In James Brundage's compendious Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, there are only two references to eunuchs, although there are considerably more references to the primary way that one becomes a eunuch, that is, castration. In ad 558 Justinian prohibited ‘castration and the making of eunuchs, an oriental practice that had begun to fall into disfavor in the Empire’. At the opposite end of Christendom and of the medieval period, Brundage reports that on March 9, 1350, an Augsburg judge ruled against nullification of a marriage because the husband, a eunuch (the word used in the text is spado), had been able to consummate the marriage. Perhaps it is not surprising that in western Christendom, the focus of Brundage's study, the texts should say so little about the condition of being a eunuch, for eunuchs, almost by definition, occupy an ambiguous position with regard to ‘law, sex, and society’, the three terms of Brundage's title. In so far as the law itself was concerned, this ambiguity is clear considering that, despite Justinian's prohibition, castration was at various times and places the punishment for males who had sex with males; for males who had sex with non-Christian women (the woman's offense was to have her nose cut off); or for rape. Regarding sex, the eunuch's ambiguity might seem a given.