may have found the funniest possible thing ever in this essay on medieval sex laws im reading hold on
From Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe by James A. Brundage
This is how tiktok users decide if you deserve to die or not
Wait wait wait
You weren’t allowed to be naked???
every time I always want to write a program to do the flowchart for you (if you don’t know, a lot of early programming is taught as flowcharts (or at least used to be), so there’s a natural flowchart->computer program connection already in my mind)
like it could ask you the yes/no questions, then you enter the date and it calculates if it’s one of these dates when it’s sin. and it’d be a fun research thing, you know? to go look up what exactly the rules are around those dates. it could be like an apple II program, since it’s very simple.
plus you could hook it in with the penances for those sins! so it can also be used for reference. if you accidentally fucked your wife on a feast day, how bad as sin is that? do you gotta only eat bread and water for three years, stay off the ale for 6, and leave the country?¹ or do you just gotta stay on bread & water for a 100 days²?
but then sometimes you gotta realize that you’re seriously considering writing BASIC software for Early Middle Ages catholic priests? based on a type of document that went out of favor IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY AD?
yeah I am. I just really like programming and religious miscellanea. this is awesome.
Penitential of Finnian (pdf link), what you gotta do if you kill your friend not out of hatred but because the devil made you do it.
Penitential of Cummean (link), what you gotta do if you puked somewhere and a dog ate it. Some other fun bits of Cummean: If a cleric fathers a child, they should do one year bread and water. Unless the child is a boy, then it’s 7 years, get out the country, and no fucking! CHASTITY FOR SEVEN YEARS, CHURCHMAN! Speaking of clerics and not fucking: if a cleric “makes love to a woman [..] in his mind”, that’s 7 days penance on the bread and water. But if the reason it was only in your mind was because you asked her, and she said no? FORTY DAYS PENANCE, LOSER!
wait. if I’m reading Cummean right, you get less penance for masturbating with a friend than on your own. if “boys of twenty years” masturbate together, it’s 20/40 days penance. but if a man masturbates alone, it’s 100 days. Huh. I wouldn’t guess that hanging out together was the way to make your masturbation less sinful.
Those are first offenses, of course. there’s like, a scale you go up if you repeat it.
Also, everyone’s favorite “used to be huge, now fallen out of the zeitgeist” type of sex makes an appearance: Intercrural sex! (aka thighjobs). Here called “femoral masturbation”, a wild term I’ve not seen before today.
They’re mentioned so they can be not as bad as sodomy. a thighjob with your bro is 100 days, then a year each time you do it again.
While sodomy starts at a year, goes up to two, then three, and then “if it becomes a habit” (and sodomy so easily can become a habit), seven years! and “a method of penance shall be added according to the judgment of this priest”. Zero idea what that’d be.
Bruce Wayne, the type of parent to get overstimulated and lock himself in the bathroom, pantry, office, etc. Dick Grayson, the type of child to wiggle his fingers under the door, and tell Bruce to let him in
