Chastity Belt - Historical Usage

Historical Usage

According to one fictional account, Semiramis, a mythical Assyrian queen, was afraid that the women of the household would seduce her son, so she forced them to wear locked chastity belts.

Gregory the Great, Alcuin of York, Bernard of Clairvaux and Nicholas Gorranus all made passing references to 'chastity belts' within their exhortatory and public discourses, but meant this in a figurative or metaphorical sense within their historical context.

The first detailed actual mention of what could be interpreted as "chastity belts" in the West is in Konrad Kyeser von Eichstätt's Bellifortis (1405), which describes the military technology of the era. The book includes a drawing that is accompanied by the Latin text: "Est florentinarum hoc bracile dominarum ferreum et durum ab antea sic reseratum." ("These are hard iron breeches of Florentine women which are closed at the front.") The belt in this drawing is described by Dingwall as "both clumsy and heavy", having "little in common with the later models which served the same use". The Bellifortis account is not supported by any additional concrete evidence or corroborating documents. Polidoro argues that Keyser's references are meant to be humorous or ironic, and that Dingwall's accounts of the use of chastity belts by a few rich men in the 16th and 17th centuries to ensure the faithfulness of their often much younger wives should be treated critically, due to the absence of actual artefacts of this nature from the historical period in question, and his lack of access to more detailed contemporary historical records.

In 1889, a leather-and-iron belt was found by Anton Pachinger—a German collector of antiquities—in Linz, Austria in a grave on a skeleton of a young woman. The woman was reportedly buried sometime in the 16th century. Pachinger, however, could not find any record of the woman's burial in the town archives. The belt itself, along with most of the rest of Pachinger's collection, has been lost.

Two belts have been exhibited at the Musée de Cluny in Paris. The first, a simple velvet-covered hoop and plate of iron, was supposedly worn by Catherine de' Medici. The other—said to have been worn by Anna of Austria—is a hinged pair of plates held about the waist by metal straps, featuring intricately etched figures of Adam and Eve. There are other such belts at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg and the British Museum in London. Most have been removed from display to avoid any further embarrassment because the authenticity of these belts as medieval devices has since been called into question. Many contemporary historians accept that these alleged "artifacts" date from the nineteenth century, and are thus inauthentic.

From the eighteenth century and until the thirties, masturbation was widely regarded as harmful in Western medicine. Numerous mentions can be found in medical journals of the time of the use of chastity belt-like devices to prevent masturbation in children and adolescents. Many designs for anti-masturbation devices were filed in the US Patent Office until the early 1930s, when masturbation was deemed not to be the cause of mental health problems.

Furthermore, some nineteenth century working women may have used them for protective reasons, as a "rape shield" to obstruct sexual assault from predatory bosses or male work colleagues. They were not worn for a long time uninterruptedly, however, since sanitary and hygiene reasons prevented this before the modern invention of stainless-steel belts.