Sex Before Sex Ed: Sexual Practice, Pedagogy, and Affect in Early Modern England

Abstract

Sex Before Sex Ed excavates and analyzes the quotidian practices through which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English women and men learned how to have sex. Historians of sexuality have long been concerned with understanding how sex and sexuality were imbricated in medical, scientific, religious, economic, aesthetic, and moralizing discourses, and with how various early modern institutions—principally the church, the state, and the stage—leveraged sexuality’s discursive reach for their own ends. In short, the history of sexuality has been a history of sexuality’s social meanings. In this dissertation I shift the scholarly focus away from what sex meant and toward how sex was practiced. Analyzing a wide variety of written and visual materials—poems, fictional prose, and playscripts; paintings and engravings; autobiographies and diaries; medical treatises and ethnographic writing; and parish and court records—I argue that early modern sexual pedagogy was a fundamentally embodied and affective process. By attending to quotidian, learned sexual practices, I develop an historically portable concept: the “sex life.” Colloquial use of the term “sex life” usually takes the form of a value judgment: one’s sex life is either good or bad. The “sex life,” however, also indexes a whole host of assumptions about how sex weaves itself—mentally, physically, emotionally, and politically—through everyday life. I analyze early modern sex lives and the pedagogies they entail in two sections, each consisting of two chapters. The first section considers what I call “sexual logistics,” that is, how early moderns physically performed the actions they considered “sexual.” Chapter 1 analyzes sexual-logistical knowledge in a wide variety of representations of women guiding men’s penises into their vaginas, a practice I call “penis guiding.” Here, I analyze lines from Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture” (1640) in the sex advice manual known as Aristotle’s Masterpiece (1690), as well as Thomas Nashe’s “A Choise of Valentines” (1592), Pietro Aretino’s Sonetti Lussuriosi (1527), the anonymous The School of Venus (1680), and the memoirs of John Cannon (1740s). Reading the Restoration closet drama Sodom (1670s), Chapter 2 turns to the material conditions within which early moderns performed a variety of penetrative sexual acts. There I focus specifically on the use of sexual lubricants, tracing their use past Sodom and into earlier city comedies like John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (1605) and Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611), as well as Richard Eden’s English translation of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s travel narrative, the Decades of the New World or West India (1555). The second section of the dissertation then turns to the affects that subtend sexual and romantic relationships, and to the ways that drama can stage such affective negotiations. Chapter 3 analyzes Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599) and John Lyly’s Galatea (1588/92) for the ways in which they represent the affective literacies and miscommunications that structure female-female relationships on the stage. Chapter 4 then turns to John Fletcher’s The Island Princess (1621) in order to demonstrate how sexual affects produce and are produced by the racism the play stages. In a brief conclusion, I suggest that implicit in my focus on the quotidian practices that constituted the sex lives of the early moderns is a critique of queer theory’s insistence on anti-normativity, since a focus on “life” need not be confined to an opposition to norms.