The Medieval Chastity Belt Started as a Joke Albrecht Classen / History News Network @myHNN Oct. 5, 2015 History News Network, the website that puts the news into historical perspective. The article below was originally published at HNN. Why would any serious medievalist turn his/her attention to this most spurious object, the medieval chastity belt, and examine its alleged reality and dissemination all over the world? Most people, both within the academia and outside, tend to chuckle when they hear about this chastity belt because they don’t know much about it and yet have a certain understanding from the modern media, and because it allows them to think and speak about the female sexual body in a seemingly legitimate fashion. Basically, the chastity belt, so the story goes, served a crusader knight to protect his wife from unwanted, or at least illegitimate, sexual contacts during his absence. More specifically, the husband placed such a belt on his wife’s body out of fear from wooers who could abuse the opportunity and sleep with her while he was fighting for God in distant lands. Jokes and humorous accounts about medieval sexuality intimately combine to attract many people who otherwise would have no interest in the Middle Ages. We also laugh about the chastity belt because it symbolizes in a complex manner the husband’s impotence, or his fear of competitors, and particularly universal worries by men that they might not be able to control their wives’ sexuality. Little wonder that modern feminists have regularly railed against this ‘monstrous’ strategy of repression allegedly employed by husbands in the Middle Ages, but very few cultural historians have ever closely examined the sources where we discover references to the chastity belt. Laughter, however, has regularly revealed much larger issues at stake, and there is hardly any really ‘harmless’ joke, especially when the topic of sexuality is at play. Humor and comedy are huge and complex topics closely associated with epistemology, anthropology, sociology, medicine, and even philosophy. The topic of the chastity belt hence proves to be important not so much as to whether it existed or not, but rather as to the phenomenon itself that people talked about it in the first place. It is critically important to understand why someone is telling a joke, what purpose s/he might pursue with it, and what the ultimate intent might be; we also must comprehend why the situation, object, or people we are laughing about would be so risible. To approach the medieval chastity belt as a theme hence requires that we investigate, first, whether such an object actually existed in the past, irrespective of the vast number of specimens that still can be found in so-called medieval torture museums all over the world. Second, we are called upon to examine closely the discourse on the chastity belt at least since the seventeenth century, which subsequently entered into a quasi-scholarly debate that has been rather tantalizing over the decades because in this particular case most principles of critical arguments have been commonly disregarded or undermined. We could also add a third component which makes the discussion of the chastity belt so important and revealing. Much of what we assume to know about the Middle Ages, or any other phase in cultural history, proves to be handed down to us through epistemological filters that regularly threaten to transform the reality behind it and convey to us, hence, mostly mythical concepts that need to be analyzed meticulously before we can claim any real comprehension. One powerful example would be the modern assumption that people in the Middle Ages believed that the earth was flat. Nothing would be further from the truth, but even an overwhelming amount of evidence stating the very opposite does little to solve the issue, since popular opinions are highly influential particularly because they are not well founded and disregard most historical details. (Edited by Sub-Verity. Lucy - you seemed to have copied the entire webpage along with all the sponsored links - like 150 of them. If I've edited too far, go give me a shout)