Beatrice de Planissoles Tells it All

Friday, March 12, 2010

Illustration from a Fourteenth Century textbook on health

In the year of our Lord, 1320, Beatrice de Planissoles was called to confess before the Inquisition in Pamiers, in the Midi-Pyrenees department of France (that’s 1320 CE, for those of you who care about that stuff).

Her crime was heresy.

We don’t know for sure how the Inquisition knew that Beatrice was a heretic, or how her case came to their attention. We have the records of the Inquisition, because such important matters demanded excellent records. We know that Beatrice was very

ill, said in court records to be on her death-bed, and so her sentence of death was commuted to the wearing of a double cross, the sign of a convicted heretic.

To what did poor Beatrice confess?

She had been seduced by a priest.

Pierre Clergue, the rector at the church at Montaillou, convinced her by a series of fast-and-loose logic with Church doctrine that it was actually worse for her soul to NOT sleep with him. An example of his lovely logic, from her testimony:

I said one day that he so bothered me in my home that I would rather give myself to four men than to a single priest because I had heard it said that a woman who gave herself to a priest could not see the face of God. To which he answered that I was an ignorant fool because the sin is the same for a woman to know her husband or another man, and the same whether the man were a husband or priest. It was an even greater sin with a husband he said, because the wife did not think she had sinned with her husband, but realized it with other men. The sin was therefore greater in the first case.

Can’t argue with that logic.

Anyway, eventually Beatrice was worn down, and the priest, in order to prevent her from getting pregnant, thereby exposing his indiscretions, produced a contraceptive of sorts:

When he wanted to take me, he wore something rolled up and tied in a piece of linen the thickness and length of an ounce or of the first digit of my little finger, which a long thread which he passed around my neck. And this thing which he said was this herb hung down between my breasts to the base of my stomach. He always placed it thus when he wanted to know me and it remained on my neck until he rose.

It is not clear whether Beatrice’s heresy was the affair with the priest, the use of a contraceptive device (pessaries were especially forbidden), or her misguided beliefs about Church doctrine which had been force-fed to her by this glib-talking priest (although a reading of the court documents actually suggests the later). The fate of Pierre Clergue is lost to history. Here’s hoping that he got his just deserts, in this life or the next.

The point, for our purposes, is how the Church found itself to be embroiled in the sexuality of its constituents. These supposedly celibate men convinced their flocks that the only way to protect themselves from the sins of venality was to tell all, either in confession or, in the worst case, to the Inquisition. The frankness and detail of Beatrice’s testimony would make modern, married, American jurors blush. In Medieval Europe, priests were just used to that sort of thing.

Michel Foucault, in his three volume History of Sexuality (which isn’t a history of sexuality at all, mind you, but is, in actuality, a very ponderous philosophical study on the way people talk about sexuality–I dare you to slog through it) points to this machinery as the beginning of his “scientia sexualis”– a carefully developed system by which society produced procedures for the telling of sex, not the hushing up of sex.

So the next time someone tries to tell you that, in days past, our sexuality was hushed, covered over, ignored, sent away to the bedroom, not discussed in polite circles, or hidden away behind closed doors, and that modern society is the first to actually get a handle on how to talk about sex, just smile and drop poor Beatrice’s name.

[This post is yet another installment in the Nefarious History of Motherhood, a series chronicling the wild and wacky history of obstetrics, gynecology and sexuality. You can catch up on the rest of the series here.]

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