Authors: John Naish
Put What Where? (6 page)
But the most notorious of all the Renaissance love manuals did not rely on pseudo-science – it invented the simple formula of neat-drawing-plus-snappy-text that 450 years later was to make
The Joy of Sex
so successful.
I modi (The Ways)
was an explicitly illustrated guide to pleasurable sexual positions, which was first published in 1524. The first edition was simply a compilation of fine-art drawings of sixteen different sex acts by Giuliano Romano, the talented 25-year-old Mannerist protégé of Raphael. Pope Clement VII was enraged by it and ordered all copies burned. He also prohibited any form of distribution, imprisoned Romano and warned that anyone who published it again would be executed. In spite of this heavy deterrent, the book became an object lesson in the near impossibility of censoring pirate printers. A second edition emerged three years later, each picture now accompanied by a sonnet written by Pietro Aretino, a journalist, publicist, entrepreneur and art dealer who had become infamous as one of the lewdest wits in all Italy. The captions were forthright, to say the least. As for wit, perhaps tastes have changed. One reads: ‘My legs are wrapped around your neck. Your cazzo’s in my cul, it pushes and thrashes. I was in bed, but now I’m on this chest. What extreme pleasure you’re giving me. But lift me on to the bed again – down here, my head hangs low, you’ll do me in. The pain’s worse than birth-pangs or shitting. Cruel love, what have you reduced me to?’
Ensuing years brought further bootleg copies, and eventually the number of positions grew to 31
as imitators added later and inferior drawings. After Aretino’s death in 1556, the term ‘Aretinian postures’ became synonymous across Europe with acrobatic sex. The book was a popular read and won celebrity endorsement: Casanova recalls in his memoirs how he spent New Year’s Eve 1753 performing Aretino’s ‘straight tree’ position with a nun. He says it featured the man standing and holding the woman upside-down for mutual oral sex. It makes a change from singing ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’.
In Britain, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, attitudes to marital sex had thawed in some denominations of the Church – especially among the Puritans. Their name has become a modern byword for all things strait-laced, but they actually believed pleasurable marital sex to be part of the holy sacrament. Early legal records in Puritan New England even record cases of husbands being admonished for failing to make love to their wives. Puritan marriage manuals completely contradicted Catholic distaste for spouse-on-spouse action. Writers such as William Whately, who published
A Bride Bush, or a Direction for Married Person
in 1616, and William Gouge
(Of Domestical Duties
, 1622) strongly promoted the right of married couples to enjoy ‘mutual dalliances for pleasure’s sake’. They also urged that ‘husband and wife mutually delight each in the other,’ maintain a ‘fervent love’ and exchange ‘due benevolence one to another which is warranted and sanctified by God’s word’.
Francis Rous, the provost of Eton College in Buckinghamshire, published a sermon in 1656 that
sounds like the preamble to some medieval handbook of voyeurism.
The Mystical Marriage
was inspired by the prophet Isaiah’s words, ‘Fear not, for thy maker is thine husband’. Rous exhorted readers, ‘Desire this husband ... Clear up thine eye and fix it on him as upon the fairest of men, the perfection of spiritual beautie ... accordingly fasten on him, not thine eye only, but thy mightiest love and hottest affection. Look on him so, that thou maist lust after him; for here it is a sin not to look as thou maist lust, and not to lust, having looked.’
It was powerful preaching, particularly from a Church that had not long before preached chastity as the only pure way. In the years approaching 1700, the general English market for sex advice was also getting stronger. We cannot know for certain what books were published or how many were bought, because the vast majority were printed as throw-away items, to be sold and read furtively. Samuel Pepys betrays himself in his diary as one of this growing band of secret sex-book stashers: ‘Away to the Strand to my booksellers and bought that idle, roguish book,
L’Eschole des filles
, which I have bought in plain binding (avoiding the buying of it better bound) because I resolve, as soon as I have read it, to burn it, that it may not stand in the list of books, nor among them, to disgrace them if it should be found.’
But one book did more than survive: it became so popular that it was still in bookshops early in the twentieth century. It was called
Aristotle’s Masterpiece.
The 4
BC
Greek philosopher’s
History of
Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals
had provided the foundation both of Western zoology and Western sexology, and his influence was so great that almost anything attributed to him was believed. When the
Masterpiece
first came out, some enterprising publisher stuck Aristotle’s name in the title, although only fragments of the information and misinformation it conveys can be traced to him. The first known edition is dated 1684 and was aimed at the common reader, the sort of literate lower-class person who bought ballads and almanacs. The text was primarily a collection of sexual folk wisdom, with hints on the positions to assume if you wanted to have a boy or a girl, and some rather bizarre pregnancy tests. The quality of the science is evident from this ‘any other questions’ exchange at the end of the book: ‘Question: Why don’t birds urinate? Answer: Because that superfluity which would be converted into urine, is turned into feathers.’ Nevertheless, the
Masterpiece
went through at least 43 editions by 1800 and there were most likely many more, which ended up being hidden, burnt, torn up and otherwise lost by the likes of Pepys.
In France, Nicholas Venette (a pseudonym) became a contemporary rival to the
Masterpiece.
His
Tableau de l’amour conjugal
was published in France in 1696, not long after the
Masterpiece.
Its theme was similar but it felt more sophisticated and, initially, more salacious. It was translated in Britain in 1703 as
The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald
, priced at six shillings, and soon became Europe’s
most popular sex guide – published in more than 100 editions and going well into the 20th century. Venette was a doctor and a father of 12. He was therefore doubly qualified to declare that the
Masterpiece
’s pregnancy tests – such as drinking honey and water at bedtime (a beating sense around the navel allegedly meant you’d conceived) – did not work.
Venette’s opening literary gambit was one that became practically obligatory right up until the 1960s – getting your retaliation in first with a justification, excuse or apology about daring to write on such a touchy subject. He declared, ‘If on the one hand, sin hath tacked shame to this knowledge; on the other, nature hath placed nothing there but what is delightful and pretty.’ So please don’t burn, jail, fine or sue me. Odd ideas? Try, ‘From the right testicle cometh the male, and from the left, the female.’ So if you tied the left one off, or lay on your right side while having sex, your chances of having a boy would increase. The book would have got him included on a
News of the World
hate-list for suggesting that women are sexually ‘fit for commerce’ when they reach their 13th birthday.
Venette had a few other strange notions, and in particular one that stemmed from a Galen-inspired belief, which was still popular in the 1700s, that masturbation was a decent way to get rid of excess sperm. Venette suggested that men are superior to woman because, by masturbating, they can renew their seed instead of allowing it to rot in their systems: ‘She sometimes retains it lengthily in her
testicles or in the horns of her uterus, where it becomes tainted and turns yellow, murky, or foul smelling, instead of white and clear as it was formerly. Unlike man, who, by polluting himself frequently, even during his sleep, benefits from a seed that is always renewed and never remains in his canals long enough to become corrupt.’
Women Who Make Good Lovers
It’s all in the face
Yu Fang Mi Chueh
(
Secret Codes of the Jade Room
)
, c.
AD
50
A woman with a small mouth and short fingers has a shallow porte feminine and she is easy to please. You can be sure that a woman must have big and thick labia if she has a big mouth and thick lips. If she has deep-set eyes, her porte feminine is bound to be deep too. If a woman has a pair of big, sparkling eyes, her porte feminine is narrow at its entrance, and yet roomy in the inner part. A woman with two dimples is tight and narrow down below.
Short (but normal) is best
Theodoor Hendrik Van de Velde,
Ideal Marriage, Its Physiology and Technique
(1928)
Women of short stature and small bones can often meet all requirements in the flexibility and capacity of their vaginae. And their sexual vigour and efficiency are also conspicuous, not only in coitus but in their buoyant reaction to the mental and physical stress and strain of menstruation, pregnancy and parturition, their fine flow of milk and easy and frequent conception (note the saying among the English common people: ‘Little women – big breeders’).
In short, little women approximate most often to the typical womanly ideal. But of course this is only
the case when this small stature is perfectly proportionate throughout and when the sexual development is adequate. When the small stature is due to some form of abnormality it is more than likely that the genitals will show serious defects structurally and functionally, in some way or other.
Sweaty’s sexy
Fang Nei Chi
(
Records of the Bedchamber
), Sui Dynasty (
AD
590–618)
Suitable women are naturally tender and docile and of gentle mien. Their hairs are of a silky black, their skin is soft and their bones fine. They are neither too tall nor too short, neither too fat nor too thin. The lips of the vulva should be thick and large. Their groins should not be covered with hair and the vagina should be moist. Their age should be between 25 and 30 and they should not yet have borne a child.
During coition their vaginas should emit abundant liquid. Their bodies should move so that they cannot restrain themselves. Drenched in sweat, they succumb to the motions of their man. Women endowed with these qualities will never harm a man, even if he himself is ignorant of the correct way of sexual intercourse.
Small-breasted, shrill hairy heaven
Nicholas Venette,
The Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveald
(1703)
Woman, hot in constitution and vehemently desirous of commerce with man, is easily distinguished by those versed in the nature of sex. In order to inform the ignorant, the breasts of such a woman are generally very small, but at the same time conveniently plump and hard. There is a profusion of hair about her privities occasioned by the extraordinary heat in those parts. The hair of the head is short and inclinable to curl, her voice is shrill and loud; she is cold of speech, cruel and oppressive to those of her own sex and unsteady in her devotion.
She is very complaisant and obliging in her behaviour towards men, but especially to those of her friends and acquaintance; she is of florid complexion, upright in the gesture of her body and more inclined to be lean than fat. She is sometimes given to excess in wine.
We may be sure, a woman answering this description, is extremely lecherous; and one who, in the act of coition, fulfils her desire greatly to the content and pleasure of the many having carnal knowledge of her ... Let me add that the libidinous woman smells not so rank when she perspires as other women do.
Hefty and breastless: mmm
Fang Nei Chi
(
Records of the Bedchamber
), Sui Dynasty (
AD
590–618)
A man should select for his sexual partners young women whose breasts have not yet developed and who are well covered with flesh. They should have hair as fine as silk and small eyes in which the pupil and the white are clearly separated. Face and body should be smooth and speech harmonious. All her joints should be well covered and her bones should not be large. She should either have no pubic and axillary hair at all or such hair should be fine and smooth.
Is she a virgin? Four tests
Albertus Magnus,
De Secretis Mulierum
(
The Secrets of Women
) (
c.
1478)
If you want to determine if a virgin has been corrupted, grind up the flowers of a lily and the yellow particles that are between the flowers, and give her this substance to eat. If she is corrupt, she will urinate immediately.
Another way to tell is to have her urinate on a certain kind of grass which is commonly known as ‘papel de mane’. If it becomes dry she is corrupt. You can also take the fruit of a lettuce and place it in front of her nose, and she will urinate immediately.
The signs of chastity are as follows: shame, modesty, fear, a faultless gait and speech, casting
eyes down before men and the acts of men. Some women are so clever, however, that they know how to resist detection by these signs, and in this case a man should turn to their urine. The urine of virgins is clear and lucid, sometimes white, sometimes sparkling. Corrupted women have a muddy urine because of the rupture of the aforementioned skin, and male sperm appear at the bottom of this urine.
There are still other ways to tell if a virgin has been corrupted. If a girl’s breasts point downwards, this is a sign that she has been corrupted, because at the moment of impregnation the menses move upwards to the breasts and the added weight causes them to sag. If a man has sexual intercourse with a woman and experiences no sore on his penis and no difficulty of entry, this is a sign that she was first corrupted. However, a true sign of the woman’s virginity is if it is difficult to perform the act and it causes a sore on his member.
If it’s too late, how to restore virginity
The Book of Women’s Love
, a medieval Hebrew women’s health guide
Take myrtle leaves and boil them well with water until only a third part remains; then, take nettles without prickles and boil them in this water until a third remains. She must wash her secret parts with this water in the morning and at bedtime, up to nine days.
And if it’s an emergency
Take nutmeg and grind to a powder; put it in that place and virginity will be restored immediately.
