There was a curious line in the obituary of the agreeable Cambridge don, Peter Linehan. It said that the historian gave the nickname “Nuns in the Oven” to The Ladies of Zamora, his celebrated study of scandal in a thirteenth-century nunnery, because “the convent oven was one venue for the illicit trysts”.

There was a curious line in the obituary of the agreeable Cambridge don, Peter Linehan. It said that the historian gave the nickname “Nuns in the Oven” to The Ladies of Zamora, his celebrated study of scandal in a thirteenth-century nunnery, because “the convent oven was one venue for the illicit trysts”.

It is true that few things could be too fantastical for the claims of legal wrangles in high medieval Castile, but the reality was that a deposition to an ecclesiastical court in 1279 declared that at Zamora nuns hid in the oven from the amorous pursuit of friars who, against all law and morality, had invaded their enclosure. Indeed some nuns “suffocated” in their hiding place, though it is not clear if this was literally fatal.

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