The Chastity Belt - Myths and Facts

[icymist]

The Chastity Belt - Myths and Facts

Probably everyone knows what chastity belts are - those devices that look like iron underpants with a lock. Well, the story goes that the chastity belt was invented in the middle ages by some paranoid Crusader who didn't want to leave his wife 'fully functional' at home while he was busy butchering people in the Holy Land. Naturally, all his Crusader pals thought this was a good idea, and had chastity belts manufactured for all their mistresses, daughters and wives (in that order, most probably).

Myths and Facts

Chasity Belts are from medieval times...

As plausible as it might sound, the chastity belt is not however a medieval invention - the romantic stories outlined in the paragraph above are nothing but a product of the over-active 19th Century imagination. There are, in fact, no genuine chastity belts dating from medieval times: all known 'medieval' chastity belts have been produced in the first half of the 19th Century. These fake-medieval chastity belts are too heavy and the workmanship is too crude, even for medieval standards. The oldest design for a chastity belt that can be taken seriously dates from the 16th Century - but it's just a design, with no real working models believed to have ever been constructed. The concept of a chastity belt itself is a lot older, but it was usually used in poems in a metaphorical sense. According to Dr Eric John Dingwall, who wrote a deeper study on the subject in 1931, 'the chastity belt probably made its first appearance in ordinary use among the Italians of the period of the Renaissance or perhaps somewhat later.'

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[skater314159]

1. I studied the Crusades

in grad school as part of my history requirement... and the Anthropology of the Crusades was interesting... but the *most* interesting thing about the Crusades is the myth and lore that has accreted around them in the succeeding centuries.

I think it's really interesting that the Victorians are the ones who were so *obsessed* with the "Medieval Chastity Belts"! As if their obsession with covering up table, piano and chair legs that might be too shapely and attract unwanted male attention wasn't weird enough, the Victorians went a step further and had a whole big thing over chastity belts! :silly:


Peace! :hippie: