Sexual Discourses in the Premodern World

Abstract

Sexual Discourses in the Premodern World Laura Gowing (bio) Marilynn Desmond . Ovid's Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. xi + 206 pp.; ill. ISBN 13 978-0-8014-4379-4 (cl); 978-0-8014-7317-3 (pb). Ruth Mazo Karras . Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. New York: Routledge, 2005. viii + 200 pp. ISBN 13 978-0-415-28962-7 (cl); 0-415-28963-4 (pb). Kathleen P. Long . Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006. x + 268 pp. ISBN 0-7546-5609-8 (cl). Katharine Park . Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. New York: Zone Books, 2006. 419 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-890951-67-6 (cl); 1-890951-68-4 (pb). Dror Ze'evi . Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xv + 223 pp.; ill. ISBN 13 978-0-520-24564-8 (cl); 978-0-520-24563-1 (pb). Across times, genders, and places, the erotic seems to be one of the most deeply embedded aspects of identity. The struggles of historians to describe how sex and sexuality differed in the past have been some of the most productive debates in gender history. In their different ways, each of the books discussed here demonstrates how particular is our modern sense of sex, sexuality, and gender, and how powerfully a few texts and images can shape the meaning of sex. Premodern concepts of sex and sexuality, in both the West and the East, were part of a worldview whose details changed minutely and slowly. Prevailing discourses were both radically different from modern ideas, and sufficiently heterodox to leave room for inconsistencies, local customs, and challenges from social, religious, and ethnic minorities. It is one of the great strengths of such works as Ruth Karras's Sexuality in Medieval Europe and Dror Ze'evi's Producing Desire that they convey the overarching discourses of desire, while highlighting the manifold possibilities within them. Ze'evi brings a Foucauldian reading of discourse to the sexual world of the Ottoman Middle East. His story relies on an eclectic set of texts: laws [End Page 146] and legal commentaries, Sufi and orthodox Islamic religious texts, Galenic-influenced medical theories, the scripts of puppet plays, and the literature of dream interpretation. The sexual scripts embedded in these genres both legislate for and debate sex, power, and morality. A cosmology of elements and humors, whose basic ideas shared with those of early modern Europe the common ground of Galenism, reigned well into the nineteeth century. Here the body and the soul share a nature: some are passive, some active, some sexual, and others chaste. Women appeared as imperfect versions of men; sexual difference was humoral. A table charts the ways in which difference was read on the body: women's eyes were languid, half-closed, or twinkling; men had wide mouths, copious beards, and curved noses indicative of strong sexual urges. The detail of such physiognomic descriptions might stem from humoral theory, but it also suggests an understanding of sexual difference which ranges more widely than the much-discussed "one-sex" model; perhaps this was one reason why the Ottoman shift toward a model more like the modern Western one-with sexual difference seen as absolute rather than relative-came slowly. The legal systems that structured public sexual regulation in this world are notoriously complex, and Ze'evi picks his way through them by means of a map of transgressions. If rules were often broken or ignored, their precepts reflected weighty distinctions: between the roles of male / female, free / slave; penetration and nonpenetrative acts; passive and active parts. Male and female sexual transgressions-sometimes at least-could be treated with a surprising equality, though there is little evidence here of how those legal codes played out in practice. Medical, religious, and legal discourses are nicely counterbalanced here by the lewd theatrics of shadow plays, and by the symbols of dream interpretation; here, most of all, debates about the ethics of sexual behavior found their resolution in ambiguity, compromise, and metaphor. In the long term, Ze'evi argues, the...