ABSTRACT
Sexual knowledge is always hard to recapture; in a time of low literacy the challenges can seem almost insuperable. In an era before reliable contraception, sexual knowledge often also meant reproductive knowledge. The earliest historians of this topic worked with the printed books that were available to only a minority.1 More recently a history of popular medicine has turned to cheap print, attempting to reconstruct how ordinary people encountered and read chapbooks, almanacs and recipes.2 A close textual analysis of the vocabulary and concepts used by doctors and patients has revealed a model of the body now almost entirely lost, where fluxes, fluids and obstacles explain the disruptions of reproduction.3 Others have tried to reimagine the social world in which knowledge was passed by word, with a particular attention to the knowledge and experience of women, who were so often understood to be particularly closely identified with bodily mysteries.4
Another useful move has been in the concept of knowledge itself. The modern understanding of reproduction is so recent – the timing of ovulation was only discovered in the early twentieth century, for example – that a history of sexual and reproductive knowledge must recapture a world of different knowledges. Rather than a simple model of transmission from elite to vernacular, historians have begun to consider how information and ideas were appropriated and reworked in a variety of forms: printed words, images, songs, jokes, recipes and folklore.5 Finally, ‘knowledge’ and ‘facts’ are themselves concepts with a history. The late seventeenth century saw a changing understanding of what was meant by ‘fact’ and ‘truth’.6 Ideas about the body stood at the juncture of biblical, natural and experimental knowing; certainty was hard to attain, and sexual knowledge was inescapably part of the dynamics of power. This chapter traces some of those dynamics. It argues that, for many people, sexual knowledge was determined less by scientific discovery than by the power of secrecy, mystery and magic. Rather than a progress towards ‘enlightenment’, we will see a series of overlapping sets of ideas about sex and models of the body, with ancient systems maintaining their hold on popular thought at the same time as new discoveries had an impact in some circles, and a continuous interaction between print and oral culture. Sexual knowledge was a social process, involving power and subordination; but more than facts were at stake.
