Report BastaBugie editorial team

(AUTOMATIC READING)
The use of so-called chastity belts, flexible metal bands capable of covering the genitals and then closed with padlocks, it dates back to the times of the Crusades, when the knights leaving for the Holy Sepulcher wanted to ensure the fidelity of their wives during their absence. The belt is nothing more than a historical fake. Just looking at them is enough to understand how they can be a source of wounds and infections and have locks that are relatively easy to open.
As Focus notes (August 2014) first of all, there is a hygiene problem: even if the classic belt has small openings for the fulfillment of physiological needs, wounds, infections and consequently the death of the wearer would have occurred very quickly.
Furthermore, it is plausible that before leaving the knights mated with their wives, perhaps with the hope of finding a child upon their return. It is evident that the presence of an iron belt would have prevented childbirth. Not to mention the simplest objection: any medieval lock could be opened by a blacksmith in seconds.
THEOLOGICAL PURITY
Beyond these logical inconsistencies, there is the fact that there are no authentic belts dating back to the Middle Ages. The idea of ​​sexual abstinence is certainly very ancient, as is the Latin term cingulum castitatis (translatable precisely as chastity belt) compare, starting from the 6th century, in some texts by Pope Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, up to Giovanni Boccaccio. But in all these cases it is intended as a symbol of theological purity, certainly not as an object of erotic dissuasion.
The concept of a chastity pact between two lovers appeared later, in some 12th century poems, like the Lai of Guigemar of Mary of France: upon the departure of the knight Guigemar, his woman asks her lover to tie her shirt around her waist, as a pact of loyalty until the return. But it is a symbolic pact and, above all, wanted by the woman. So in these sources the intent was invariably comic or allegorical, that is, they did not refer to something that physically existed.
To find the first visual mention of an object that vaguely resembles a chastity belt we have to wait until 1405 and a manuscript, il Bellifortis di Konrad Kyeser, dedicated to the military technology of the time. The designed device, almost like armor, it is presented as a tool imposed on Florentine women by jealous husbands, but Kyeser's comments are ironic and the drawing was probably made based on hearsay and not by copying an authentic object. Certainly there was nothing of the kind in the Florence of the time.
Some engravings from the 16th century, including one attributed to Sebald Beham, instead they depict a woman wearing a “chastity belt”, closed by a padlock, standing between two men while receiving and handing over money: the interpretation that has been given is that it is a prostitute between the client and the pimp, the latter willing to open the lock only upon payment of the service. Even if it had been real and not just symbolic, so, the belt represented here only a professional tool.
FAKE OF THE 19TH CENTURY
end which, the medieval myth. The first chastity belts “vere”, real, they are the ones that ended up in museums around 1840. At the Cluny Museum of Medieval Art in Paris, for example, until recently you could admire a belt that was said to have belonged to the queen of France Catherine de’ Medici (1519-1589). It was only in 1990 that those in charge of the Museum realized that it was a fake dating back to the 19th century.
Also another similar specimen, exhibited at the British Museum in London and long indicated as dating back to the 16th century, it was recently dated to the mid-19th century and removed from exhibitions. Almost all the museums that preserved them attributed them to the medieval era, have now corrected their catalogs to indicate recent invoice or fraudulent origin.
What were these real belts for?? At the end of the 19th century, writes La Stampa (February 2017) masturbation was seen as a sin and chastity belts became reality and a remedy. There are patents from the early 1900s that explain the usefulness of these tools to prevent young people from masturbating.
These belts “modern”, in which leather replaced metal, they were also used to protect women from sexual violence in a period in which they began to appear in worlds hitherto considered only male such as factories or for erotic games with sadomasochistic practices. […]