The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process

Albrecht Classen's The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process is a scholarly historical study arguing, against a persistent popular belief, that the chastity belt as commonly imagined, an iron device medieval husbands locked onto wives before departing on crusade, has no genuine medieval material or documentary evidence behind it and is instead a later invention, largely from the nineteenth century onward, retroactively projected onto the medieval period. Classen's method is close examination of the actual medieval textual and material record, which he finds silent on the device in the form popular imagination assumes. The book is respected as a corrective to a widespread historical misconception, and its core negative finding, that surviving medieval-dated belts are later fabrications or misdated, is well supported by the documentary gap it identifies.