Profs & Pints Baltimore: Medieval Sex

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Medieval Sex,” a look at the reality of medieval sex and sexuality through the lens of comic literature, satire, and obscenity, with Larissa “Kat” Tracy, professor of medieval literature and author of several books on the Middle Ages.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/perch-medieval-sex .]

Profs and Pints is about to bring some “bawd” to Baltimore.
In its quest to provide scholars new audiences of people who love to learn, Profs and Pints is debuting at The Perch in Federal Hill with a fascinating, rollicking discussion of how medieval people navigated sex in their time.

The speaker, Professor Kat Tracy, has appeared on Wondrium’s series Sex in the Middle Ages and the History Channel’s Dark Marvels. She has earned a big following among Profs and Pints fans in Baltimore and other cities by giving excellent talks in other venues on medieval torture, the pagan origins of late winter holidays, monster beliefs, and the Green Knight legend.

This time out, Professor Tracy will tackle the question of whether medieval society truly was more prudish than our own.
She’ll discuss how the sex lives of medieval people were framed by religious edicts and secular laws, how they skirted those restrictions, and how they found outlets in sexual humor and displays.

Medieval discussions of sex were most common in humorous literature that used satire, double entendres, obscenity, and dirty jokes, often to engage in political commentary or draw attention to bigger social issues. We’ll look at how great writers of that time found ways to discuss sex while escaping censure from the Catholic Church.
It will be about as much fun as you can have outside the bedroom. ( Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: An illustration by Giovannino de' Grassi from the late 1300s.