Chastity belts and birthing girdles.

©FFPRHC J Fam Plann Reprod Health Care 2007: 33(4) Chastity belts Chastity belts have been the subject of schoolroom and music hall humour for as long as most of us can remember. But did they really exist and for the purpose suggested? My research started in 2004 with the purchase of a steel chastity belt (Figures 1 and 2). Made of solid steel with sharp spikes on the groin area, padlock plus key and with decorative toilet arrangements, my chastity belt is everything one could wish for in imagined medieval chastity. The very appearance of this object raises eyebrows and causes much hilarity in my lectures, even in the most scholarly medical circles. I also remember having some explaining to do to security personnel at East Midlands Airport a few years ago, on my way to speak at an international sexual health conference in Edinburgh. Laughter is an appropriate response because I have reason to believe that chastity belts in this form are just a joke: a bawdy joke that seems mostly Victorian or Edwardian in origin as, indeed, is my chastity belt, which was manufactured no earlier than 1900. One medieval writer, Geoffrey Chaucer, must take some of the responsibility, as he refers to a “chastity belt” in The Miller’s Tale. Many of the stories told on the road to Canterbury are full of bawdy humour and adultery. A chastity belt fits in wonderfully well amongst the lust and marital strife. Chaucer is an author rarely found on school curricula nowadays, but in the Victorian era his books were a key element in studying the English language, so it is hardly surprising that the chastity belt seems to have entered the music hall around about that time. The public seem to be committed to their existence. I have been told by visitors to Tutbury Castle and at lectures how they were used by the Crusaders to lock up their wives to protect against adultery. One engineer explained how some contained spring-loaded blades to remove enquiring fingers. He could not, however, quite remember where he had seen such a device or indeed if there was any real evidence for its existence. I have travelled abroad and looked at art collections and, as yet, haven’t seen a chastity belt that can be proved to be medieval in origin. The British Museum agrees with me. In my years looking at whorehouse accounts, early pornography and the more salacious work of pamphleteers, I have not once seen reference to chastity belts by name or description. I have not found evidence in physicians’ notes of treatment of injuries caused by wearing such a device. Neither have I ever seen a note to an armourer or blacksmith giving instructions to make one. At some levels it is not so impossible. We have ‘scolds’ masks’ to slip over the head and hold down the tongue or pierce it as a punishment for gossips. Various other instruments of torture can be found in records – but not the chastity belt. And before any reader suggests that they Chastity belts and birthing girdles