The good, the bad, and the textual: approaches to the study of the body and sexuality, 1500–1750

The sex advice manual, Aristotle’s Masterpiece, advised readers: ‘When the Husband commeth into his Wives Chamber, he must entertain her with all kind of dalliance, wanton behaviour, and allurements to Venery, but if he perceive her to be slow and more cold, he must cherish, embrace, and tickle her … intermixing more wanton Kisses with wanton Words and Speeches, handling her Secret Parts and Dugs, that she may take fire and be inflamed to Venery.’1 Aristotle’s Masterpiece was not by Aristotle, but it was something of a masterpiece. It was, with adaptations for the changing times, a best seller until well into the nineteenth century.2 Aimed at a popular audience, Aristotle’s Masterpiece exemplifies several of the salient developments in the shifting understandings of the study of the body and sexuality that began in the Renaissance, and also provides a good focus for understanding the ways in which the study of the history of sex and the body have developed in the past 30 years of scholarship. Aristotle’s Masterpiece exemplifies the complicated and contested developments in thinking about sex and sexuality, challenging the assumption that sex before the ‘Enlightenment’ period of the seventeenth/eighteenth century was ‘playful’, ‘unihibited’, or unmedicalized. First, Aristotle’s Masterpiece shows the effects of the rise of secular thought about the body and sexuality that took place during the period referred to as the Renaissance (including developments such as the spread of print culture and the recovery of Antiquity) in undermining earlier presumptions about corporeal knowledge. Second, it highlights the contradictory impulses such shifts created in which the expanding language about sexuality encountered attempts to define, control, and regulate ‘proper’ sexuality. Finally, in its reliance on sensory experience and a fundamental trust in the reliability of the body to behave as nature intended, Aristotle’s Masterpiece echoes the new corporeal and sexual regime of the European Enlightenment. Despite all that it can reveal about the culture of its day, a text like Aristotle’s Masterpiece

has only recently come to the attention of scholars, as a result of methodological and conceptual changes in approaches to history. The study of sex and the body has emerged and transformed since the 1970s. The field has been dominated in particular by Michel Foucault’s work, despite his relatively low interest in early modernity. However, as we shall see, Foucault established a set of conceptual and methodological frameworks that have proved extremely stimulating, while painting a particular image of the medieval and early

modern worlds which historians have spent considerable energy revising, modifying and challenging. Since the 1970s, following the work of Foucault and others, a whole new range of sources for thinking about the medieval and early modern periods have come to dominate studies along with new ways of interrogating more familiar sources. In the 1970s, the shift away from high politics and toward the history of everyday life and ordinary people prompted inquiries into the history of the family, the history of women, and to a degree, the history of sexuality. After all, families continue because of sex, and women, historians found, were largely defined in terms of their sexual status as virgins, wives, widows, nuns, or prostitutes, just to name the more common iterations.3 Second, historians of women, coming out of the social tradition, filled in empirical data about women’s lives and formulated narratives about sexually inflected practices. This chapter explores the compelling intellectual framework for studying sex and the

body provided by Foucault’s History of Sexuality (1978). It examines the body of critical historical works, which, while indebted to Foucault’s conceptual challenges, reworked his idea that the Renaissance was a period when sexuality, as an attribute of the person, was absent and the mechanisms for controlling behaviour were based on acts and not on identities, in a way which meant that behaviour itself could be viewed as less inhibited and more playful. In recent work, the Renaissance is revealed as a period of intense debate about sexual matters that drew upon, for example, ancient texts and medical models of male and female nature. In particular, the idea that such understandings of sex enabled a form of ‘sexual freedom’ has been revised and the important ways in which sexuality was policed have been stressed. A focus on Aristotle’s Masterpiece provides an exceptionally clear route through these themes, highlighting the ways in which the shifting understandings of sex and the body in the period 1500-1750 did not follow Foucault’s model. Rather, the text illustrates the ways in which the ‘Renaissance’ ushered in a period of new contestations around sex and the body, new forms of control, and new anxieties: configurations of sex which were both a form of science and an art at the same time. Foucault argued that discourse, made up of both language and silences around lan-

guage, constituted a technology of power. In the case of sexuality, discourse was largely organized by and around such institutional structures as the church, the state, the family, and ‘science’.4 In addition to the understanding of power as a matter of discourse, Foucault argued two central premises that continue to motivate historical scholarship and are of particular importance for this chapter. As Harry Cocks explores in greater detail in the companion chapter to this one, Foucault maintained that sexual identity was a product of modernity and prompted by the rise of interest in sexuality as a matter of population politics and ‘morality’. In early modernity, individuals committed sexual ‘acts’ but did not regard their sexual behaviour as constituting their identity. In contrast, a modern person defined himself (for Foucault, the subject in question was almost always male) by reference to his sexual behaviour. Terms like ‘homosexual’ came to have meaning as identity categories as never before. Second, Foucault argued that the distinction between the science and art of sex (scientia sexualis and ars erotica) was crucial for understanding how people obfuscated around sex. The development of scientific language around the biology of reproduction and the medicine of sex led to the articulation of sexual knowledge as ‘fact’. The modern west, he maintained, sought to understand sex as a matter of truth generated through confession. Other cultures (Rome in the past and the ‘East’ broadly construed) understood sexual knowledge in terms of sensual pleasure. Where western subjects

understood sex as constraint, those in the East accepted pleasure without separating ‘good’ sexual acts from ‘bad’ ones. Provocative as these claims were, Foucault asserted them more than proved them.

Lacking empirical precision, Foucault’s work was both the target of historians and an inspiration to them.5 Historical study of sexuality prompted by Foucault has attempted to fill the empirical gaps, challenged aspects of Foucault’s chronology, and inspired inquiry into patterns of meaning with respect to sexuality and sexual behaviour. For example, scholars have highlighted important Renaissance texts which challenged Judaeo-Christian assumptions about sex long before the period Foucault highlighted as significant. The Renaissance is conventionally understood as an intellectual movement that recuperated ancient texts and spread knowledge of Antiquity through the teaching and learning of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts. Less conventionally, scholars have found that many of these texts considered sexual matters.6 In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini unearthed a manuscript of the De rerum natura by Lucretius. For the first time since the sixth century, significant remains devoted to supporting the philosophy of Epicurus became available in the west. Lucretius’ poem was published in 1473, and the surviving letters of Epicurus appeared in print in 1533. Epicurus inspired supporters initially. Bartholomaeus De Sacchi Platina’s De honesta voluptate focused on pleasures of the body with special attention to corralling desire so that it did not cause discomfort by allowing pleasures to control the body.7

Lorenzo Valla wrote De voluptate in defence of Epicurean ideas, and his notion that pleasure rather than virtue was the highest good caused him to be regarded askance by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.8 For Thomas Creech, Epicurean pleasure was a travesty. Of Epicurus, Creech warns: ‘Sometimes his Books declare him a most loose and dissolute Voluptuary’, while Lucretius was devoted to, ‘his share in sensual Pleasures’.9 The Epicurean rejection of notions of the divine and immortality of the soul that could be cast as compatible with Christian ethics meant that the emphasis on corporeal pleasure caused tremendous discomfort. These sorts of discourses did not figure in Foucault’s account. He had little to say about

the Renaissance. He thought the crucial development toward modern sexuality occurred in the seventeenth century with the rise of auricular confession. In his narrative, the practice of describing the self in confession, of understanding sexual acts as expressed in language, produced the internalization of sexual norms. A more relaxed, playful attitude toward sex, he argued, gave way to the modern practice of disciplining the self. Indeed, there are plenty of examples that suggest this process of identification through confession did occur. A transcript of proceedings by the Inquisition in Mexico reveals how confession could work in dramatic terms. Marina de San Miguel came to the attention of the Inquisition in 1598. When asked why she had been arrested, Marina initially offered minor transgressions of church law. The officials remained unimpressed until Marina seemed to fall into a trance and then explained she had a vision of assisting Christ releasing souls from Purgatory. Still, Marina’s story did not satisfy, and she was enjoined to examine her conscience. Left to do so for six weeks, Marina requested an interview. And the dam broke. She had engaged in sexual relations with several men and another beata. She had masturbated and looked at her genitals with a mirror. As for her spiritual trance, that was a fake, she said. She just wanted to maintain her reputation for piety, and both the trance before witnesses and denying her sexual depravity (as she now saw it) were part of her effort to do so. Marina defended herself by arguing that she did not intend to sin, and that her actions were accordingly not sinful. The Inquisition did not agree, and Marina was convicted.10 While

the process of turning Marina’s experiences into ‘sin’ and ‘crime’ through confession illustrates aspects of Foucault’s point about the power of discourse to create identity, it undermines his assertion that sex was more playful and uninhibited. Marina knew to hide her sexual experiences, recognized that revealing them would be dangerous, and discovered that the Inquisition understood her desire to hide as evidence of her knowledge that she was in fact guilty, regardless of her intentions. Marina’s self-protection is not surprising. Contrary to what Foucault implies, discourse

about sex and the body had been prominent in the west since Antiquity. Aristotelian logic and ancient physiology organized ideas about sexuality and the body derived from presumptions about men and women. Aristotle’s philosophy with respect to sex was articulated most fully in De generatione animalium (On the Generation of Animals). Among Aristotle’s assertions was the idea that only men produce seed necessary to reproduce human life. Aristotle reasoned that men were superior, and since nature created everything for a purpose – a telos – men must provide the important parts in procreation. Seed for Aristotle meant the soul and principal characteristics. Women provided the locus for generation (the womb) and the basic matter to enable the foetus to develop. These were inferior aspects in Aristotle’s view, in which all things have four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Material causes are the most basic; formal causes (and the male contribution was the formal cause) were more advanced and therefore more important. The key difference was humoural, Aristotle believed. Every person had a ‘complexion’, which was the balance of their humours. Each humour (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) had a quality (dry, wet, hot, or cold). Based on the four basic elements (earth, water, fire, and air), the humours had qualities that reflected the balance of elements of which they were composed. The balance could be altered by environment, diet, and physical activity, but in general, women were colder and wetter, while men were hotter and dryer. While there were functional differences between male and female bodies, in humoural terms, all bodies were on a spectrum from hot to cold and dry to wet. Aristotelian ideas continued to dominate through the Middle Ages. Despite the concerns

of Christian ascetics, sexuality remained a lively issue and debates about sex and the body peppered the intellectual exchanges of scholastics. As Joan Cadden notes, problems raised by ancient physicians and natural philosophers motivated much scholastic discussion.11

With Constantine the African’s (c. 1020-87) translations of Islamic medical texts that brought the Graeco-Arabic medical corpus into the Latin west, basic truisms about sexuality came into the learned tradition.12 Constantine reiterated the notion elaborated in the Greek medical tradition of the Hippocratic corpus and by the highly influential Roman physician Galen (131-201) that physical pleasure provided humans with a motive for intercourse so that the species would not die out.13 Discussions of the gendering of corporeal pleasure regularly appeared in scholastic texts. Constantine maintained that women derived greater pleasure from intercourse because they were both expelling their own sperm and receiving the male’s.14 William of Conches in the Dragmaticon followed Constantine’s lead. William wondered why women have greater sexual heat even though they are cooler in complexion. He answered that women derive pleasure from both emission and reception of seed.15 Petrus de Abano Pativinus opined that men have more intense pleasure, while women enjoy a more extensive version. Petrus noted that encounters with the penis (virge) give women ‘great delectation’.16 Hildegard of Bingen insisted that men have more focused pleasure, while women have more diffuse experience of it.17 The examples could be multiplied, with interlocutors turning questions of physiology, pleasure,

and desire over and over within a fundamentally Aristotelian and humoural frame.18 The discourse of sexuality and the body, in short, was abundantly present long before modernity. The discoveries and recoveries of the Renaissance, of which the revival of Epicurus was

just one, threatened entrenched beliefs about the body and sexuality built up by scholastic debate. As Julia Haig Gaisser has indicated, the rediscovery of Catullus caused all kinds of trouble with his sexually explicit, often raunchy poems.19 The explicit erotics of the poems attributed to Anacreon prompted one editor to suppress poems he found offensive and to rearrange the collection to downplay others.20 Plato, James Hankins has noted, was bowdlerized to render his ideas about marriage and homosexuality in suitable form.21

Ovid, never lost in the west but often grossly distorted to make him palatable for Christians, appeared in Renaissance commentaries with the sexually titillating bits no longer allegorized into oblivion.22 As more accurate versions of ancient texts emerged, both the volume of voices at odds with Christian beliefs and the development of more sophisticated methods for understanding the ancient context gradually undermined earlier certainties about sexuality and the body. Ideas that conflicted with Christian sexual mores did not immediately destroy the

Aristotelian synthesis or the humoural system. Old debates continued to appear in popular medical literature. The relative roles of male and female in reproduction, for instance, still exercised commentators. Thomas Vicary emphasized mutual contribution: ‘[A]s the Renet and Milke make the Cheese, so both the Sparme of man and woman make the generation of Embreon.’23 Nicholas Culpeper describes not mutuality but competition: ‘The reason why sometimes a Male is conceived, sometimes a Female, is, The strength of the Seed; for if the Mans Seed be strongest, A Male is conceived; if the Womans, a Female: The greater light obscures the lesser by the same rule; and that is the reason weakling men get most Girls, if they get any.’24 Manuals devoted to facilitating procreation through teaching basic physiology, instruction in foreplay, and maintaining sexual health routinely addressed questions of pleasure as well as function. The mix of distinctions between men and women and the propensity to see all human

beings on a humoural spectrum has prompted debate among historians about early modern understandings of the sexed body. Emphasizing the continued dominance of Galenic medicine with its foundation in the humours, Thomas Laqueur has argued that Europeans largely understood male and female bodies as emanations of one sex along a spectrum. The differences between men and women were of degree (hotter vs. colder; dryer vs. moister) rather than of kind. This way of thinking, Laqueur argues, led to the presumption among anatomists that the female body was an inverted version of the male body (Aristotelian teleology again prevails in making the male the standard, which the female fails to attain). Anatomists following Galen described the uterus as an inverted penis, and the ovaries as female testicles that remained inside the body because the female lacked sufficient heat to push them out. The homologies worked intellectually for the most part, Laqueur notes, and problems such as the clitoris (in the homology argument, it was redundant) were simply overlooked.25 While there is much that is compelling about Laqueur’s argument, historians have pointed to several areas in which the presumptive dominance of the one-sex model must be questioned. Laura Gowing argues from extensive archival work that men and women recognized difference experientially.26 Karen Harvey has found that Laqueur’s central period of representational change, the eighteenth century, is actually marked by extensive continuity in the representation of bodies, and the female

body in particular.27 Katharine Park and Robert Nye dissent on the grounds that multiple, often competing notions of human physiology coexisted.28 The critics are not wrong, but aspects of Laqueur’s thesis remain persuasive. The difficulty of re-imagining the female body as anatomically specific, for instance, was stubbornly persistent, with gendered assumptions about bodies and roles seemingly limiting new approaches to understanding human anatomy. But the infusion of ‘new’ texts and the development of textual practices that yielded

more reliable information about Antiquity did facilitate questioning of paradigms about the body and sexuality. Take, for instance, the ‘rediscovery’ of the clitoris. Several anatomists ‘found’ the clitoris: Charles Estienne identified it in 1545; Gabriele Falloppia claimed he had spotted it first in a treatise written in 1550 and published in 1561; Realdo Colombo argued for priority, publishing his ‘discovery’ in 1559. Katharine Park recounts these assertions as part of her argument that the clitoris, understood as functionally duplicative of the penis, prompted discussion of women as necessarily hermaphroditic. This both undermined the presumptive gender hierarchy of traditional anatomy and encouraged fantasies about female sexuality.29 Detailed anatomical study in general moved beyond the wisdom of the ancients, with attention to sexual anatomy eventually countering ancient axioms, including the belief that the womb could move about inside a woman and strangle her if her humours were unbalanced.30 More texts, better texts, and an understanding of Antiquity as rooted in its specific time and place encouraged Renaissance inquiries to move beyond the truisms about the body and sexuality that had long prevailed. The infusion of new ideas and new understandings of old ideas about sexuality and the

body played into two related developments: the rise of print culture and the elaboration of secular discourse about corporeal matters. As Mary Fissell has found, popular medical tracts, pamphlets, and books provided information in both words and pictures for the less literate.31 Images of male and female reproductive parts, examples of foetal mishaps, and descriptions of healthy vs. diseased bodies became available even for those for whom reading was not an option. For the growing number of the literate, Latinate culture gradually gave way to vernacular literatures, of which Aristotle’s Masterpiece was but one example. Books of all sorts advised people on sexual matters. Jacques Guillemeau told readers that a man might recognize if his wife had conceived, ‘If he [the husband] finde an extraordinarie contentment in the companie of his Wife; and if he feele at the same time a kind of sucking or drawing at the end of his yard.’32 Advice on how to assure that the woman will carry to term, ways to control unusual appetites during pregnancy, and warnings about when it is acceptable to have intercourse before the child is born. In his advice, Giovanni Marinello explained about optimal positions for achieving pregnancy, the importance of moderation in coitus, and how to select a partner based on physiological compatibility.33 Eucharius Roesslin advised copiously on sexual dysfunction, with explanations made more vivid by the addition of images derived from the anatomical studies of Vesalius.34 Michele Savonarola emphasized that venereal relations are ‘escrementi utili’ [exceedingly useful], and not just to keep the human race afloat. Coitus can help with conditions such as melancholy, retention of urine for men, and retention of menses for women. Sex must be moderate, but its therapeutic value was not to be denied.35

Savonarola, and indeed all the popular medical texts, made a point of asserting that procreative sex was congruent with Christian teaching, but the texts make scant reference to God amidst elaborate discussions of sexual techniques and the physiology of male and female sex organs.