Grave Concerns: Attitudes Toward Sexuality
Grave Concerns: Attitudes Toward Sexuality
Maturity. Opinions about when men and women reached sexual maturity were closely related with attitudes toward sexuality in general, which were also a mixture of medical and religious beliefs. In medical terms, male sexuality was the baseline for any perception of human sexuality, and the female sex organs were viewed as the male turned inside out or simply not pushed out. The great sixteenth-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius depicted the uterus looking exactly like an inverted penis, and his student Baldasar Heseler commented: “The organs of procreation are the same in the male and the female. . . . For if you turn the scrotum, the testicles and the penis inside out you will have all the genital organs of the female.” This idea meant that there were no specific names for many female anatomical parts until the eighteenth century, because they were always thought to be the the inverse of some male part, and so were simply called by the same name.
Bodily Heat. The fact that the female sex organs were inside the body was viewed as a sign of female inferiority; male organs, it was thought, were pushed out by the greater heat in the male body, which was regarded as a positive and active force. This condition was also used to explain why men go bald more often than women, for heat burned up their hair from the inside. The parallels between male and female organs could lead to alleged unusual sex changes, for many medical doctors throughout Europe solemnly reported cases of young women whose sex organs suddenly emerged during vigorous physical activity, transforming them into men; there are no reports of the opposite, however. Because female sex organs were hidden, they seemed more mysterious to early modern physicians and anatomists, and anatomical guidebooks use illustrations of autopsies on women's
lower bodies as symbols of modern science uncovering the unknown.
Negative Concepts. Religious opinion about sexuality was generally more negative than the ideas of scientists and doctors. Orthodox Slavs in eastern Europe had the most negative beliefs, seeing all sexuality as an evil inclination originating with the devil and not part of God's original creation; as in the rest of Europe, women were viewed as more sexual and the cause of men's original fall from grace. Even marital sex was regarded as a sin, with the best marriage one in which there was no sexual intercourse; this concept led to stories about miraculous virgin births among Russian saints, and to the popular idea that Jesus was born out of Mary's ear, not polluting himself with passage through the birth canal.
COURTLY LOVE
Andreas Cappelanus's The Art of Courtly Love (circa 1185) was a popular treatise during the period of the Renaissance and Reformation, It described how a man can and should fall in love, and how he could get out of a love affair he no longer wanted.
CHAPTER III: What the Effect of Love is
Now it is the effect of love that a true lover cannot be degraded with any avarice. Love causes a rough and uncouth man to be distinguished for his handsomeness; it can endow a man even of the humblest birth with nobility of character; it blesses the proud with humility; and the man in love becomes accustomed to performing many services gracefully for everyone, O what a wonderful thing is love, which makes a man shine with so many virtues and teaches everyone, no matter who he is, so many good traits of character! There is another thing about love that we should not praise in few words: it adorns a man, so to speak, with the virtue of chastity, because he who shines with the light of one love can hardly think of embracing another woman, even a beautiful one. For when he thinks deeply of his beloved the sight of any other woman seems to his mind rough and rude.
CHAPTER IV: What Persons Are Fit for Love
We must now see what persons are fit to bear the arms of love. You should know that everyone of sound mind who is capable of doing the work of Venus may be wounded by one of love's arrows unless prevented by age, or blindness, or excess of passion.
An excess of passion is a bar to love, because there are men who are slaves to such passionate desire that they cannot be held in the bonds of love—men who, after they have thought long about some woman or even enjoyed her, when they see another woman straightway desire her embraces, and they forget about the services they have received from their first love and they feel no gratitude for them. Men of this kind lust after every woman they see; their love is like that of a shameless dog. They should rather, I believe, be compared to asses for they are moved only by that low nature which shows that men are on the level of the other animals rather than by that true nature which sets us apart from all the other animals by the difference of reason.
CHAPTER VIII: The Easy Attainment of One's Object
The readiness to grant requests is, we say, the same thing in women as overvoluptuousness in men—a thing which all agree should be a total stranger in the court of Love. For he who is so tormented by carnal passion he cannot embrace anyone in heartfelt love, but basely lusts after every woman he sees, is not called a lover but a counterfeiter of love and a pretender, and he is lower than a shameless dog, Indeed the man who is so wanton that he cannot confine himself to the love of one woman deserves to be considered an impetuous ass. It will therefore be clear to you that you are bound to avoid an overabundance of passion and that you ought not to seek the love of a woman who you know will grant easily what you seek.
CHAPTER IX: The Love of Peasants
If you should, by some chance, fall in love with a peasant woman, be careful to puff her up with lots of praise and then, when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace her by force. For you can hardly soften their outward inflexibility so far that they will grant you their embraces quietly or permit you to have the solaces you desire unless first you use a little compulsion as a convenient cure for their shyness. We do not say these things, however, because we want to persuade you to love such women, but only so that, if through lack of caution you should be driven to love them, you may know, in brief compass, what to do.
Source: Andreas Capelianus, The Art of Courtly Love, translated by John Jay Parry, edited by Frederick W. Locke (New York; Ungar, 1957), pp. 4-5, 24.
Ambivalent Attitudes. Western Catholic opinion did not go this far, but displayed an ambivalent attitude toward sexuality. Sex was seen as polluting and defiling, with virginity regarded as the most desirable state; members of the clergy and religious orders were expected, at least in theory, to remain chaste. Their chastity and celibacy made them different from, and superior to, lay Christians who married. On the other hand, the body and its sexual urges could not be completely evil, because they were created by God; to claim otherwise was heresy. Writers vacillated between these two opinions or held both at once, and the laws regulating sexual behavior were based on both. In general, early modern Catholic doctrine held that sexual relations were acceptable as long as they were within marriage, not done on Sundays or other church holidays, performed in a way that would allow procreation, and that did not upset the proper sexual order, which meant the man had to be on top.
Reformed Views. Protestant reformers clearly broke with Catholicism in their view that marriage was a spiritually preferable state to celibacy. Moreover, Protestants saw the most important function of marital sex not as procreation, but as increasing affection between spouses. Based on his own experience, Martin Luther stressed the power of sexual feelings for both men and women, and thought women in particular needed intercourse in order to stay healthy. Protestants generally agreed with Catholics that sexual relations were permissible as long as they were marital and “natural,” though exactly what they meant by natural differed from writer to writer.
Popular Views. Opinions about sexuality were expressed in this period not simply by learned scientists and theologians but also by the writers of popular songs and stories. Many of these works celebrate male sexuality—bawdy tales of men who, along with drinking and fighting, slept with other men's wives. Even those works that discussed love along with sex, such as Andreas Cappelanus's The Art of Courtly Love (circa 1185), considered force part of male sexuality, at least when lower-class women were concerned. Few of these popular works portray women who engaged in sex outside of marriage in a positive light, and some even praise men who beat women into submission.
Sources
Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980).