Janega is a fantastic and hilarious medievalists whose blog, "Going Medieval" is essential reading, offering a well-informed and profane counterpoints to the ideologically driven, just-so stories that get rolled out to explain why progressive ideas are doomed. Some of my favorite installments:

* I assure you, medieval people bathed

going-medieval.com/2019/08/02/…

* On courtly love and pick up artists

going-medieval.com/2019/10/28/…

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I assure you, medieval people bathed.

I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…

^{Going Medieval}

* If you’re going to talk about the Dark Ages, you had better be right

going-medieval.com/2020/07/02/…

* On putting sex work on the map

going-medieval.com/2021/06/11/…

* On women, pleasure, and semen

going-medieval.com/2022/03/24/…

* On conflating drag, (and femininity), with sexuality

going-medieval.com/2022/06/10/…

* On medieval kink (part one)

going-medieval.com/2022/06/24/…

* On medieval kink (part two)

going-medieval.com/2022/07/08/…

* A medieval abortion reading list

going-medieval.com/2022/06/29/…

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If you’re going to talk about the Dark Ages, you had better be right.

Because I am absolutely responsible for all of my own problems, my lovely readers often send me bad medieval takes in order to watch me get mad. This is effective. Today, one of my fantastic Patreo…

^{Going Medieval}

*Once and Future Sex* is one of those very excellent blogger books that takes all the ideas that the author has developed through short pieces reacting to current events, takes all the reactions *to* those pieces, including the squeals of outrage from less-informed people desperately invested in a certain vision of medieval life, and synthesizes them into a single consistent narrative.

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Books like these are the comedy specials of blogging: the author has road-tested their material, tried it in front of audiences up and down the land, polished it to a high shine, and now brings it all together in a triumphant, confident bravura performance.

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Janega's overarching point is that gender and sex are *contingent*. Our obvious, "biologically determined" ideas about sex - say,, that men are sexual aggressors and women are generally uninterested in sex - are relatively modern, and millions of people once believe the exact opposite, with equal confidence.

This extends in all directions: whether women did hard physical labor, whether beauty ideals are eternal, whether women went to war, or ruled, or engaged in scholarship.

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When someone claims that the "hip to waist ratio" for women has an evolutionary determined ideal that is found everywhere, Janega's work lets us counter with the fact that for hundreds of years, the ideal female body was one with small breasts and a prominent pot-belly.

Janega's point is by no means that the medieval era was a golden age of gender equality - rather, it's that the problems of gender were *very different* from our own.

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If, as a society, we are capable of believing that women are sex-crazed monsters, *and* capable of believing that women are frigid and sex-averse, then perhaps we could find some happy medium, like "Some women like sex a lot. Others, not so much. Still others: it depends."

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But while *Once and Future Sex* has a point and a narrative, it is also a bouquet of delightful grace-notes and weird facts from the age - from the belief that horny women tricked their men into having sex with them by putting live fish in their vaginas, then cooking and serving them, to the criminal hijinx of oven-for-hire bakers who stole their customers dough by means of a hole in the table.

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The past is a different country. Our understanding of the past is always changing - and that's not new, either (after all, many of the ideals of the medieval era's ruling class were based on revisionist beliefs about life in ancient Greece and Rome). Janega is a thoroughly modern medievalist, able to inform and contextualize while entertaining and amazing.

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