9. There’s Pervy, and Then There’s Sexing Corpses Pervy
I-n-c-e-s-t with his sister was not the most perverted thing done by Charles the Great. He reportedly also liked sexing corpses. Various ninth-century texts refer to Charlemagne repeatedly engaging in, but refusing for a long time to confess to, some “unspeakable sin”. He eventually got it off his chest and sought absolution for what some modern scholars think was a predilection for necrophilia.
The necrophilia reports eventually gave rise to legends in which Charlemagne’s partiality to corpses extended from sexually satisfying his lust with random corpses, to sleeping with his wife’s corpse after she died. While there are some scholarly bases for Charlemagne’s necrophilia, the parts about Charlemagne having sex with his dead wife are most likely exaggerations and legends. However, they are indicative of the field day contemporaries had with Charlemagne’s necrophilia, working up the sufficiently shocking reports of that perversion into even bigger myths.
