With court records of husbands and wives calling for annulments due to their partner’s sexual incapability, sex clearly played an important part in life and people were not afraid to have conversations about it in a public space. While sex only within marriage was seen as ideal by the medieval authorities, it was not always achievable or even desired. And if adults did marry very young children, they would tend to hold off consummation until later.” “Medieval people were quite uncomfortable actually, for the most part, with big age gaps between spouses. “The ideas of consent, and that you should like your partner, were both very important in medieval marriage,” states Harvey. Instead, the idea of consensual sexual relationships appears to have been valued.
Although we do have evidence of sexual assault, incest and even cases containing young children, it seems that medieval society generally shared our repugnance of these same issues. However, while we might get the impression that sex was all about sin, it seems that attitudes were far more complicated.
