Incest between Adults and Children in the Medieval World

The topic of children and sexuality has not attracted much attention from medievalists.1 There is no entry for children in the index of Bullough and Brundage’s Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (1996). There is no entry for abuse, incest, or sexuality in relation to children in the index of Pierre Payer’s study of sex in the early medieval penitentials (1984), or in Shulamith Shahar’s study of children in the Middle Ages (1990); in more recent studies, abuse (physical, mental, sexual, verbal) does appear in the index of Orme’s study of medieval children (2001) and incest in Phillips’ book on medieval maidens (2003), but none of these terms is indexed in Albrecht Classen’s collection of essays on childhood in the Middle Ages (2005). Brundage does have an index entry for children in his magisterial study of legal attitudes to sex during the Middle Ages (1987), but he is mostly concerned with issues of legitimacy and inheritance, rather than the sexuality of children. The same concerns are reflected in the index of Karras’s recent study of medieval sexuality (2005) under children, though she does briefly discuss their sexual experience too (in relation to awareness of parental sexual activity, and also to rape cases). As for medieval literature, Jean-Charles Payen maintains that ‘l’enfant n’est pas un personnage frequent dans les oeuvres medievales’; this is particularly true of chivalric romance, where the protagonist has to be old enough to fight and to fall in love.2