter defended himself by saying that “this book was silly also. . . . It could have fallen into worse hands than mine.””
Let us turn to some of the cinematographic details. In the opening skit, “Do Aphrodisiacs Work?” Woody acts the role of a rather pathetic medieval court jester who tries to make love with the queen and gives her an aphrodisiac to drink. As soon as she feels the effects, she urges him to make love with her, but they both fail in their attempt to commit adultery because he cannot take off the huge chastity belt, and when he employs all kinds of metal objects to open the padlock by force, including a huge halberd that he had fetched from one of the guardsmen outside the queen’s chamber, the noise awakens the king who comes rushing in, catching them almost in flagrante. Just a minute before his arrival the jester had managed to open the chastity belt, but in the process of hastily helping the queen to get “armored” again, his right hand gets caught in the chastity belt on her behind. When the king realizes what has happened, or rather what their intentions had been, he orders the jester’s decapitation.
Woody Allen deliberately combines medieval and Renaissance features, incorporating allusions to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and freely operates with anachronistic elements (jester wearing glasses, references to tomatoes, a black man as a magician who concocts the aphrodisiac). The jester’s efforts to break the padlock—of course only the husband has a key to his wife’s chastity belt—lead to grotesque comic, especially when he slams the halberd at the padlock, calling it “beaver shooting,” whereas the queen’s vaginal area is called “portal of ecstacy,” and “royal box.” When the jester’s right hand gets caught in the iron belt around her hip, which later forces him to hide behind or underneath the queen, he describes this uncomfortable situation in modern terms, talking about his hand being “stuck in the cookie jar.” The perhaps most facetious linguistic formulation proves to be the jester’s exclamation when he discovers the chastity belt, calling it “heavy underwear.” And in his desperate attempt to explain the compromising situation to the king, the jester excuses himself with a reference to the husband’s own invitation to the jester: “whenever I am in town, I should look up your wife.”
Little wonder that the combination of pseudo-scientific sexology with its speculative historical approach employed by David Reuben, whose book-length study exerted an international influence, and the cinematographic spoof by Allen with its grotesque satire of the medical treatment of sexuality deeply implanted the myth of the medieval chastity belt in public awareness—once again, and particularly in North America. And considering the degree to which Allen ridiculed Dr. Reuben’s serious attempt to provide some information about the absurd-looking chastity belt, the effectiveness of which he seems to have doubted himself, thereby indirectly casting a major shadow of doubt on the authenticity of the chastity belt, blocked any further attempts to investigate the myth of the chastity belt from a scholarly perspective. The myth won, so to speak, over any attempt to investigate this curious object and its history more critically.
It is high time that this myth is examined critically to shed light on its origin and development, and its impact on public notions regarding the past as a model case for addressing the hermeneutic problematics that cultural historians always face. This book will try to address these aspects and offer a scholarly critique based on a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. Certainly, the chastity belt seems to be a matter of trivial jokes and silly comedy predicated on general notions about the Middle Ages. And I can only hope that the laughter about this absurd object as a fantasy product since the fifteenth century, will eventually shatter some of the sturdiest myths about that age. The fifteenth-century author Conrad Kyeser had understood the facetious character of the chastity belt and had obviously tried to pull his audience’s leg when he incorporated a drawing of such a belt into his book on war machinery. Once all evidence has been evaluated, let us join him in his laughter and lay this myth to rest.
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