: You might want to be careful with some of your own assumptions there. First, the "premarital" thing; many "marriages" of the time were what we'd today call common law relationships. People

@Jennifer354

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You might want to be careful with some of your own assumptions there. First, the "premarital" thing; many "marriages" of the time were what we'd today call common law relationships. People just moved in together, had sex, there was no official marriage ceremony at all. And if your protagonist is male, the idea he had sex with a woman outside marriage? Meh. Prostitution didn't disappear 600 years ago, so someone was using their services.

It was women for whom virginity was considered important. Not men. And in those cases, it was likely more a concern of the upper classes due to inheritance issues, but since those are the people who had the most written about them, they receive a disproportionate share of attention. There's debate about how much it was considered important to the average person.

Given the demonstrated human characteristic that we'll fuck pretty much anyone anytime anywhere, I suspect it was something "proper" people tut-tutted about but most people cared about it less than you'd think.

Homosexuality? Depends on time and place, and that could vary a lot. There's no guarantee that just because someone was from a certain period of time that you would automatically know their opinion. Allan Tulchin published a paper in 2007 arguing that same-sex marriage was present in Medieval France in the institution called "affrèrement" (literally, "enbrotherment").

What might surprise Catherine is people and governments officially accepting things rather than tolerating them so long as things stayed in the closet, as it were. Or it might not.

To be honest, you're safer dealing with culture shock for things other than sex. The concept of multiple religions and church sects peacefully co-habitating and generally staying out of politics, for example.

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