Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is presented less as a neutral historical period than as the ideological past that Mario believes must be overcome. In his account, medieval religion and social authority transformed desire into guilt, wrapped sexuality in prohibitions, and preserved a hierarchy in which women were subordinated to domestic and productive labor. Against this inheritance, Mario defines eroticism as a rational, educational, life-affirming discipline rather than as decadence or mere indulgence.

The Medieval Inheritance

Mario rejects the conventional claim that the Middle Ages invented romantic love. He argues instead that the period taught people to hate love by surrounding desire with religious myths and moral prohibitions. His image of this inheritance is deliberately material: the “belts of chastity” imposed by feudal lords around the waists of their wives and female animals have become rusted remnants falling from the battlements where they originated. Their preservation in museums does not redeem them; it merely records the eventual collapse of a coercive morality.

His criticism is also explicitly gendered. The biblical language he invokes places woman between the farm and the livestock, behind even the principal position of labor, while the wife is assigned the brick and the hut and the servant is valued only slightly above a draft animal. The medieval order therefore appears as a system that joins sexual regulation to social degradation: control over desire is inseparable from control over women’s bodies and status.

Morality, Language, and Authority

Mario treats medieval sexual morality as historically constructed rather than divinely self-evident. He illustrates the instability of moral categories through the Latin word pulla, whose descendants in French produced both pucelle, meaning a maiden, and poule, a derogatory term for a sexually available woman. The linguistic coincidence becomes, in his argument, evidence that the opposition between virtue and vice has been arbitrarily organized. What one age condemns, another could honor; what one institution calls purity may be only a temporary arrangement of power.

The distinction Mario draws is not between morality and immorality but between false morality and a morality that survives historical scrutiny. He claims that the clergy’s “poisoned gift” of moral teaching sought to deprive human beings of the desire for pleasure, yet the passage of time has reduced its instruments of control to museum objects and historical debris. The Middle Ages thus supplies the example through which he separates inherited authority from a morality founded on reason, trust, and love of life.

Contrast with Mario’s Erotic Program

Mario’s broader theory presents eroticism as a canon, code, ceremony, art, school, and science. It is not a collection of social recipes but a conception of human destiny whose laws rest on reason rather than credulity, confidence rather than fear, and vitality rather than a cult of death. In that framework, the medieval period represents the opposite pole: sexuality disciplined through fear, myth, prohibition, and ascetic ideals.

The contrast extends to Mario’s account of art and human development. He imagines modern eroticism as an art made from living bodies and minds, an attempt to reshape human beings rather than merely produce objects from stone, bronze, or sound. The Middle Ages belongs to the older order of inherited forms and restraints, whereas erotic practice becomes a means of freeing the human spirit from the supposed blindness of matter and from laws that reduce people to biological mechanisms.

Historical Obstacle and Projected Future

Mario does not propose simply to replace medieval society with a political republic of unrestricted lust. He describes the desired transformation as biological and mental: one future morning, humanity will think differently, and the fears, ignorances, and servitudes of its former race will become unintelligible. In this projected condition, good is what produces pleasure and evil what produces pain, frustration, or limitation. The important change is not the physical act itself but the free spirit in which it is undertaken.

The Middle Ages consequently serves as the historical image of a humanity that has not yet reached this freedom. Mario urges Emmanuelle to help bring the age of reason closer by ensuring that words and gestures do not reinforce the illusion that humanity has already found its destination. His rhetoric turns the medieval past into a warning: a civilization can mistake submission for virtue and fear for moral knowledge.

The Alternative of Learned Desire

The conversation’s account of the Murias provides Mario with a counterexample to medieval inheritance. Their communal educational institution, the Gothul, is described as teaching children of both sexes the art of love from an early age. Their sexual morality is formative rather than prohibitive, and jealousy—not rape or murder, which Mario says do not exist among them—is identified as the gravest crime. By presenting this society as evidence that erotic knowledge can be taught, Mario denies that sexual freedom is an innate grace available only to a chosen people.

Emmanuelle doubts that such a morality could arise through conscious effort, suggesting that the Murias must possess a natural gift comparable to poetic genius. Mario answers that poetry, harmony, and beauty are made by human beings rather than simply found in nature. His conclusion, “Learning is learning to enjoy,” reverses the medieval model of instruction through renunciation and fear. The Middle Ages therefore remains important not because it determines the novel’s present, but because Mario uses it as the defeated model against which an educated, rational, and pleasure-oriented humanity can be imagined.