The medieval Catholic Church was the primary institution concerned with sexual transgressions in Europe. That’s why the primary sources of information on sex toy usage from the middle ages are penitential manuals and trial records. Penitential manuals listed what was prohibited. Included on these lists was the use of sex toys which were considered “instruments of diabolical operation,” and female masturbation which was the “most horrible sin.”
Penitential manuals begin addressing the topic of lesbian sex as early as the 7th century and the prohibition of dildos is mentioned in the 8th century in the English penitential of Saint Bede where it says, “If nuns with a nun, using an instrument, seven years’ penance.”
In the 9th century, the Frankish writer Hincmar of Reims expanded on this theme. He tells us that certain women, “do not put flesh to flesh as in the fleshly genital member of one into the body of the other, since nature precludes this, but they do transform the use of that part of their body into an unnatural one: it is said that they use instruments of diabolical operations to excite desire.”
At the end of the 10th and beginning of the 11th century, the Burchard of Worms created a penance manual with 194 sex-related questions. It is possible that this was the product of an overactive imagination, but it is more likely that it was common knowledge that some of these things were going on. One of his questions asks: “Have you done what certain women are wont to do, contriving a certain engine or mechanical device in the form of the male sexual organ, the dimensions being calculated to give you pleasure, and binding it to your own or another woman’s pudenda, and have you thus committed fornication with other evilly disposed women or they, using the same or some other apparatus, with yourself?”