Ilicit sex, unfaithful translations: Latin, Old High German and the birth of a new sexual morality in the early Middle Ages

How did early medieval writers understand and categorize illicit sex? Given the dearth of descriptive information on private life in this period, previous scholarship on sexual behaviors has generally focused on prescriptive sources such as law codes or narratives of exceptional events. In contrast, I investigate a previously untapped but remarkably rich source base: the continental Germanic vernacular translations, confessional formulas, and glosses, primarily composed in Old High German.;The intellectual and cultural history of the early middle ages is still poorly understood. In the Christian tradition, sex provoked discussion and anxiety from the apostolic era onwards. The scholarly conventional wisdom today is that the teachings of church fathers such as Augustine and Jerome remained definitive until the emergence of systematic canon law in the twelfth century. But vernacular sources demonstrate early medieval innovations and changing priorities. By revealing native-language categories instead of relying upon the learned Latin ones, these texts show that early medieval writers thought of sex not only as a (sinful) private act, but as an activity with vital implications for family structure, emotional life and economic concerns. Sex perhaps endangered the soul, but it also played a key role in life on earth.;More importantly, vernacular evidence helps pinpoint a loss: the Roman notions of largely immutable rank and social status that defined their categories of illicit sex. As early medieval writers progressively disaggregated categories of illicit sexual acts from the status of the person committing the act, actions---not status---began to dictate culpability. The church fathers were themselves deeply embedded in this status-based system, which in one form or another had dominated the west since the earliest recorded history. Yet it did not survive the translation from Latin to the vernacular and transplantation from the Mediterranean basin to the wilds of northern central Europe. Through both conscious and unconscious reshaping, the mostly anonymous writers considered here bear witness to the birth of a new sexual morality in the early middle ages: consequently, arguments for monogamy and fidelity ultimately held men and women to much more similar standards of behavior than had earlier been the case.