The Medieval Vagina: A Hysterical and Historical Perspective of All Things Vaginal During the Middle Ages

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I snapped the photograph that appears on the cover of this book while visiting Scotland and England in June 2013. The photograph is the entrance to Bothwell, a 15th century castle near Glasgow, Scotland. Interestingly, I was a castle virgin before visiting Europe for the first time, so this photograph is particularly fitting for this book.

The Medieval Vagina, or the MV as we have come to call it, is intended to offer readers a glimpse of the most feminine of body parts during one particular moment in time. This book is for the feminist. It is for the historian. It is for the medievalist. It is for the humorist. It is for the curious male. It is for the lover of the unusual, the weird, the quirky, and the slightly vulgar. It is for anyone who appreciates the uniquely female organ that plays a key role in progeny, pleasure, punishment and peccadillo.

Any student of the medieval era worth his/her salt will no doubt be familiar with Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, arguably one of the most important literary works of the Middle Ages. In this work, the proto-feminist Wife of Bath mentions a well-known fable of the time in which a man and a lion ponder a painting depicting a man killing a lion. The lion observes that, had a member of his own species painted the picture, the outcome would be different; it would have shown a lion defeating a man. Just as the artist naturally paints himself in the dominant role as the victor, the documentarians of history favor their own kind. We know that the recorders of medieval history had one key commonality — all were sans vagina. The Middle Ages, as with most of human history, was a time of great inequality between the genders. The balance of power favored those with a penis.

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