We are accustomed to consider sin or crime in binary categories: either you sin or you don’t, either you fornicate or you don’t, either you are a virgin or you are not. However, when we take a closer look at the sexual life of young people in the premodern Polish countryside, those binaries become less obvious. Christian morality perceived fornication, that is, sexual relations between unmarried persons, as a sin. At the same time peasant communities – Christian beyond any doubt – showed a relatively lax attitude towards premarital sexual relationships. They were sinful (to some extent), yet they formed part of the rituals of matchmaking and as such contributed to the community's biological survival. In this chapter I tell the story of a couple of teenagers from a Subcarpathian village who were convicted of incest and sentenced in the mid-eighteenth century. Their relationship, even though extraordinary, will serve to explain the complexities of the moral assessment of premarital sex by peasant communities in Poland and to show how the practical notion of sexual chastity functioned in everyday life.

In service

In 1732 a village in southern Poland called Jazowsko was scandalised by a ‘miserable act and an offense against God’, that is, ‘scelus patratum in consanguinitate tertii gradus existentis’, by a young unmarried couple: Jan Wielowski and Barbara Białozielonczonka, who served together at the household of a certain Józef Surma. The perpetrators were first cousins, so the relationship was incestuous; moreover, since there was an additional suspicion of infanticide, the case was investigated by the local court with particular care and described in detail in the court records. But in spite of the exceptional gravity of the sin, the story of Jan and Barbara was in fact so banal that only under extraordinary circumstances could it be documented.

Jan and Barbara probably knew each other from early childhood since they grew up in the same parish and their mothers were sisters. Of course, the latter fact should have excluded them as potential sexual partners, but in a small village like Jazowsko almost all inhabitants were related more or less closely by blood or marriage, and young couples often had to apply for a dispensation to get married.