Sex and sexuality, 1640-1490 literary, medical and sociological perspectives

Abstract

SEX & SEXUALITY, 1640-1940
Literary, Medical and Sociological Perspectives

Part 1: Sources from the Bodleian Library- Oxford and theWellcome Institute for the History of Medicine- London

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION BY DR MARIE MULVEY-ROBERTS,
SCHOOL OF LITERARY STUDIES, UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST OF ENGLAND

"More intimate secrets survive in the archives than we sometimes credit; yet it is safe to predict that we shall remain forever in the dark about the love lives of otherwise well-known public figures...." Peter Gay

Flying in the face of the advice given by the twentieth-century surgeon, D’Arcy Power that the "less said about sex manuals the better", this series sets out to provide the raw material for the dialogue already started by Roy Porter and Lesley Hall in The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650-1950. As their subtitle implies, a body of information and advice on sexuality was constructed from the seventeenth century onwards. Has its offspring been an epistemology of sex or rather an anatomy of the generations of sexual discourses for the modern reader? More pertinently, such writings provide us with important clues as to the sexual mores, practice and beliefs of contemporaries. These medical dissertations, moral tracts, texts on sexual habits, reproduction, masturbation, sexual pathologies, to the popularist self-help manuals and treatises of the specialist sexologists, all serve to disseminate information and advice about sexuality. In many cases, the border line between teaching and titillating is finely delineated.

A text that crosses this frontier is the pseudo-Aristotelian Aristotle’s Master-piece, which was intended as a sexual primer for married people. So popular was this anonymous work, that it went into 200 editions from its first appearance in 1684. Undaunted by wrong or misleading information, Aristotle’s Master-piece persisted in being a compendium of medical misinformation and a sexological anachronism. Such advice included one ill-advised method of avoiding pregnancy by having sex as often as possible except on the dangerous days. An example of this skewed logic is given in the reason why whores do not conceive. The answer is that grass is unlikely to grow on a path that is well trodden.

Fears that the relationship between reproduction and sexual behaviours was being distorted, were central to the anxieties, that fuelled the campaign against masturbation. This was compounded, by the fact, that the history of anti-masturbation tracts has been riddled with misinformation. Onania or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (1710) believed by Peter Wagner to have been written by Balthazar Beckers (or Bekkers) makes a misguided connection between masturbation and venereal disease. Even the title is ill-informed since the Biblical Onan is concerned with coitus interruptus and not masturbation.

Of all the afflictions said to be caused by masturbation, the most drastic must be the claim made in a supplement to Onania that "self-pollution" can cause even nuns to change sex. Dr Tissot also draws attention to the dire consequences of masturbation for both sexes in his A New Guide to Health and Long Life, or Advice to families: being a treatise upon the disorders produced by the dangerous effects of secret and excessive venery among youths of both sexes (1808). M D T de Bienville signals masturbation as a prelude to nymphomania and hysteria and recommends as a deterrent such drastic measures as blood-letting, purging and in extreme cases, a strait-jacket. Bienville’s dissertation on Nymphomania (1775) which he diagnoses as Furor Uterinus or mania of the womb, along with works like William Rowley’s Practical Treatise on ...the Breasts (1772), contribute towards the process of carving up the female body into eroticised and fetishised components, which led to the medicalisation of female sexuality during the nineteenth century.

A figure of female erotic fantasy, who eventually became Lady Hamilton, the wife of Lord Nelson, was the scantily clad eponymous personification of Dr James Graham’s Guardian goddess of health (1782). Described by Roy Porter as a "Vaudeville medical messiah" and "exhibitionist impresario, dramatising himself as a magus, a Prospero" and "Promethean enlightened despot of the body natural", Graham was most notorious for his Temple of Love. Known as the Temple of Health and Hymen, its conjugal altar was a celestial bed through which were passed electrical currents in order to give couples "superior ecstasy" and to increase fertility for those when "powerfully agitated in the delights of love". All of this was for a nightly fee of £50. Among Graham’s tracts reproduced here is Il Convito Amoroso (1782), which contains a description of the "celebrated celestial bed".

Other guides to the erotic sciences include John Henry Meibomius’s A Treatise of the Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs (1718), which draws on the belief that: "there are Persons who are stimulated to Venery by Strokes of Rods, and worked up into a Flame of Lust by Blows, and that the Part, which distinguishes us to be Men, should be raised by the Charm of invigorating Lashes". Edmund Curll, who was the translator, added a Treatise of Hermaphrodites to an English translation in 1718, for which he was prosecuted. He defended himself against accusations of obscenity by insisting "the fault is not in the Subject Matter, but the Inclination of the Reader, that makes these Pieces offensive". Under a different cover with the modified title of The use of Flogging, as provocative to the pleasures of love. With some Remarks on the Office of the Loins and reins, the treatise was reprinted in 1761.

Eighteenth-century treatises that enjoyed large reprinting runs during the following century were concerned primarily with reproduction. Nicholas de Venette’s salacious Tableau de l’amour conjugal, first published in 1696, and translated into English as The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal’d, had by the nineteenth century become the "Bible of the French peasantry". While the Georgians had been preoccupied with the dangers of masturbation, the Victorians were more concerned with the social and moral consequences of prostitution and disease. William Acton’s classic Prostitution considered in its moral, social and sanitary aspects in London and in other large citites (1857) is included, as well as Ryan’s Prostitution in London, with a comparative view of that of Paris and New York (1839); Miller’s Prostitution considered in relation to its cause and cure (1859); Chapman’s Prostitution, governmental experiments in controlling it (1870); Lowndes’ Prostitution and venereal diseases in Liverpool (1886); and Prostitution in Europe (1914) by Abraham Flexner. There are also a number of pamphlets published by the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Society for the Rescue of Young Women and Children. For many of the sexologists of the first half of the twentieth century, the context of sexuality had shifted towards the rhetoric of psycho-analysis and the pragmatics of birth control, which had gained widespread attention through Marie Stopes’ family planning clinics.

As these developments over the centuries reveal, the collections of writings included here are not just a potpourri of sex and sexuality. They are discourses of sexuality and an index to what Michel Foucault terms "sexualities". By opening up a subject that has remained largely inaccessible, this series makes available many writings that have been restricted to specialist libraries and obscure archives. Several of these texts have been subject to taboo, censorship, prejudice and condemnation and have been relegated to the periphery. This series will enhance our understanding of the sexual enlightenment and its aftermath and the way in which individuals have negotiated their sexual practices and beliefs throughout the course of history.

Citation

Sex and sexuality, 1640-1490 literary, medical and sociological perspectives. [Microfilm]

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