In The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process, Albrecht Classen has managed to find the topic most likely to inspire a chorus of “Why didn’t I think of that?” among his readers. The fascinating subject brings the reader to the work with high expectations and, in a sense, Classen delivers. His exploration of the myth of the chastity belt is intensely thorough, scrupulously and extensively researched, and often quite penetrating in its analysis of how the modern imagination creates the Middle Ages. In his investigation, he explores the ways that powerful “individual and collective mental filters” (1) often create obstacles to asking vital questions about the past. The popularity of the idea of the chastity belt, he suggests, arises because it is “so intimately connected with sexuality, the gender relationship, and the power structure within the family, satirical authors and artists, political propagandists” (2) that it is held to be a medieval reality. The popularity of the myth then replaced any serious historical or critical investigation of veracity of this device, which Classen finds to be totally fictional, all existing examples being later forgeries.

Classen's task in the book is to address this myth, examine it critically to discover its origins, trace its development, and assess its effect on public constructions of the medieval past; his hope is that the kind of laughter generated around the very subject of the chastity belt will serve to puncture some of the most trenchant myths about the Middle Ages. This is ambitious and intriguing, and the macrostructure of his argument delivers what it says it will. The most basic conclusion—that the chastity belt is, indeed, a myth, and that imagining it as a real apparatus of the medieval period is something like future historians imagining that the skies of the twentieth century were teeming with UFOs—is fully and clearly revealed, and the more complex nexus of similar myths that Classen brings forward (such as the Flat Earth Theory) and the larger conclusions that he draws about how our culture engages the past are intriguing.

What is less intriguing about The Medieval Chastity Belt is some of its own apparatus, which seems to prove its point as heavy-handedly as Classen suggests the mythmakers do. Chapter 1 begins by noting the enormous fascination modern popular audiences have with the Middle Ages and how that produces a Middle Ages almost unrecognizable to scholars, but the discussion soon shifts to the stages of mythmaking that produced this peculiar fantasy. Beginning with Bonneau's Las cadenas et ceintures de chastité (1883), moving on to Dingwall's Girdle of Chastity (1923), he continues to discuss every incident of the chastity belt in every discipline from history, to art, to psychology, in every intervening period. As the examples in the first chapter primarily seem to have been drawn from each preceding text, Classen goes over similar and even identical ground in an exhaustive fashion, reaching the same conclusion. Adding to this somewhat repetitive quality, each photograph seems to be of the same chastity belt, none of them showing the earliest illustration, from Conrad Keyeser's Bellifortis (ca. 1405) that Classen often mentions. This method of argument continues through much of the next chapter, introducing the fields of fashion and sexology to the mix. The impulse to cover all literary and iconographic evidence is exemplary, but the results seem a bit like overkill.

When Classen revisits the literary and historical evidence for this myth, the discussion picks up steam. Examining Marie de France, the Minnesang and the troubadours, and later French, German, and English poetry, he makes a compelling demonstration of the variety of girdles, coffers, and keys that have been misread as chastity belts. The history of the literalizing of a body of images with great symbolic currency is Classen's most profound revelation.

The first concrete mention of chastity belts is in the Bellifortis, although this too proves to be a fabrication, an object that could never be worn on a human body and seems to be part of an involved joke about the promiscuity of Florentine women—not that Keyser's Italian contemporaries or antecedents have anything but the most allegorical references to chastity belts in their works.

Given the extremely detailed nature of the first two chapters, it seems a bit strange that the third leaves the chastity belt to examine the myth of droit du seigneur, another “highly fashionable myth, also closely connected with love, marriage, sexuality, and power in the Middle Ages” (147). Once again, Classen identifies a concept that has become deeply identified with the imagined Middle Ages whose reality cannot live up to the fictions created around it. This myth, however, has at least been debunked in the scholarly sources. At the end of this chapter, he says, “I hope to have accomplished my task to outline the origin and development of the myth formation concerning this infamous girdle and to have disassembled its extremely speculative and mostly faulty elements” (154). Having made it this far, the reader can say in no uncertain terms that Classen has succeeded.

Chapter 4, which briefly revisits the nature of myth in the construction of the Middle Ages and in general, provides some of the most enlightening commentary in the work. Classen's argument, that myth often proves itself impervious to inquiry in its appeal to a public taste for fantasy, charges readers to investigate other myths that inform our construction of the past. So, while some sections seem overly ponderous and repetitive, the frame that surrounds them fulfills more of the great promise that this fascinating subject contains.