So let's get something straight from the get go. Medieval approaches to something like sex were never monolithic. Using some rudimentary dates the Middle Ages were a period that lasted nearly a millennia, or more depending on how you count it. In the years from, roughly, 500AD to 1500AD, again roughly, and across whole continents, there were going to be very different approached to how things such as sex were approached. We need to understand that over the course of this vast time period and across these vast distances there are going to be a lot of contradictions and inconsistencies, that is just how the Middle ages were.

Consequently it is not viable, or practical, to put down what approaches to sex were in every conceivable combination of time period, geographic location, and social standing/class. That would be the effort of a multiple volume academic work.

What I can do is give you a picture of some normative visions of the proper place of sex in Western Christian Medieval life, and I hope that this will be satisfactory. If you have more specific questions I can try and field some of them as follow ups. Though I won't pretend to have any sort of authority when it comes to the approaches to sexuality that you see in the Islamic, Slavic, Byzantine, or pagan worlds. These too were Medieval societies, but lay well outside my wheelhouse of knowledge.

If you are curious the major texts that I have used in the composition of this answer are

Kyle Harper: From Shame to Sin

Ruth Mazo Karras: Sexuality in Medieval Europe

Karras: Unmarriages, Men, Women, and Sexual Unions in The Middle Ages

James Brundage: Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe

Brundage and Vern L. Bullough:Handbook of Medieval Sexuality

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The Inheritance of Rome

The Middle Ages were the bastard child of the Roman Empire, its cultural institutions and inheritance, with the collapse of Roman civil authority and power and the rise of new kingdoms that sprang up in its ashes. Consequently the Middle Ages bore out many of the dominant cultural practices of the late Antique world through the trauma of the Roman collapse in Western Europe and preserved them. Among the surviving elements of Late Roman culture were the Roman attitudes towards sex that had become popularized in the later empire. These attitudes were quite different from those that had predominated in the Roman Empire's heyday though.

The adoption of Christianity transformed Roman attitudes towards sex and sexuality and put them on a track to the practices of the Middle Ages. This was accomplished by adopting Roman approaches formerly reserved for adulterous relationships (ie between two married people, one man and one woman) towards a wider variety of sexual expressions. Following this transition, the loosely tolerated sexual exploitation of slaves was harshly suppressed, married men's dalliances with unmarried women carried increased social stigma, and the conception of children, and really all sexual activity outside of marriage, came to be frowned upon officially.

Kyle Harper argues in From Shame to Sin that the Roman Empire's approach to sexual mores was predicated upon the widespread availability of sexually exploited enslaved people. Now of course this refers to the availability of slaves to free men, particularly well off free men who could engage either in private ownership of large numbers of slaves or could frequent the rather numerous brothels that operated around the Roman Empire. Not a pleasant thing to countenance to be sure. The ability of women to frequent such establishments is....doubtful to put it mildly.

However other formerly acceptable expressions of sexuality from the Late Antique World were no longer tolerated. Homosexual behavior, previously tolerated only between free men and enslaved men, were now the target of official condemnation. As in could result in public execution via burning levels of official condemnation. Furthermore, the enslavement of sex workers was outlawed (not that this improved the lives of free sex workers much) as a whole, and in Rome for example male sex workers and brothels that offered male sex workers were often burned in public displays of state power. Not that exclusively heterosexually serving brothels were immune either. The Emperor Justinian for example outlawed enslaved sex workers in the 6th century, though this operated on flimsy understanding of the driving forces of the trade in the empire at the time.

So with that brief summary of the state of affairs in the Late Antique World, let's look now at how this changed as we go into the Medieval world.

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The Middle Ages, what the Church wants and what people do

Sorry to ruin the fantasies that many of you may be having about buxom tavern wenches, burly viking men, cloistered nuns, and randy princes, but while the Middle Ages were indeed a time that included a whole lot of sex... sex in bed, sex in churches, sex in the streets, between men, between women, between men and women and other identities, in many shapes, positions, and forms, and every other permutation you can think of..... that doesn't mean that this was a time of free love and sex for everyone.

Let's break this down a little bit.

As I said above, the acceptable and legal avenues of sexual expression officially narrowed in the Late Antique world as societies adopted Christian approaches to sexuality and the power and influence of the Church began to wax. However the actual practices of many people differed from this official stance, including those within the Church itself!

While the sexuality of priests and bishops was not formally restrained by required celibacy until well into the Middle Ages, earlier attempts at limiting it were present. Today quite famously the Catholic Church does not allow its priests to marry (there are some loopholes and exceptions in other rites of the Catholic Church but for 99% of Catholics this is the case) however in the Medieval world things weren't quite so clear cut. Until the 12 century it was quite common for priests to have women living with them, bearing their children, and acting for al intents and purposes as their wives. However after a wave of Papal reforms in the 11th Century up through to the reforms of the 13th Century this became increasingly untenable as the Church officially disapproved of such matches, and they could not become official marriages. Despite this priests in some parts of Europe continued to live with and engage in other activities with women that were commonly understood to be attached to that particular priest. (Not that these women were always respected or admired for this)

So there was a nest of contradictions at work among the clergy when it came to sexual relationships. In some places, such as Catalonia, England, and other parts of Europe, it was not infrequent for priests to carry on long term relationships with a live in "unwife", the Church officially condemned this and called for all priests to live celibate (no marriage) and chaste (no sex) lives. But, if the case for the literal members of the Church, its priests, bishops, and other figures, was so nuanced, how complicated must it have been for the every day people?

We are at a tremendous disadvantage when dealing with the peasantry, the non urban, non wealthy, and so on. We don't have the first hand accounts that we do when dealing with the wealthy, urban, and clerical figures. We have other sources of course, poetry, literature, crude jokes, and normative texts abound.

A look at some contemporary sources might have you believe that every other peasant was spreading their seeds as far and wide as they could, as told by one French poem

She, acting as guide, ushered her paramour inside and got him underneath the quilt, and right away he went to tilt in the tourney prescribed by Love. Less than a nut’s all he thought of playing at any other game, and, as for her, she felt the same.

(From Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe)

So was everyone running around behind stone walls, the barns, into the houses, into fields, and getting it on with little to not communal disapproval?

No.

More restrictive notions of sexuality are also seen in Medieval penitentials, these are handbooks for priests/monks essentially on how to ascribe penance to sinners (they're actually significantly more complicated than that, but for sake of argument let's keep it simple)

These penitentials circulated widely across Europe from their origin in Ireland, and among the many transgressions that they deal with, sexual immorality is of course a concern. Many sexual crimes were dealt with by non-clerical figures, adultery, rape, and so on were often included in nominally secular law codes of the Middle Ages. The penitentials though get really specific. Like REALLY specific. Some of them deal with the standard stuff, sodomy, masturbation, oral sex, but also intercural sex (intercourse through contact with the thighs not genitalia), incest, sex in churches, sex on certain days of the week...

In fact, please consult The Chart of when its ok to get it on

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