r i ES Tacr Sex Acts in Early Modern teh Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment EDITED BY Allison LevyThe cultural history of ‘Seigneur Dildoe’ Patricia Simons Language It might be thought that ‘dildo’ is an Talian word. However, the word is English, first appearing in a poem written by Thomas Nashe around 1593.! It was a nonsense-word from ballads that sounded vaguely Italian or Spanish. ‘The dildo’s deflating impact on virility was presented as the troubling sign of an urbanized nation losing its innate manhood under the impact of foreign, foppish habits. ‘The dildo was thus one of those sexual phenomena of early modern European culture that could be represented as imported, although this was not the case in Italian texts. According to the minor French nobleman Pierre de Brantéme, writing in the early 1580s, the fashion for sex between women was carried to France by a great, unnamed ‘dame de qualité’ (lady of quality) from Italy, which probably repeats gossip about Catherine de’ Medici? He observed that women had sex with women using dildoes in many regions, ‘in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Greece and other places.’ Having spent time not only at the French court but also with the courtesan ‘La Greca’ in Rome, some of Brantéme’s stories are likely to have a basis in fact. At the very least, they record gossip, which was in itself influential and formative. His subsequent discussion devoted much attention to women’s use of ‘instruments lascif’ (lascivious instruments) fashioned he knew not of what, and named godentichis. For the English, the dildo derived from Italy or France, and was thus easier to deploy in political satire. In November 1673, the arrival in England of Marie Beatrice d’Este, Princess of Modena and second wife of the Duke of York, was the occasion for a satire crediting the worryingly Catholic bride with the introduction of ‘a noble Italian call'd Seigneur Dildoe.” A slightly later variant of ¢. 1695 referred to Signior Dildo. The poem, attributed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, named many other aristocratic women who resorted to the pleasurable device, including Marie's mother. By the early eighteenth century, another Italian-born woman was credited with its importation. Monsiewr Origin (1722) reported that the personified object was Gallic by birth78 SEX ACTS IN EARLY MODERN FTALY and that ‘some say it was the Duchess Mazarine / Was first contriver of this fine machine." Hortense Mancini, niece of Cardinal Mazarin (chief minister of France), had been Charles II's mistress for a year or so after her arrival in 1675, and rumors of her bisexual exploits in London doubtless fueled her association with the foreign ‘machine.’ The anonymous poet immediately noted, however, that others instead said that ‘from Italy it was that first it came, / And from that country it had first its name.’ Foreign yet familiar, the contraption provided an addition to the satirical, libertine lexicon. The word ‘dildo’ was common enough in England by the late 1590s for John Florio's Italian-English dictionary of 1598 to readily translate into ‘dildoe of glasse’ the phrase ‘pastinaca muranese’ (parsnip from Murano) from Aretino's Ragionamento (1534). This ‘parsnip’ was a device made in the glass factories of Murano, to be used in an orgy between nuns and prelates. Never at a loss for words, Aretino also called these glass dildoes ‘frutti del parndiso terrestre™ (fruits from the earthly paradise), ‘frutti di vetro che si fano a Murano di Vinegia alla similitudine del K, salvo che hanno duo sonagl’ (glass fruits made in Murano near Venice to look like a prick, except that these had two dangling bells), ‘il salsiccione di vetro’ (the glass sausage), ‘quell pestello di vetzo’ (that glass pestle), “il vetriolo bernardo’ (glass tool), ‘cotale di vetro’ (glass affair), ‘frutti cristallini’ (crystal fruits), ‘ampolla’ (glass ampule), ‘vetro' (glass cock), ‘Iancia ... di vetro’ (glass lance), ‘Ia lancia da le due pallotte’ (her two-balled lance), ‘berlingozzo! (glass patty-cake), ‘carota di vetro’ (glass carrot), ‘vetri’ (hunks of glass), ‘ampella’ (the clapper) and ‘matico di vetro’ (glass handle), The simulacrum was chiefly distinguished by its glass material, and there was no single word in Italian for the object as a type. To Florio in 1598, ‘dildoes’ meant pinco and robinetto, each words that also signified ‘pillicocke,’ a now defunct English word that meant a man’s cock or a pretty boy. In Italian, as in Latin, there was no word for artificial penis/phallus, as though the dildo's inadequacy could be insisted upon by its very absence from the language. On the other hand, that linguistic lack engendered playful plenitude. Aretino’s Ragionamento gleefully offered a plethora of metaphors and symbols for the ever-rampant phallus, paradoxically making it less unique and mighty, more of a sign that could be transferred to other objects. The heritage of antiquity The Greek words élisbos and baubért for dildo, and even phallés had no Latin equivalents; fascinum was most commonly used in Roman and Early Christian times, referring to phallic charms and other representations of the male organ.” In the first century, racy Petronius wrote that a priestess of Priapus treated his impotence by inserting into his anus a lubricated ‘leathern prick’ (scorteunt fascinum) (Satyricon, 138). Martial and Juvenal instead used ‘Priapus’ when referring, respectively, to a phallic cake (14.70) or a glass drinking vessel (2.95), and that personifying word was common in Renaissance Latin.Patricia Simons 79 Phalli were visible everywhere in Graeco- Roman culture, seen by female as well as male viewers, in Dionysian rituals and public processions, on the comic stage, in garden statues of Priapus, on herms and termini marking boundaries, at street co doorwa ers and S, as votives, cakes, lamps, wind chimes, statuettes, amulets and other pieces of jewelry’ Conventionally associated most with ferti was more fundamentally and frequently an ty, the evidence suggests that the phallus emblem for revelry, humor, and good fortune (including fecundity), with the concomitant notion that it symbolized virile strength and warded off the evil eye so that it had an apotropaeic function, A Pompeian relief records: the telling motto, HIC HABITAT FELICITAS (Here dwells happiness). A strapped-on dildo appears in a wall painting from the suburban baths in Pompeii.* A woman, Isis, invented the phallus, according to the myth of Osiris” Women exercised sexual autonomy with the aid of dildoes in several ancient texts."” Lucian’s True Story noted that in sexual intercourse the Moon people used phallic prostheses made of ivory or wood (1.22) During marriage festivals, according to St Augustine, images of the ‘all-too-male divinity’ Priapus (De civitate dei, 6.9) were once used in a way probably imilar to the manner represented satirically ina mid-second-century CE marble relief of bacchic revels."' ‘The newly wedded bride used to be told to sit on his phallus, that monstrous obscenity.’ Renaissance artists focused on just this action, performed obscenely by a satyress reaching behind for the ithyphallic yet marble organ projecting from a herm of Pan. Marcantonio Raimondi, around 1512-15, produced engravings of the entire erotic relief and derivative images were made just of the detail with the satyress.!? In the Renaissance, such images, as well as ancient tex , reinvigorated an awareness of phallic objects, usually in a carnivalesque rather than moralizing vein. Neither humorous nor judgmental, however, is the fragmentary engraving by Raimondi showing a classical nymph ina generic landscape calmly using a dildo, existing today in a single copy (Figure 5.1) The figure encapsulates a certain kind of classicism, of a timeless, idealized, unflustered kind, in which passion is taken for granted and acted upon with 1 Mareantonio Raimondi, Woman with Dildo, engraving, 1520s (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm)80 SEX ACTS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY grace and a slight smile, without unseemly extravagance. Now solitary, the nymph is positioned close to the edge of the plate and at least one other figure once existed to our right. Modern fantasies can endlessly contemplate what might have motivated destruction of the rest of the print, The dildo has the shape of a carrot or similar vegetable, just the sort of object in Aretino's lexicon, and he moved in Raimondi’s Roman circle in the early 1520s. The erotic series of engravings showing various sexual positions adopted by male-female couples, ! modi, was also issued around the time of this print, ¢- 1523, by the workshop of the recently deceased Raphael, designed by Giulio Romano and cut by Raimondi, soon accompanied by Aretino’s obscene verses, Understood to be a reinvention of ancient erotica, the Modi prints are supplemented by this print’s naked nymph offered to a voyeuristic gaze, her sexual ‘partner’ now a dildo. ‘The heritage of the Church Efforts by the Catholic Church to police the use of dildoes paradoxically gave the devices a textual and confessional presence. Confessors asking whether women had employed ‘instruments’ could spark the very idea. The machina, molimen or instrumento was a tool used either alone or with another woman, and its artificiality increased the degree of ‘unnaturalness and thence penance required." In the Decretum of Burchard of Worms (¢. 1012), the list of questions to be asked of women included: Have you done what certain women are accustomed to do, that is, to make some sort of device [molimen] or implement [machina] in the shape of the male member, fa size to match your desire, and you have fastened it to the area of your genitals Or those of another with some form of fastenings and you have fornicated with Sther women or others have done with a similar instrument [instrumento} or another sort with you? For this act, penance of three or five years was required; masturbation with a dildo necessitated one year.'* To confess to the use of dildoes, or be found out, was dangerous, but not always life-threatening. However, public records of such usage usually occur in the context of execution. Necessarily, those practices handled in the sanctity of the confessional by the meting out of penance have left little or no documentary trace. What does remain is the reiteration of the Latin language of penitentials in the records of civil law and in the vernacular use of ‘instrument’ or ‘machine,’ which suggests that the confessional did indeed have an impact on practice. In Foucauldian terms, discourses of repression can generate the very thing they seek to silence. Through the confessional, from oral reports by men or women who could read Latin, by reading certain passages in the increasing number of vernacular publications, by way of rumor or news reports, many women heard about the instruments. But not all. Abbess81 Benedetta Carlini, for instance, engaged in repeated, varied sex with her assistant Bartolomea Crivelli at their convent in early seventeenth-century Pescia, without recourse to a dildo." On the other hand, two Spanish nuns employed ‘material instruments’ and were burned to death because of it! Fictive nunneries In fictional terms, the nunnery was probably the first post-classical locus for the activities of the dildo. An apothecary and chronicler from Lucca perhaps introduced it to Italian fiction around 1400. In Giovanni Sercambi's story titled ‘De libidine,’ an abbess ‘fare di zendado pieno di miglio ‘mo pasturale d’uomo di buona forma’ (made a well-formed object of fine silk filled with millet), which appropriately took the metaphorical form of a postorale (crozier).” The point of the tale is that the nuns were satisfied with it until an actual ejaculating man proved the inadequacy of the mere tool, and thereafter atennersi a quell della carne (they were faithful to the fleshly one) Sercambi’s novella did not circulate widely, but dildoes in nunneries became a major part of Aretino’s orgiastic Ragionamentto first published in 1534, and thereafter reprinted many times, often in clandestine versions. The device was striking, probably appearing in European print for the first time, and later in the century a text wrongly attributed to Aretino also had women using a ‘carotia di vetvo' (glass carrot)."* In typically exuberant fashion, Aretino represented both sexes eagerly snatching up the device and using it in group sex and with partners of either sex. The nunnery was an ideal location for the Italian dildo, supposedly filled with sexually frustrated women who, in the tradition of Boccaccio’s Decameron and numerous tales, some true, colluded in allowing men entry to the cloister for licentious purposes. Factors such as social isolation, gender segregation, penitential discourses about ‘instruments’ and anti-clerical sentiment fueled the fictional image of nuns with dildoes in their hands. The carnivalesque As soon as the pantiere of frutti (basket of fruits) arrived in Aretino’s convent there was a roar of laughter. Delight was the response often encouraged by dildoes. Detached, organic instruments appear in the carnivalesque mode, primarily as fruits or vegetables. A maiolica plate from Deruta, dated to the first quarter of the sixteenth century, depicts a seated woman plucking one ‘fruit’ from a basket of squirming, winged phalli.” She enacts what the inscription exhorts: ‘Ai bon fruti done’ (Get your good fruits, women). The plate, like Aretino’s text, recalls Greek vase paintings that show82. SEX ACTS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY a woman with a large collection of phalli in baskets or pots.” The chief focus of such imagery may be fertility but there is also a long European jon of eroticizing food. The sixteenth-century burlesque poetry of Francesco Berni and others made phallic symbols of eels and sausages, and homoerotic delights were figured in fruits like peaches. Fertility might be an ostensible justification for phallic imagery but poetry and practice equally celebrated the sheer pleasures to be had from sweet fruits, the gratification of tantalized senses, and the savoring of these fares in a culture with a taboo against oral sex From medieval times, women plucked ‘fruits’ from a phallus tree. The public fountain of Abundance in Massa Marittima is frescoed with a late thirteenth-century (or later) scene of women eagerly plucking from a phallus tree.”! In such images, women are active, sexually desirous and capable of autonomously satisfying themselves with the simulacrum. This is the case also in a carnival song, Canzone della forese, written in the 1480s by Lorenzo de’ Medici” Peasant women use vegetal dildoes while their husbands are away, ‘che ‘l poder non resti sodo.’ Their implements include Cetrivoli abbiamo grossi, Di fuor pur ronchiosi e Paion quasi pien’ di co Poi sono empitivi e sani E’ sipiglion com duo mani: Di fuor Hew tu po” di bucc Apri ben la bocea e suecia, he s'avezza,e* non fan male. [Cucumbers, large ones, we have brought, All rough outside and strange to view It seems they're full of warts, but then They're laxative and wholesome too. First take the fruit in hand. Expose The core by pulling back the skin. Open your mouth and suck. For those Who know the way, it does not hurt at all.| ‘Their other fruiti include melons, full of seeds and making the mouth red, and long beans in their pod to be rubbed gently up and down. Lorenzo's vegetal vocabulary followed tradition, Cucumbers, for example, were traditionally phallic vegetables, from the time of the Greeks and then the Romans. Women could enclose in their genital ‘figs’ a ‘zucca assai grossa’ (very large squash) according to Antonio Vignali’s Cazzaria (c. 1525-26), which then described in more detail ‘tn pistello di buona mano, covertato di uno budello di bue’ (a large-handled pestle, covered with ox gut) used asa dildo by a female weaver he knew.® Women had access to phallic ‘instruments’ in their own gardens and kitchens, inspired by incessant jokes about erotic fruits like parsnips, carrots, leeks and a variety of gourds. The jokesPatricia Simons 83 extended into the visual realm. A phallic gourd gently forces open a fig, amidst the festoons Giovanni da Udine painted around 1518 in Agostino Chigi’s loggia of the Villa Farnesina, above the outstretched hand of Raphael's Mercury. Similar games with figs and zucchini in Bronzino’s decoration of Eleanor of Toledo's chapel indicate that women were not excluded from such jokes Painted in a chapel or a dining room, on ceramic ware and a public fountain, sung on the streets and present in erotic literature, detached phalli in sexual action made the idea of dildoes very visible and possible to a large audience of men and women. St Augustine was displeased by the involvement of women in priapic rituals. But moralistic constructions of obscenity did not stop such practices as the parading of a large wooden phallus through the streets of Naples in 1664 or women’s offerings of wax votives in penile form. The carnivalesque procession of a gigantic phallus concluded Lorenzo Venier’s Puttana erraitte (published in Venice c. 1531) and ecstatic nymphs and putti parade a huge phallus toward an enormous vulva, in a Triumph of Priqpus drawn by Francesco Salviati.” The excess of carnival also had its dark side, visually treated by Parmigianino’s etching from the 1530s (British Museum) in which a witch rides a giant phallus with hairy backlegs. Absent men Dildos were usually situated in the hands of solitary women excessively yearning for sexual satisfaction that was imagined as only possible if it resulted from phallic magnitude. On the one hand reinforcing the misogynist assumption that all women are incomplete without the phallus, such discourse nevertheless bespoke anxiety about the degree to which the phallus was replaceable and replicable. Humorously bountiful on many occasions, the phallus was at other times endangered. The Breviarum Practice of the late thirteenth or fourteenth century envisaged women masturbating with dildoes when husbands were absent. Its claim was a common and plausible one: that women used dildoes due to the risks of adultery and the fear of pregnancy. Rustic women exploited vegetables in order to ‘plow’ their ‘fields’ while husbands were away. Sercambi’s nuns end up with a more satisfying human replacement. Another of his tales (no. 70, ‘De vidua libidinose’) imagined a young widow using sausages as dildoes in order to maintain her family’s honor. Orsarella Strozzi realizes that her brother's favorite sausages were ‘quasi simile di forma’ (nearly the same [genital] shape) of her dead husband, so ‘tenerdo i occhi chiusi e in mano Ia salsiccia, fornia il suo piacere’ (keeping her eyes closed and her hand on the sausage, she pleasured herself). When the brother finds out, she retorts that she feels sexual desire just as he does, and that she has been concerned ‘di preservare il tuo onore’ (to preserve your honor), so that the family will not be shamed84 SEN ACTS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY by an adulterous affair. Tolerance is also shown in Pietro Bembo’s Latin poem Priapus, where maidens moisten their wicker basket at the shrine of this god In particular, his shaft nourished ‘the woman whose husband has flitted across far-away seas, / Who is left all alone, weakened by underserved neglect’ and it also satisfied ‘any woman who has been badly tended by her husband.’ In this case, husbands might be either absent or inadequate, and the compensation is eagerly devoured, in a manner similar to that of the voracious Strozzi widow. Impotence does not feature in Brantéme’s account, for his focus was whether or not husbands were cuckolded when women had sex with women. He found that female-female relations were merely an apprenticeship arousing desires that were then better satiated by sex with men. The dildo, which was not envisaged as essential to every sexual relationship between women, was disturbing but the advantages of not risking pregnancy or dishonor were great. The ‘instruments’ were ‘engines contrefaits’ (counterfeit engines), merely imitation devices. In his scheme of humoralist medicine, the dryness of the sterile dildo was crucial to its role in confirming that only sex with actual, ejaculating men would do. Women in practice It is often said that dildoes and their representation are ‘male fantasies projected onto women.’ However, we have substantial evidence that early modern women did make and use dildoes. Most activity with dildoes will necessarily have escaped written documentation. The majority of recorded cases concern cross-dressed women who devised a dildo to improve their masculine appearance and actions. In 1477, describing what she had used to have sex with women who did not realize she was a woman, Katherina Hetzeldorfer told the court official in Speyer that ‘she made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole thru the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round.’ Leather casing and stiffening, usually of wood or bone, are the two most recurrent features of dildoes described in texts, from Aristophanes on. Another German case, of a female ‘husband’ tried in 1721 is also very detailed.* Cases of female ‘husbands’ reported by Henri Estienne and Montaigne, however, are coy about the mimicry of masculinity." Brantéme reported court gossip about four dildoes found in a woman's chest, and another espied in use by a grand prince (probably Henri Ill). The latter, he was told, was ‘uit gros entre les jambs, gentiment attaché avec de petites bandelettes 4 Fentour du corps, qu‘il sembloit un member naturel’ (a large one between her legs, neatly fastened with little bands around her body, so that it resembled a natural member). From Pseudo-Lucian, Seneca and the painting in Pompeii to the two German descriptions, some of the morePatricia Simons 85 detailed information about dildoes indicates that they were often strapped on. Straps described by Brantéme’s informant recur in Fuseli’s sketch of such a device, drawn in the 170s during his time in Italy (Figure 5.2), A large tie is aided by a harness that enables a standing woman to enter from the rear her partner who, given the shoes, is probably female. The drawing may be one of Fuseli’s Personal fantasies, but it nevertheless supplies too much mechanical detail for it not to originate in first-hand observation. Many more cases of women making and using dildoes doubtless did not come to the notice of authorities. Male-made discourse was not always fanciful Medicine Medical discourse was engaged with defining the pathology of the dildo, yet it was also implicated in the utility and design of the device. According to Brantéme, dildoes were very injurious and could cause poor complexion as well as internal growths and other vague horrors. He was repeating gynecological information of the kind already present in the famous twelfth-century Latin manual of ‘Tyotula,’ first published in 1544. Its chapter on uterine ulcers began by noting that sometimes the womb was ulcerated by strong medicines or by obstetrical instruments.» According ‘o Hippocratic theory, still very much current in early modern Europe, ‘the womb is moistened by intercourse, whereas when the womb is drier than it should be it becomes extremely contracted’ and painful.* Hence, the use of dry, sterile dildoes was harmful. On the other hand, a medical cure for female ‘hysteria’ or uterine disorder, known since antiquity and cited by the influential physician Galen, justified the application of various means to bring about a woman's orgasm. It was thought that widows and virgins in particular suffered from the retention of excessive female ‘seed’ and menses. It was cured through manual stimulation by a midwife, by masturbation or by marriage and thus sex with a man. Under the general rubric of female maladies, the dildo could be considered a medicinal instrument Physicians recommended the insertion of a pessary, ‘the motion, excitation and fervor it agitates in the uterus’ leading to orgasmic relief.” Ostensibly medical usage of dildoes was denigrated in Boccaccio’s Corbaccio. The 52 Henry Fuseli, Woman Using a Dildo, penand ink over lead pencil on fine cardboard, torn up and reassembled, 1770-78 (Museo Home, Florence, inv. no, 6070)86 SEX ACTS IN FARLY MODERN ITALY picious, misogynist voice in that text spoke of ‘i Iuoghi segreti dove esse, vergagnandosene, nascondono gli orribili strumenti li quali a tér via i loro umori superfluid adoperano’ (the secret places where [women] in shame hide the horrible instruments they employ to take away their superfluous humors). Even with shame, women were conceded access to dildoes for purgative purposes. ‘Doctors’ instead offered their marvelously curative ‘unction’ to widows, inserted in a suggestively phallic manner according to a carnival song penned by Bernardo Giambullari. But the women have the last laugh, retorting that they have another solution, zucchini and melons or, best of all, actual flesh.” Cross-dressing women appropriated medical equipment like tubes for urination. Surgical technology engineered genital prostheses, necessitated not only by war injuries but, since the late fifteenth century, by the advent of syphilis. Inanimate, medical insertions that had penile implications were common, Basic anatomical knowledge, after all, described a homology between male and female genitals, with the penis being an exterior form of the vagina. A variety of ‘instruments’ used in medical examinations of women, especially candles and fingers, were characterized as doing the work of the penis, even deflowering a virgin. According to the English poem of c. 1673, Seigneur Dildoe ‘is sound, safe, ready, and dumb / As ever was candle, carrot, or thumb’ but now he outranked them.” At times, the instruments threatened a woman's virginity. The topic of whether men could ever be certain about a woman's virginity was treated in a controversial chapter of Laurent Joubert’s Erreurs Populaires, first published in 1578 and transiated into Italian in 1592." Probing them ‘avec le doigt, oi avec une chandelle, par le moyen d'un miroir metrical’ (with the finger, or with a candle, or with a speculum) did not provide easy answers. How would you be able to tell, he asked, whether the opening was ‘fait du member viril, plutdt que d'une chandelle ou d'un pessaire, ou du proper doigt de la fille? (attributable to the virile member rather than to a candle, or a pessary, or the fingers of the maiden herself?) Pessaries, according to the Hippocratic Corpus, were often ‘shaped like a penis’® The Troha advised for the retention of menses: ‘let a hollow pessary be made in the shape of a man’s penis and in it let the medicine be placed so that it can be injected.” So Joubert had cause to worry about the penetrative work of pessaries, and just a few years later Brantéme contrasted dildoes with pessaries. One theory about the dildo’s origin had it invented by French doctors. Monsieur Thing’s Origin ultimately decided that ‘To France he owes his birth or first extraction, / By doctors there he had his first creation, / And is originally of that nation. / Experienced Asculapians did design / Him for the use of infants feminine, / Until they were fit to be put to nurses / Of males, most proper for to steer their course.’ The English writer of 1722 is referring to an enlarging device, probably not imaginary, that stretched the vagina of girls so that they were capable of conjugal sex at an early age. Canon law and civil courts were each concerned not only with male impotence but alsoPatricia Simons 87 Peffaire pourtenir lecol dela matrice ounert par le benefice d'unreffort. i 3S =e — yy yoyo LLL Ps) °; N = ES with cases in which marriages had to be dissolved because of some genital ‘impediment’ on the wife's part, chiefly due to the fact that her body had not yet grown to adult size, Hollow pessaries of penile morphology would have served the purpose of enlargement as well as pharmacological delivery. In early modern Europe, it was indeed a Frenchman, the royal surgeon Ambroise Paré, who publicized vaginal devices designed in penile form. Around a decade before Brantéme wrote down his memories about dildoes, and while serving at the very same Valois court, in 1573 Paré published in his De ia generation de l'homme the image of a hollow applicator, an updated version of the one mentioned in the Trotula (Figure 5.3). It reappeared, three times, in his collected works published in 1575, and thereafter the illustration often recurred, including Latin translations in 1586 and 1597. The caption summed up its usage, ‘pour tenir le col de la matrice ouvert’ (The forme of a Pessary to be put into the neck of the wombe to hold it open). Holes in the internal end enabled delivery of a fumigation, but the text's phrasing might have given some readers the idea that the apparatus could also operate as an enlarging contraption. It would have catered only to ladies at court and those well-to-do, being handmade from gold, silver or tin plate and having ‘deux liens @ une bande, ceinte au miliew du corps de la femme” (two straps forming a band, encircling the middle of the woman's body). Those ties recall Brantéme’s description of a dildo in use around the same time in the French court, and are an essential part of the design observed by Fuseli (Figure 5.2). 3 Ambroise raré, Les ovvores dem. Ambroise Paré ...Auec les figures & portraicts tant de Vanatomie que des instruments de chirurgie, & de plus rs ronstres. Le tout isé en vingt six Tires ... (Paris: Chez G. Buon, 1575), p. 78588 SEX ACTS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY Paré’s appliance was disseminated widely, not only through his many publications but also in the treatises of other authors, In 1586 Caspar Bauhin’s compendium of gynecological texts included a redrawn image of the instrument. One of the authors in that collection, Scipione Mercurio, then issued yet another redrawn image in his popular, vernacular midwifery La Commare 0 riccoglitrice published in Venice in 1596, with a second edition coming out in 1601.” Midwives and laywomen as well as men read the vernacular books by Paré and Mercurio. Women, who did not even have to be literate to get the idea from the woodcut images or from the oral reports of friends and ministrations of their physicians, could think about the curative device in a number of ways. Dildoes were hardly a new invention, having been present in ancient satire, then early medieval penitentials and mentioned by Boccaccio then Sercambi, in carnival songs, Raimondi‘s engraving and Aretino’s influential erotica, amongst others, but they made a particular impact during the 1570s in France. An object of official condemnation and underground rumor was given vivid form by a widely disseminated medical picture of an imitation of an imitation. Paré devised his appliance at a time when his patients were gossiping about dildoes; women were both talking about and using, them. Conclusion Medical discourse offered both warnings on the dildo and legitimation. Primarily used by women, who were represented as dependent upon the phallus in the absence of men or in order to mimic masculinity, dildoes were nevertheless also employed by men on occasion. For both women and men, they often performed the role of ‘husband.’ Other functions included pharmacological delivery, urination, purgation, amusement, titillation and pleasure. Whether secular or ecclesiastical, fictive or real, medicalized or moralized, amusing or threatening, classicized or carnivalesque, dildoes were ubiquitous, appearing in brothels and courts, festive streets and somber confessionals, satire and surgical manuals. Public at carnival or ‘secret’ in its storage chest, the dildo circulated in a variety of genres, ranging from rumor and underground poetry to prints and penitentials, Like contemporary lesbian theorists such as Judith Butler, we need to distinguish between these performative uses of a dildo and a range of different attitudes regarding how much the device is inherently, exclusively masculine in symbolic and physical terms." They were deliberately made by women or prescribed, sometimes unwittingly, by doctors. Renaissance dildoes had no single origin, owner or purpose. Their proliferation sundered any connection with an originary standard. Seigneur Dildoe was variable in national origin, purpose and form, and it was often imagined yet also frequently put into practice.Patricia Simons 89 Notes 1 Thomas Nashe, ‘The choise of valentines, in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, eds David Norbrook and H.R. Woudhuysen (London: Penguin, 1993), pp. 253-63. 2. Pierre de Bourdeille, Seigneur de Brantome, ‘Des Dames,’ in Oewores complites, vol. 9 (Paris: Renouard, 1876), pp. 193-208 for this and all subsequent quotations. 3. Earl of Rochester (attrib.), ‘Seigneur Dildoe,’ in The Works of Jolin Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. Harold Love (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 248-57. 4. ‘Monsieur Thing’s Origin; or, Seignior D—o's Adventures in Britain’ (1722), rpt. in The Literature of Lesbianism. A Historical Anthology from Ariosto fo Stonewall, ed. Terry Castle (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 237-342. 5 John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes (1598), facsimile (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972), pp. 31, 52; Pietro Aretino, Ragionamento. Dialago, ed. Paolo Procacciali (Milan: Garzanti, 1984), pp. 19-64 passim. 6 LN. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 63-4, 228 7 Michael Grant, Eros it Pompeii. The Secret Rooms of the National Musetum of Naples (New York: William Morrow, 1975); Catherine Johns, Sex or Symbol? Erotic Images of Greece and Rome (London: British Museum, 1982). 8 John R. Clarke, Looking at Lovemaking. Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100 BC-AD 250 Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pl. 13. 9. Petrarch, Moralia, 358b, 10 For example, Martial, 1.90, 7.67; Lucian, Dialogues of the Courtesms, 5; Pseudo- Lucian, Amores, 28; Seneca the Elder, Controwvrsiae, 1.2.23. IL Grant, Eros in Pompeii, pp. 91-3. 12 Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture. A Handbook of Sources (London: Harvey Miller and Oxford University Press, 1986), no. 70, 13, John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 204; Pierre J. Payer, Sex and the Penitentials: The Development of a Sexual Code, 550-1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 4 Patrologia Latina, 140.971D-972. 15 Judith C. Brown, Imumodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy (Oxiord: Oxford University Press, 1986). 16 Louis Crompton, “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity. Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791,’ Journal of Homosexsiality 6 (Fall/Winter 1980/81): 11-25, esp. 17, 19. 17 Giovanni Sercambi, Novelle, ed. Giovanni Sinicropi, vol. 1 (Bari: Laterza, 1972), no. 30, 18 I Piacevol Ragionamento de l’Aretino. Dialogo di Giulia e di Madalena, ed. Claudio Galderisi (Rome: Salerno, 1987), pp. 61-9. 19 Musée du Louvre, OA 1256.90 SEX ACIS IN EARLY MODERN ITALY 20 Eva C. Keuls, The Reign of the Phallus. Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), figs 76-7. 21 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Larbre des familles (Paris: Editions de La Martiniére, 2003), pp. 124-5. 22 Trionfi e Conti Carnascialeschi del Rinascimento, ed. Riccardo Bruscagli, vol. 1 (Rome: Salerno, 1986), pp. 15-17. The English translation is fram Lorenzo de’ Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. and trans, Jon Thiem (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1991), pp. 158-9. 23 Antonio Vignali, La Cazzaria, ed. Pasquale Stoppelli (Rome: Edizioni dell’Elefante, 1984), p. 76. 24 Philippe Morel, ‘Priape & la Renaissance,’ Reowe de Vart (1985): 13-28, 25. Deborah Parker, Bronzino: Renaissance Painter as Poct (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 154-5 26 Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Moder Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), pp. 186-7. 27 Morel, ‘Priape a la Renaissance; fig. 9 28 Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasett, Sexuality anid Medicine in the Middle trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), p. 153. 29 Pietro Bembo, Lyric Poetry. Etvta, ed. and trans. Mary P. Chatfield (Cambridge MA; Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 22-9; Carminum libellus, 8, here quoted from lines 53-4, 71. 30 ign of the Phallus, p. 82. 31 Helmut Puff, ‘Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) Journal of Mediconl and Early Modern Studies 30 (Winter 2000): 41-62, citation at 61. 32. Brigitte Eriksson, ‘A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721. The Trial Records,’ Journal of Homosexuality 6 (Fall/Winter 1980/81): 27-40. 33. Crompton, "The Myth of Lesbian Impunity,’ 17. 34 Trotula of Salerno, The Disenses of Women. A Translation of ‘Passionibus muilierum curradorum, trans. Elizabeth Mason-Hohl (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie, 1940), p. 15 (based on the Latin edition of 1547). 35 Hippocrates, The Seed, in Hippocratic Writings, ed. GER. Lloyd (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 320. 36 For example, Galen, On the Affected Parts, trans. Rudolph E. Siegel (Basel: S. Karger, 1976), 6.5; Jacquart and Thomasett, Sexuslity and Medicine, pp. 152-3, 173-7; Helen Rodnite Lemay, ‘William of Saliceto on Human Sexuality,’ Viator 12 (1981): 165-81, esp. 167, 177-8; Helen Rodnite Lemay, Women’s Secrets, A Translation of Pseucdo-Albertus Magnus’s ‘De Secretis Mulierum’ with Commentaries (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 6, 130-5. 37 Abraham Zacuto (called Zacuto Lusitano), Praxis Medica Adwiranda (1637), rpt in his Opera onmia, vol. 2 (Lyons, 1649), p. 65. 38 Giovanni Boccaccio, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta; Corbaccio, ed. Francesco Erbani (Milan: Garzanti, 1988), p. 234. For the English, see Giovanni Boccaccio, The Corbaceio, trans. and ed. Anthony K. Cassell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), 24,Patricia Simons 91 59° Bruscagli, Trionfie Canti Carnascialeschi, pp. 282-4. 40 Earl of Rochester (attrib.), ‘Seigneur Dildoe,’ p. 256, 41 Laurent Joubert, La Médecine t le Regime de Santé. Des erreurs populaires et propos ‘ulgaies, vol, 2, ed. Madeleine Tiollais (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1997), pp. 243-5 passim, 42 Ann Ellis Hanson, "The Medieval Writers’ Woman’ in Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, eds David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 309-38, citation at p. 319. 9 Trotula, The Diseases of Women, p. 77. 44 “Monsieur Thing’s Origin, p. 238. 45 Ambroise Paré, Oe plites, ed. Joseph-Frangois Malgaigne (1840-11), rpt (Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 366-71, vol. 2, pp. 756-61 (with redrawn images), 46 James V. Ricci, The Deaelopment of Gynaecological Surgery and Instruments (1949), tpt (San Francisco: Norman, 1990), p. 88. 47 Girolamo (Scipione) Mercurio, La Commare o raccoglitrice (Venice: G.B, Ciotti, 1601), p.295. 48 Judith Butler, “The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary, différences 4 (Spring 1992): 133-71.