domestic chastisement from the high middle ages as found in a church
spanking the wife while the rest of the family gets on with business
My girl is reading a book on the history of sex and punishment, she was hoping for more spanking subjects, but it is actually grim reading.
Motivated by her interest, a quick search found a vanilla blog about church decor.
If you are British you will know that there are hundreds of medieval churches in the country and many of them have ornate wooden carved gates and inside, pews with biblical or sometimes pagan scenes.
Flagellation is a common theme but usually the person punished is male. This is sometimes true even if a marital flogging or spanking is depicted.
Having actually studied this at college. The reason for these scenes is comedic satire. They are often subversive images that depict the exact opposite of what was usual, in other words it was the woman who was spanked.
It hard to think that this inversion was just for fun and some people think they were coded messages commenting on the orthodoxy of religious practice (nothing to do with spanking your wife which was de rigour and not controversial).
However many more were just cautionary illustrations like the one above that depicts a naked woman being switched by a fully clothed woman (a mistress or mother figure). This one is either to be found in Boston (the original town in England) or in Germany as both I gather have such depictions but from the text it wasn’t clear which one was shown.
There is some suggestion that the relative rarity of traditional marital spanking depictions in churches was because it had an ambiguous erotic dimension. While some poo-poo this, dismissing the medieval mind of being too innocent, it is true that engravings in books, which often proved to be the source of some of these carvings, (as in one from the 17th century depicted above) were much more likely to show a woman getting a spanking from her husband. So why weren’t these engravings on public display if one could show nudity as above?
The male-on-female flagellation scenes seem to be more common in Germany and the Netherlands, which might account for it and chimes with the picture above if German sourced. However it might just be that the more salacious images were kept out of sight and were the province of those that could read.
All this has to be put in context of course as many images were just the fancy of a local engraver who often secreted them away where only certain people would look. So the depictions and subject matter would vary from place to place.
This brings us back to the subversive hidden meanings on which we can only ponder.
