PATRICIA SIMONS. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History.

Abstract

The title of this book might have been The Sex of Men: A Seminal History, in that the basic premise of this study is to contradict current readings of the cultural construct of masculinity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as being primarily penetrative and generative by reinstating the medical and cultural importance of the scrotum and the emission of semen. The volume is divided into two parts with eight chapters, two of which deal specifically with female reproductive biology as understood in the early modern period. The multiple sources used by the author are particularly laudable in that she looks at the ways male sexual organs and the use thereof are referred to in Renaissance comedy and proverbs, medical treatises and conduct literature, prints, and paintings. Patricia Simons convincingly beats the drum about the importance of male seed and the testicles in early modern culture (as opposed to the penis per se), drawing upon what the author terms the “semiotics of semen” as illustrated by visual metaphors such as coins and purses. Material culture is here brought to bear, especially with regard to archeological finds such as glass dildos or humorous lead badges featuring phallic and vulvar imagery, whose function is thought to be primarily apotropaic. Re-reading of paintings in terms of the metaphors of material culture—such as Titian's Danae being showered with gold coins—does in fact enlarge upon the culturally charged objects that endow many Renaissance paintings with erotic content, although more pedestrian readings, such as the (literal) gold with which contemporary patrons showered courtesans, may have been more immediately accessible to a sixteenth-century public.