Philip M Soergel (ed.), Sexuality and culture in medieval and renaissance Europe. Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd series, vol. II, New York, AMS Press, 2005, pp xv, 287, $89.50 (hardback: ISSN 0081-8244, ISBN 0-404-64552-6).

Abstract

In this thoughtfully edited volume, Philip Soergel brings together an international group of nine scholars, all historians of pre-modern society and culture. Their essays range from micro-studies of rural and urban women to broad statements about the nature and transmission of the Hippocratic corpus. All provide a fresh perspective on an often misunderstood topic: the history of human sexuality. Here, the topic is taken seriously and addressed with confidence and skill. Sexuality and culture opens with an engaging survey of medieval women's medicine. Monica Green reviews and discusses recent scholarship on technologies of the body, sexual difference, and the history of childbirth. There are also references to edited texts and on-line databases, the latter allowing for what Green aptly calls the democratization of knowledge. Her concern to elucidate theories of human sexuality is shared by Helen King in an essay that explains how ancient Greek texts re-entered the medical mainstream in the sixteenth century. This Hippocratic revival enhanced the perception that the female body required discrete and distinctive therapies. No longer was it commonplace to infer that women, with genitalia supposedly shrunk inward, were hardly different from men. The scientific thinking of the sixteenth century was more expansive and measured than this. Of course, people in earlier centuries were no less interested in acquiring knowledge and testing traditional norms. This is evident in three essays on the medieval world. In the first, ‘A medieval territory for touch’, Fernando Salmon reviews Latin commentaries on the five senses. He argues that touch represented a complex of sensations, surrounding the body like a net, and gradually becoming the locus of self and experience. What ultimately mattered were not simply the sexual overtones associated with touch, but the role it had in forming personal identity. Medieval constructions of personality reflected an interest in natural philosophy and admittedly had a part in Latin physiognomy. This was the art of discerning character and sexual nature by studying genitalia. Rather than dismiss physiognomy as little better than pseudo-science, Joseph Ziegler uses the scholastic commentaries it generated to document alternative ways of perceiving the body. More detailed as to practice is Carol Lansing's essay reconstructing a civic inquiry into female sodomy in 1295. Her story of Guercia of Bologna is so artfully told that it deepens our understanding of an aspect of sexuality seldom glimpsed in medieval texts. Equally informative are four essays that address the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Using Christian tradition as her starting point, Merry Weisner-Hanks places Martin Luther centre stage, deftly highlighting his ideas about the male libido and how they figured in Reformation theology and social thought. Joel Harrington discusses German society as well. Exploring the plight of an unwed mother in Nuremberg, he helps us to see that a story such as hers is at the very heart of social history. Mindful of a mother's life, Charlene Villasenor Black argues on behalf of utilizing images of the Madonna and Child to measure changes in breastfeeding and maternity in early modern Spain. Hers is an eloquent argument, illustrated by reproductions of Spanish painting and altar art. Retha Warnicke's meditation on marriage and female rulers in Britain concludes this volume, leaving no doubt that sexual nature influenced destiny in the arena of politics and power. The essays collected here obviously differ in method and approach. Yet all are distinguished by rigorous scholarship and historical insight. To read them together is to see that the story of human sexuality was as complex and compelling in medieval and renaissance Europe as it is today.