Contraception largely remained a private matter and not an issue of government concern
in early modern Europe, but other sexual practices were clearly public issues and could
become criminal matters. As we saw in chapter 2 , unmarried women who became pregnant
were viewed as guilty of fornication and thus merited punishment; if they miscarried
or their infant happened to die, they were increasingly open to charges of infanticide.
Before the sixteenth century, church and secular courts heard very few cases of infanticide,
as jurists recognized that physicians could not make an infallible distinction between a
stillbirth, a newborn who had died of natural causes, and one who had been murdered.
Though there was no improvement in diagnostic techniques, this leniency changed in the
sixteenth century, when infanticide became legally equated with murder in most areas of
Europe and so carried the death penalty, often specifi ed as death by drowning.
A French royal edict promulgated in 1556 carried this even further, requiring all unmarried
women to make an offi cial declaration of their pregnancy and decreeing the
death penalty for any woman whose infant died before baptism after a concealed pregnancy
or delivery, whether or not there was evidence of actual infanticide. A similar statute
was passed in England in 1624 and in Scotland in 1690, and in various German states
throughout the seventeenth century. Sometimes this surveillance of unmarried women
bordered on the pornographic; an eighteenth-century German physician suggested, for
example, that all unmarried women between the ages of fourteen and forty-eight should
be viewed monthly at a public bath to see if their bodies showed any signs of pregnancy.
These stringent statutes were quite rigorously enforced in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries; more women were executed for infanticide in early modern Europe
than any other crime except witchcraft. In the Spanish Netherlands, women found
guilty of infanticide were generally also accused of witchcraft – the reasoning being
that only the devil could lead a mother to kill her child – and executed in gruesome
ways, such as being impaled on a stake and then buried alive, or having the offending
hand cut off before being drowned. In England the conviction rate went down
after 1680 when women successfully argued that they had not intended to kill the child
because they had prepared linen for it, or had killed it accidentally or through ignorance.
Executions for infanticide or presumed infanticide also decreased in other parts
of Europe in the eighteenth century, though the laws remained on the statute books.
Whether this represented a decrease in the number of infanticides or only a change
in enforcement is diffi cult to say, though there were more orphanages and foundling
homes available for infants. The death rate at such places was extremely high, however,
so that placing a child in them did not increase his or her life expectancy by much.
Selling sex for money was also increasingly criminalized. As we saw in chapter 6 ,
during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, licensed brothels in many cities
were closed, and national statutes declared prostitution illegal. Rulers did not have the
means to enforce these statutes, however, so illicit prostitution fl ourished, especially
in ports and other growing cities and wherever large professional armies were housed.
Many women combined occasional prostitution with other types of wage labor such
as laundering, serving in taverns, or selling at the public market, and increasingly all
unmarried poor women were suspected of prostitution. Religious and civic leaders regarded
prostitutes as worse than other criminals, for they seduced other citizens from
the life of moral order and discipline that authorities regarded as essential to a godly
community. Women who sold sex, and women who simply engaged in sex outside
of marriage, were “whores,” and portrayed extremely negatively in sermons, popular
plays, illustrations, and ballads. Sexual honor was a key element in women’s social
identity, so that calling someone or something a “whore” was a high insult. “Whore”
continued to be used to describe religious opponents; in the words of an English anti-
Catholic pamphlet from the 1680s, the Catholic Church was “a foul, fi lthy, old withered
harlot … the great Strumpet of all Strumpets, the Mother of Whoredom.” 4
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, large cities such as Paris and
Amsterdam organized police forces, which monitored taverns and streets, arresting
women suspected of selling sex. Women charged with prostitution were generally so
poor that punishment by fi ne was impossible, so they were imprisoned, punished corporally,
and then banished from the area; in England this banishment occasionally
included deportation to the colonies. Repeat offenders were sometimes executed, especially
if they were also involved in other sorts of crime or had previously been banished
and had broken their oath not to return to an area.
Prisons that housed prostitutes might also house other sorts of “fallen” women. In
many southern European cities, women charged with fornication or unseemly fl irting
might be locked up, often in institutions dedicated to Mary Magdalene, the New
Testament fi gure understood to be a repentant prostitute. Such houses also began to
admit women who were regarded as in danger of becoming prostitutes, women whose
husbands threatened them, poor young widows, or young women regarded as in danger
of losing their sexual honor. The ordinances stated explicitly that the women admitted
had to be pretty or at least have acceptable looks, for ugly women did not have to
worry about their honor. Many of these asylums were started by reforming bishops, who
also supported the establishment of orphanages and foundling homes (termed ospizi in
Italy), in which unwed mothers were required to leave their children, and in which they
might be required to work as wet-nurses for other infants along with nursing their own.
In such asylums, the women did not take vows and could leave to marry, but otherwise
they were much like convents, with the women following a daily regimen of work and
prayer. Some of them stressed penitence and moral reform while others were more purely
punitive, closer to prisons than convents. This mixture of punishment and penitence
may be seen very clearly in the Parisian women’s prison of the Salpêtrière. In 1658, Louis
XIV ordered the imprisonment there of all women found guilty of prostitution, fornication,
or adultery, with release only coming once the priests and sisters in charge determined
the inmate was truly penitent and had changed her ways. Imprisoning women for
sexual crimes marks the fi rst time in Europe that prison was used as a punishment rather
than simply as a place to hold people until their trial or before deportation. Such prisons
later became the model for similar institutions for men and young people – often specifi -
cally called “reformatories” – in which the inmate’s level of repentance determined to a
great degree the length of incarceration. (This, of course, is still true for prisons and “reform
schools” today.) Thus the “Great Confi nement” was clearly gendered, with women
judged morally deviant imprisoned along with the mentally ill and vagrants.
SOURCE 23 August Tissot on onanlsm
Along with fornication, whoredom, and sodomy,
masturbation (termed “the sin of Onan” from
the biblical story of Onan who “spilled his seed
on the ground” rather than have sexual relations
with his brother’s widow) was seen as a sin in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Its
punishment was left in God’s hands, however,
and it was never viewed as a source of physical
harm. That changed in the eighteenth century.
In 1715, an anonymous pamphlet with the long,
self-explanatory title Onania, or the heinous sin
of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences
in both sexes considered, with spiritual and
physical advice to those who have already injured
themselves by this abominable practice was
published in London. It was republished and expanded
in more than twenty editions, and widely
read. One of its most avid readers was Samuel-
August Tissot, a Swiss medical doctor, who
published a number of medical treatises in Latin
and French, several on the topic of what came
to be known as “onanism.” His Onanism, or a
physical discussion of the ailments produced by
masturbation, fi rst appeared in Latin in 1758 and
then in French in an expanded edition in 1760,
and in a third and even more expanded edition
in 1764. English, German, Italian, and Dutch
translations appeared. Tissot regards masturbation
as a moral peril, but even more strikingly as
a physical danger:
[It will cause in men] a general wasting of the
machine; the weakening of all the corporal
sense and all the faculties of the soul; the
loss of imagination and memory; imbecility;
contempt; shame; the resulting ignominy;
the functions that are disturbed, halted,
painful; long, deplorable, bizarre and disgusting
illnesses; sharp and always renewed
pains … a perceptible reduction of strength,
of memory and even of reason; blurred vision,
all the nervous disorders, all types of
gout and rheumatism, weakening of the
organs of generation, blood in the urine,
disturbance of the appetites, headaches, and
a great number of other disorders … [Masturbators
have] a continual tension of the
mind, always occupied by the same project
[so that] the part of the brain that is thus
active, makes an effort that can be compared
to a muscle that is stretched too long and too
hard. Worn out by continual fatigue, these
patients are affl icted by all the maladies of
the brain, melancholy, catalepsy, imbecility,
loss of reason, weakening of the nervous
system, and a host of similar ills. The shame
that follows them infi nitely increases their
misery [and leads to] the loosening of fi bers,
the slowing of circulation, imperfect digestions,
nutritional lack, obstructions…spasms,
convulsions, paralyses, pains, an infi nite
increase in anguish…
The troubles experienced by women are just
as explicable as those experienced by men.
The humor they lose being less precious, less
perfected than male sperm, its loss does not
perhaps weaken them as quickly, but when
they indulge excessively, their nervous system
being weaker and naturally more inclined to
spasm, the troubles are more violent.
(Onanisme, 1764 edition)
Tissot reported on a young watchmaker he was
called to treat, who had been healthy until he
began masturbating:
I found less a living being than a cadaver
lying on straw, thin, pale, exuding a
loathsome stench, almost incapable of
movement. A pale and watery blood
often dripped from his nose, he drooled
continually; subject to attacks of diarrhea,
he defecated in his bed without noticing
it…Mental disorder was equally evident;
without ideas, without memory, incapable
of linking two sentences, without refl ection,
without fear for his fate…Thus sunk below
the level of a beast, a spectacle of unimaginable
horror, it was diffi cult to believe he
had once belonged to the human race…He
died after several weeks.
To combat this peril, Tissot recommended milk,
exercise, clean air, and cold baths, but primarily
avoidance. Tissot’s work was extremely infl uential,
cited by physicians all over Europe during the
century after it appeared, who added observations
drawn from their own patients. His work formed
the basis of the article on masturbation in the
1781 Encyclopedia Britannica; doctors devised
metal rings, electrical alarms, and special garments
to keep their patients from the “solitary
vice”; and surgeons occasionally performed
penile and vaginal surgery. Child care manuals
advised mothers to tie children’s hands. By the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
masturbation was linked with imperialism; young
men had been given “a sacred trust for carrying
on the race,” wrote Lord Baden-Powell, the
founder of the Boy Scouts, who warned “you are
throwing away the seed that has been handed
down to you as a trust instead of keeping it and
ripening it for bringing a son to you later on”
(Scouting for Boys, 1930). The anti-masturbatory
campaign has sometimes been labeled a “panic”
or a “hysteria,” but it is important to recognize
that it was promoted by highly educated physicians
and scientists, not naïve villagers. Warnings about
the dangers of masturbation were directed to, and
accepted by, sophisticated urban residents, whose
interest in new medical discoveries was a sign of
their modernity.
(Quotations taken from Jean Stengers and Anne van
Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror,
trans. by Kathryn Hoffman [New York: Palgrave, 2001],
pp. 65, 66, 70, 72–4, 146.)
Same-sex relations, termed “sodomy” or “buggery,” were even more deviant than
whoredom in the minds of many clerics and jurists, because they could never lead
to procreation, and thus broke God’s commandment to “be fruitful and multiply.”
They were therefore linked with heresy, and, as one German jurist commented,
“such a monster [ Unmensch ] is called a heretic, and generally punished as a heretic,
by fi re.” 5 These attitudes were shared by Protestant and Catholic authorities, but
enforcement of sodomy laws was sporadic and selective, as was the enforcement of
so many laws. Some authorities were less concerned about sodomy than about other
types of sexual misconduct, because same-sex relations did not lead to a child who
might create a public scandal or require public support. Most male same-sex relations
seem to have occurred between a superior and inferior, such as an older man
and a younger one, or a master and a servant. The dominant individual was generally
married and heterosexually active, with his homosexual activities not viewed as
upsetting the social order.
Alongside this age-based homosexuality, in the late seventeenth century homosexual
subcultures began to develop in a few large cities such as London, Paris, and
Amsterdam, with special styles of dress, behavior, slang terms, and meeting places.
These networks brought together men of different social classes and backgrounds, but
did not necessarily involve a dominant and subordinate partner. This was a new type
of same-sex relationship, involving men interested only in other men, rather than the
traditional structures in which the dominant male was also heterosexually active. Some
men began to dress and act effeminately, at least in private, with wigs and clothing even
fancier than those worn by most well-to-do men, and distinctive gestures. They met
in special houses for sexual relations and socializing. In England such men were called
“mollies,” a word used originally for prostitutes, and the areas of town where mollies
gathered were also frequented by female prostitutes and their customers. By the late
eighteenth century, these effeminate men began to describe themselves as having a
“condition” or “way of being” that was different from other men: as having what we
might term a “homosexual identity.”
The policing of homosexual activities could be intrusive, especially in cities. In
London, the Society for the Reformation of Manners, founded in 1690 as a private
group with a paid staff that would bring complaints regarding drunkenness, swearing,
prostitution, and other moral offenses to the attention of authorities, organized
raids on molly-houses. Police in Paris watched and kept records on men suspected of
sodomy, using spies and informers, including clergy to spy on other clergy; typical
punishment was being forced to stay awake for a few days in custody, though occasionally
sterner measures were ordered. The persecution of sodomites was most severe in
the Dutch Republic, where there was a major waves of arrests in the 1730s leading to
interrogations with torture, secret denunciations, life-long imprisonments, and about
200 executions.
Women were not immune from sodomy accusations and trials, although there were
only a handful in all of Europe during the early modern period. In part this was because,
in the minds of most male authorities, true sexual intercourse involved penetration
by a penis, so that female–female sex was not really sex. The cases that did come
to trial generally involved women who wore men’s clothing, used a dildo or other device
to effect penetration, or married other women. The horror with which they were
regarded sprang more from the fact that they had usurped a man’s social role than
that they had been attracted to another woman. Female–female desire was increasingly
portrayed in poetry, drama, pornography, medical literature, and the visual arts, however,
sometimes coded as passionate friendship and sometimes as suspicious sexual
deviance. Women themselves expressed powerful same-sex emotions in letters and poetry,
though there is no evidence of the female equivalent of a molly-house.
The enforcement of many sexual laws was intermittent, and rarely applied to the upper
classes, who continued to have extra-marital affairs of all types, generally with little
social sanction. In Spain, nobles were expected to have children out of wedlock as well
as in, because fathering many children was a sign of virility. The “reformation of manners”
did shape extra-marital relations among the elite, however. Elite men sought the
company of well-educated and refi ned women rather than streetwalkers; such women
were generally dignifi ed with the term “courtesan,” a word that originated at the pre-
Reformation papal court. Courtesans such as Veronica Franco (1546–91) became known
for their poetry, while others, such as Ninon de Lenclos (1615–1705), were known for
their connections to famous writers. Kings and high nobles often had an offi cial mistress
or two whose standing at court and family infl uence were enhanced, rather than
lessened, through their sexual relations with the monarch. Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson,
Madame de Pompadour (1721–64), was just such a maîtresse en titre to Louis XV of
France, the third woman to have this title. She was an important patron of the arts and
a skilled courtier as well as sexual partner, and her role eventually included choosing
younger sexual partners for the king. Such courtesans were often glamorized in plays
and poetry, and one, Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de Maintenon (1635–1719), the last
offi cial mistress of Louis XIV of France, even became the wife of the king, though she
was never named queen.
Extramarital relations among the elite occasionally included same-sex ones, a situation
that has been best studied for the French court. King Henry III (ruled 1574–89) visited
courtesans when he traveled to Venice, but also wore women’s clothing to balls and
parties and surrounded himself with male favorites, his so-called mignons . Philippe
d’Orléans (1640–1701), the brother of Louis XIV, regularly cross-dressed and had homosexual
affairs, though he also married twice and had children with both wives.
The goings-on at court were avidly reported in scurrilous pamphlets and broadsides,
though many of the stories they told were patently false. Marie Antoinette, the wife of
Louis XVI, was accused in a series of pamphlets of being insatiable and debauched
in her sexual desires, engaging in incestuous and lesbian affairs, and killing children.
Paris police did not send spies to court or make arrests at the royal household, but this
sexual demonization of Marie Antoinette, along with reports of her lavish spending,
gambling, and seeming unconcern for the people of France, contributed to growing
hostility toward the monarchy in the 1780s.
The body of any queen, and not just that of Marie Antoinette, was a matter of great
public concern in early modern Europe, for only through that body – or that of another
female relative – would a ruling dynasty continue. British writers during the reign
of Queen Anne (ruled 1702–14), who had no children who lived to adulthood despite
eighteen pregnancies, remarked – often in pamphlets published anonymously – on
the problems created by depending on the bodies of women for political continuity.
The body of a king was also a public body, which both represented the nation and was
expected to father an heir. Political theorists, in fact, sometimes talked about the “king’s
two bodies,” one his physical body that lived and died, and the other the body of the
realm, which continued. Today we might call this split between public and private life a
distinction between the kingship and the king. Queens also had two bodies. Catherine
II of Russia (ruled 1762–96), whose sexuality was as much a matter of gossip as Marie
Antoinette’s, had three children by several of her many lovers; only the one born while
her husband was still alive was publicly acknowledged, however, and her husband was
offi cially regarded as the father. Even for those at the pinnacle of society, whether one
was born in or out of wedlock mattered tremendously.
World History
