KEVIN SIENA, editor. Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe. (Essays and Studies, number 7.) Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. 2005. Pp. 292. $28.00

Abstract

No one disputes that the “great pox” deeply scarred the early modern world. Certainly, few other diseases have been the subject of as much scholarly—and prurient—curiosity. This collection of essays presents “state of the art” thinking on the phenomenon that was the pox. By refusing to break yet another lance in the old battle over the origins of the pox or give in to scurrilous anecdotes about famous sufferers, the contributors accept the scholarly framework so deftly presented by Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and the late Roger French in The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (1997). To say that the bookrests on much good older work voices no criticism of editor Kevin Siena and his fellow authors. Rather such dialogue with previous scholarship, when combined, as here, with new sources and new methodologies, is exactly what academics should strive for. The editor groups ten essays into three divisions, labeled “responses”: scientific and medical, literary and metaphoric, and institutional and policing. In terms of disciplines, however, the volume divides in two: six essays were written by historians or historians of medicine and science, and four by literary scholars. For this reviewer the most successful—and convincing—contributions were the first, although the most provocative and original were the latter. (Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French did not ignore the metaphoric meanings and literary treatments of the pox, but their methodological focus was neither principally literary nor cultural.) The opening essays on scientific and medical responses, while (obviously) based on contemporaries' experience of the “French disease,” reach beyond the pox to address larger historical issues in sophisticated ways. Arrizabalaga's piece in this volume guides us sure-footedly through the confusing debate over causation. While everyone believed in a divine first cause, that conviction in no way prevented medical writers “from concentrating most of their attention on natural causes” (p. 37); in particular, they wondered why the pox first struck the genitals. Yet, while the disease came to be understood as affectingthe genitals, it was notimmediately or inevitably viewed as a result of sexual intercourse. The French disease also “significantly contributed to the spreading of this idea [of contagion]” as the primary, even sole, means of transmitting an infectious disease. David Gentilcore moves from theory to practice. He refutes the widely accepted explanation that because “respectable” medical practitioners avoided treating the pox, “charlatans” became the resort of necessity for its sufferers. Working within the well-established paradigm of medical pluralism, he demonstrates that the poxed consulted whomever they pleased. Darin Hayton's discerning discussion of Joseph Grünpeck situates his treatises on the pox within the context of sixteenth-century careerism. Grünpeck's use of specific explanations, especially astrological ones, was congenial to imperial culture and fit well the political needs of the Emperor Maximilian.