1.
A deathless device, with no documentary evidence, only known by myth. The fable will have it that they served to ensure the
fidelity of wives during long absences of husbands, particularly of the wives of knights or crusaders. Some women also used this
for protection against rape while their husbands were away from them. Today the belt is used mainly for sexual pleasure. If you
were to check out any BDSM site, you'd more than likely see this device being used.

2.
A deathless popular myth, but one echoed also in academic publications, mystifies these devices. The fable will have it that
they served to ensure the fidelity of wives during long absences of husbands, and particularly –no one knows why, considering
that we have no documentary evidence to support such a notion– that the wives of knights-crusaders about to
depart for the Holy Land. Perhaps sometimes, but never by way of normal usage, “fidelity"” was thus “ensured” for brief periods,
for a few hours or a couple of days –never for any greater length of time. A woman thus locked up would soon fall prey to death
from the sepsis caused by irremovable toxic accumulations, not to speak of the abrasions and lacerations caused by the rubbing
of the iron, nor of the possibility of an incipient pregnancy.
The prevalent use of the belt was in reality a very different one: viz., that of forming a barrier against rape, a frail barrier and yet
a sufficient one under certain conditions: in times of the quartering of soldiers in town, during overnight stays in inns, on
journeys generally. We know from many testimonies that women locked themselves into the belt on their own initiative, a fact
that some old Sicilian and Spanish women alive today will still remember.