Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (review)

This is a fine collection of ten essays on Renaissance syphilis that includes an introduction by the editor, Kevin Siena. Siena organizes the collection into three sections according to responses to sexual disease: (1) scientific and medical; (2) literary and metaphorical; and (3) institutional and policing. Although one might have wished that he had eliminated overlap more strictly—introductory paragraphs especially tend to go over the same material—there is sufficient new material in each essay to hold the reader's interest.

In what is the most cited essay by the other authors in this volume, Jon Arrizabalaga finds evidence contradicting Temkin's view that the French disease was not considered venereal before 1520. He shows that, by 1520, Gaspar Torrella had stressed the need to avoid coitus with people infected with the French disease—in short, it did not take three decades to make the link between the disease and sexuality. In "Charlatans and Venereal Disease in Italy," David Gentilcore looks at the wide band of non-academic healers or empirics, some of whom were called ciarlatani (which was not necessarily an opprobrious designation, but an administrative or descriptive one) or, if they cured the French disease by hothouses, stufaroli. While charlatans rarely cured the disease (as licensed charlatans, they were not allowed to), they did sell medicines for it. Before the background of Emperor Maximilian's "Blasphemy Edict" at the Diet of Worms, Darin Hayton then elucidates Joseph Grünpeck's astrological explanations of why the disease struck when it did and why it affected the genitals. In "(Po)X Marks the Spot: How to 'Read' 'Early Modern' 'Syphilis' in The Three Ladies of London," Jonathan Gil Harris questions, as his quotation marks indicate, the appropriateness of terms and theorizes the subject. He is also concerned with and about "traps stumbled into by some scholars" and pleads for a historical formalist reading that "attends to Conscience's spots not for a single reality external to them, but for the skein of intratextual relations embedded in them" (129). Attending to satirical English works, Roze Hentschell then shows how pervasively xenophobic notions of the French disease were; fear of infection through clothing blended with antipathy against French sartorial fashions. In a perfect transition, Diane Cady extends these subjects in her essay, "Linguistic Dis-Ease: Foreign Language as Sexual Disease in Early Modern England," beyond xenophobic to what might be called xeno-homophobic topics, and shows how early willingness to accept foreign terms into the English language gave way to associations of foreign language with femininity, otherness, disease, bestiality, and monstrosity. Domenico Zanrè then returns to parodic and satiric topics as he tries to unmask the author of some vitriolic sixteenth-century texts from Tuscany, one of which presents Petrarch and Laura infected with the French disease. In "Quarantining Beauty," Laura J. McGough argues that, while beauty was looked on favorably (even as a sign of God's favor), extreme beauty was associated with vice. She proves her point admirably from the institutional records in early modern Venice: hospitals treating the French disease for women made beauty an official requirement for admission. Returning to the perceived nexus of French disease and sodomy, Mary Hewlett investigates to what degree the authorities of Lucca treated the mal francese as a disease specifically spread by anal intercourse. Beside male intercourse, "sodomy" here meant also heterosexual anal intercourse, which Hewlett calls somewhat awkwardly "erotic sodomy." She retraces how the government of Lucca recruited agents, medical personnel, and prostitutes in order to stop both sodomy and syphilis. Finally, Kevin Siena investigates the curious—and characteristically early modern—nexus among charity, shame, and punishment in London hospitals, where syphilis patients were segregated to the "foul" wards (similar to the continental examples of such hospitals in Germany and Italy). Siena reports that in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, when almost one of every four patients seems to have been...