You’ve heard of medieval nobles going off to the Crusades and leaving their wives in chastity belts. After all, they’d be gone for years. Or they’d lock up their daughters, so to speak, to preserve their virtue for an arranged marriage. Everyone knows about them. But things that everyone knows aren’t always necessarily so. Albrecht Classen wrote a book to dispel the myths about chastity belts.
"As a medievalist, one day I thought: I cannot stand this anymore," says Albrecht Classen, a professor in the University of Arizona's German Studies department. He set out to reveal the true history of chastity belts. "It's a concise enough research topic that I could cover everything that was ever written about it," he says, "and in one swoop destroy this myth."
Here is the truth: Chastity belts, made of metal and used to ensure female fidelity, never really existed.
So where did the historical references, the museum displays, the art, and the “common knowledge” we’ve heard come from? From fantasy. After all, we have the same evidence of unicorns. The historical evidence of chastity belts is presented and explained at Atlas Obscura.
(Image credit: Albrecht Classen)
Chastity, not just for women any more. This Chinese wholesaler lists 9,350 male chastity devices, but only has 2,380 female chastity belts.