Around the year 1400 a young woman in Central Europe was given a saddle made of bone, likely for her wedding day. As she rode from her parents’ home to that of her new husband, she sat upon carved scenes of lovers embracing and men banging drums or clutching their belts. In France, at about the same time, a young bride might have been given the (less suggestive) gift of a coin purse held by a finely woven metal handle and embroidered in delicate green, pink, and yellow silk.

Saddles rowdy with double entendre, demure coin purses: the objects gathered in “Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages,” an exhibition currently at the Met Cloisters, braid together various threads of medieval romantic life, from erotica and same-sex relationships to heterosexual marriage and religious celibacy. Staged in the museum’s “chapel,” which is presided over by a twelfth-century apse, a crucifix, and a painting of the Madonna nestled within a yonic wound-shaped frame, is an assortment of medieval objects as well as representational art: tapestries, paintings, statuary. A statue of Mary at the moment of the Annunciation, dated 1300–1310, sits reclining and relaxed, knees splayed open as though ready to physically receive the conception promised to her by the Holy Spirit. One clutched hand pulls the curtain of her head covering over her breast. The other hand grips the seat next to her. Her face, young and pretty, is angled flirtatiously downward.

The show’s transgressive delight relies partly on an imaginary veil of propriety, a misapprehension that medieval people were prudish simply because they existed in the past. In A Distant Mirror, her influential 1978 book about daily life in fourteenth-century France, the historian Barbara W. Tuchman warns against the “difficulty of empathy” that results from this misunderstanding:

The main barrier is, I believe, the Christian religion as it then was: the matrix and law of medieval life, omnipresent, indeed compulsory. Its insistent principle that the life of the spirit and of the afterworld was superior to the here and now, to material life on earth, is one that the modern world does not share…. What compounds the problem is that medieval society, while professing belief in renunciation of the life of the senses, did not renounce it in practice, and no part of it less so than the Church itself. Many tried, a few succeeded, but the generality of mankind is not made for renunciation. There never was a time when more attention was given to money and possessions than in the fourteenth century, and its concern with the flesh was the same as at any other time. Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.

The question of medieval attitudes toward sex and the body, as Tuchman suggested, is in large part a question about medieval Christianity, although scholars have found firm footing to disagree with Tuchman’s assertion that Christian renunciation was the sole “matrix and law of medieval life.” In 1980 the historian John Boswell challenged the accepted view that Christianity was and has always been hostile toward homosexuality; in 1990, the same year Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, the historian Thomas W. Laqueur argued that the medievals, working with the science of ancient thinkers like Galen and Aristotle, thought of men and women effectively as one gender presented in different forms. The medieval world, he claimed, relied more on social norms than on biology to set guidelines for identity and behavior.

There is now a substantial body of scholarship concerned with how ancient norms bled over and into medieval life. Some historians take the view that the flagellations and hair shirts of medieval religious piety testified to a backlash against antiquity’s hedonism; others prefer to stress the subtler ways that medieval Christians shifted rather than shunned ancient sexual mores. Several of the smart essays in the catalog to “Spectrum of Desire” take the latter approach, discussing the show’s objects by way of medieval texts that lifted their stories from antiquity: Aristotle and Virgil, for example, are frequent characters in medieval art, but in presentations that would be unfamiliar to most of us.

The show doesn’t present a singular thesis. Its curators, Melanie Holcomb of the Cloisters and the Oxford art historian Nancy Thebaut, don’t claim to take on the myth that the medievals renounced the world, for example, nor do they try to argue that medieval people had anything like today’s conception of sexuality and gender. It remains far from clear whether the more salacious objects in the show were understood in their own time as irreverent or merely playful, commonplace or exceptional. The show does, however, want to suggest that the premodern, pre-Reformation past was titillatingly freer from sexual hangups than we might think, and in certain corners it ends up quietly advancing a theory of the period’s ideas about the erotic and where they may have come from. Spending time at the Cloisters with decorative works that channel tales from the classical past, most of them meant for everyday use by everyday people, one begins to see how much the strangeness of medieval sexuality has to do with the pagan hangover of antiquity.

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One of the more eyebrow-raising objects on display—next to a large plate embossed with a scene of a wife paddling her husband’s ass—is a copper aquamanile, a type of water jug that here is more like a small sculpture, in the shape of a woman riding a man. He crawls on his hands and knees while she sits side-saddle, with her right hand tugging at his hair and her left spanking his rump, which is clad in what look like very short, very tight briefs. On first glance this seems to be a surprising little totem of kink play. But to many a medieval it would have been immediately legible as a depiction of a popular story, dating to the Middle Ages, about Aristotle.

According to the tale, Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great had a lover named Phyllis. At one point, the story goes, the philosopher warned Alexander to stay away from her, claiming that she was distracting him from more important matters. Phyllis (who was apparently quite something) charms Aristotle into making a deal: sexual favors if he allows her to ride him like a horse. Little does he know that Alexander will be watching. Upon seeing his teacher so thoroughly humiliated, the king decides he can’t take anything he says seriously, and Phyllis gets her boyfriend back. The catalog dutifully notes how this object complicates gender roles. But a jug such as this would likely have been used by an upper-class woman to serve her dinner guests, and one doubts that she deployed it to teach a lesson so much as to excite, shock, or prompt a retelling of the story.

Elsewhere antiquity’s erotic blend with the medieval appears carved on an ivory box. It’s a story of Virgil—or a version of the poet the Middle Ages imagined. As Jasper Griffin wrote in these pages about the winding afterlife of Roman poetry, the Middle Ages “made Virgil, who had been ‘a great clerk,’ into a magician. He balanced the city of Naples on an egg; he devised impregnable fortifications; he delivered the city from a plague of leeches by creating a golden leech; he made a bronze fly, which kept all other flies away. And so on.” 

In the ivory-box episode we find Virgil, poet-sorcerer, in pursuit of a woman named Febilla. After being rejected and humiliated by her, he extinguishes all of the lights in her city and places a single burning coal inside her. The townspeople, understanding that she is their new source of light, line up to penetrate Febilla with candles and light their wicks on the hot coal. (As shown on a Venetian goblet, often these townspeople were all women.) “So forthright and disturbing is this depiction of anal penetration,” Holcomb writes in the catalog, “that museums holding such works of art understandably leave them in their storeroom.” Holcomb points out that anal fascination was a recurring theme in the Middle Ages, and once you look for it you start to notice it everywhere, not least in the marginal doodles of illuminated manuscripts filled with characters passing fiery wind.

But the story of Febilla emanates from the darker depths of medieval psychology. Further complicating matters is the fact that illustrations often depict her in a receptive pose with a docile expression, perhaps indicating something like consent or enjoyment. Were medieval artists simply not attuned to what today we would read as violation? “Poetic language or an expert brushstroke can mask the violence of rape,” Holcomb writes. “But was there a script of ‘counter-conduct’ for women, a performance, an opening that gave them agency as the submissive partner?” Passed through the minds of curious medievals, the story might have evolved into something for or about the pleasure of the viewer. Whether that viewer was expected to be a man or a woman—and what their conception of consent was—remains mysterious to us.

It was not uncommon or necessarily untoward, “Spectrum of Desire” suggests, for medieval craftspeople to make titillating images for no other purpose than titillation—what the curators call “medieval erotica.” Another ivory box depicts a perverted version of the story of the prodigal son. Like a comic, it unfolds in narrative panels, with recurring characters and consecutive scenes. Instead of what we know from the Gospels, we see the prodigal son cavorting in a tavern after he’s left his father’s house. The story ends with a panel of him receiving oral sex—under a blanket, of course.

Yet this is not a show concerned only with titillation, and not everything on display is nearly so explicit. In fact, there may well have been more erotica in the literature of the period than there was carved onto objects, which makes the exhibition a little difficult to enter into without having the catalog on hand for guidance. Unlike the ancients, who often used ceramics as a canvas for hardcore pornographic scenes, the medievals tended to be much more discreet about visually representing literal sex. Copulatory representations can be as simple as a fully clothed, presumably married couple lying together, gently embracing with his leg draped over her rigid waist.

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The curators are forthright about their debt to queer theory, with its “broader understanding of kinship, friendship, emotions, and love.” This is not, they stress, a matter of “‘outing’ the past.” Anyone visiting the Cloisters hoping to see the Middle Ages liberated from the closet will likely be disappointed: “We want to be careful,” the curators write, “about distinguishing between medieval norms—if we can indeed call them that—and our own.” They are more interested in “the collapsing of multiple binaries, whether secular/sacred, male/female, friend/lover, or marital/mystical.”

Consider, as Holcomb does, the symbolic potency of the belt in the Middle Ages. It seems that belts were everywhere, and you can find at least one impressive specimen on display at the show. You’ll notice one with large studs around Aristotle’s waist as Phyllis rides him. A fourteenth-century box of gold and painted leather, a bit worse for wear, shows a pair of lovers joined by a belt they both hold. Belts, famously, were symbols of chastity for women, but they were also symbols of power for men, and between men. When the Archbishop of Cologne was able to negotiate the marriage of Henry III’s sister Isabella, the king bequeathed him and his brother belts in gratitude and packed Isabella off with twenty-four belts to distribute to her new court on his behalf.

Then there is “The Belt,” the thirteenth-century fairy tale by the little-known German writer Dietrich von der Glezze. King Henry of Swabia, the story goes, had a magic belt that gave the wearer “honor, happiness, and victory over any opponent”—which includes a power he uses to persuade a knight named Konrad to lie down with him and do “wonderful things…especially what any man usually does with his wife.” The twist: Henry of Swabia is actually Konrad’s wife in disguise. Here, in an echo of Laqueur’s writing on the “one-sex model,” the transition from female to male and then back again is not so much fluid as nonexistent.

The catalog lingers on representations of same-sex friendships, often between people in religious orders, and on the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, which medieval artists tended to depict as physically affectionate and tender: one statue on display shows John resting his head on Christ’s shoulder and dozing off as Jesus smiles kindly and contentedly, one arm around John’s shoulders and the other caressing his hand. “Their bond was not sodomitical, to use their term, but it was queer, to use ours,” write Holcomb and Thebaut, “in that it operated outside of normative relational models. For medieval thinkers, there was no more effective way to evoke the rare and intoxicatingly beautiful epiphany that they sought.” This congeniality was counterbalanced by another trope: artists of the period often depicted the serpent who tempts Eve in the garden using feminine characteristics, equating girl-on-girl seduction with the fall of man. Sodomia was suspicious.

From our vantage point, as the curators point out, notions about bodies and desire in the Middle Ages might have shaken loose from certain norms while still attending to others, such as piety. The relationships among people in religious orders—particularly nuns and monks living sequestered from society—were “queer” in the sense that they grew out of something other than the project of traditional family-building and homemaking, and were instead predicated on renouncing the world in the service of higher aims. What look to us like transgressions were couched in reverence, whether explicitly or not; they were meant less to liberate the body than to elevate the life of the spirit closer to God. “Spectrum of Desire” might have done more to explore how thoroughly united the body and spirit were during these years, a time when something as physiologically routine as arousal could be—and often was—understood as an experience of the divinely miraculous. One misses so many female saints in all their ecstasy.

Nevertheless, the religious statuary on view is the most luscious. One of the most beguiling pieces on display is a fifteenth-century painted-wood statue of Saint Sebastian. Martyred for defying the emperor around the year 288 by a firing squad of archers, Sebastian typically appears in artistic depictions as a handsome, muscular youth stuck full of arrows. Over the centuries he has become, as many commentators put it, something of a gay icon. Oscar Wilde took the name Sebastian while living in exile after his release from prison, inspired by Guido Reni’s 1615 painting; Derek Jarman’s first feature film, Sebastiane (1976), restaged the martyrdom with a cast of mostly nude men speaking their dialogue in Latin. Insofar as the Middle Ages have anything to do with modern queer culture, Sebastian is the poster saint.

At the Cloisters he is limpidly poised, loincloth jauntily draping over a hip coquettishly cocked. There is little information about this statue, but the erotic posture is undeniable. Again one finds shades of antiquity; the contrapposto pose suggests a familiarity on the part of this anonymous Northern European artist with classical sculpture. You can also see what the iconoclastic Reformers were worried about. Ulrich Zwingli is said to have commented that statues “of Sebastian, a Maurice and the gentle John the Evangelist” were “so cavalier, soldier-like and pimpish that the women have had to make confession about them.”

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The paintings on view, for their part, are where we find down-to-earth portrayals of heterosexual marriage. A pious little bridal portrait from Germany shows a newlywed couple, him passing her a sprig of forget-me-nots with rings clearly on display, her hand on her belly in anticipation. It is a clear picture of the conventions about marriage developing at the time: consensual between the two parties (even though most marriages would’ve been arranged in some way), tender, and sexual (as hinted by that premonitory pregnant belly). At such a union the bride might expect to receive a coin purse, or “alms bag”—like that lovely little example embroidered with silk and metal thread at the Cloisters—to collect coins that were to be distributed to the poor at a certain point in the wedding ceremony.

Look more closely at that conjugal coin purse and it offers a rare glimpse of the preoccupations of the medieval bride—a balm to Tuchman’s “difficulty of empathy.” Embroidered on one side is a scene from the story of Patient Griselda, then a familiar tale. She appears in Chaucer and in the tenth story told on the tenth day in Boccaccio’s Decameron—the grand finale. It’s a demented and painful fable about marital piety.

A rich duke, resistant to marriage, is coerced by his court to choose a bride. He marries the low-born but comely Griselda on the condition that she serve him lovingly and unwaveringly. Having secured her promise, he brings her out of her father’s house and strips her naked in front of the townspeople before dressing her in finery in front of the crowd. After she becomes pregnant with their first child, he decides the time has come to test her promise.

What unfolds is an increasingly cruel charade. The duke starts by sulking and criticizing Patient Griselda, then escalates to staging the murder of their two children, and, finally, to elaborately faking divorce papers from Rome and sending her away to her father’s house, only to call her back again as hired help to prepare his estate for what he tells her will be his wedding to a new wife. Every step of the way, Griselda submits completely and silently.

In the end, all is joyfully revealed: the young woman he’s brought to be his second wife is (surprise!) actually their daughter, who was not murdered but is alive and well after being sent away to be expensively educated abroad. Their son is there, too. The divorce papers were fake, and she can move back in as his wife immediately, having passed her test with flying colors. They all rejoice in feasting together, a happy family. At the end the narrator delivers the moral: if you are going to marry, you should do so only if you find someone as patient as Griselda.

Bocaccio gives us some insight into Griselda’s mind—she does love her husband unconditionally, or at least in the way that she promised to, never once showing anything but “constancy.” When he tells her of his new wife, she is “secretly filled with despair. But she prepared herself to endure this final blow as stoically as she had borne Fortune’s earlier assaults.” Chaucer’s clerk, who tells this tale, judges that “then her heart was filled with woe” but that, “ever steadfast,” she endures “the adversity of Fortune.” In this ordeal, she isn’t appealing to God to grant her the Christian virtue of patience with a husband to whom she is sacramentally bound, so much as stoically bearing what she perceives as the wanton machinations of Fortuna, the ancient goddess of fate. One can only guess at whether the bride on the bone saddle would’ve expected a marriage like that.