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  • The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History by Patricia Simons
  • Alexandra Shepard
Patricia Simons. The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xv + 327 pp. Ill. $99.00 (978-1-107-00491-7).

In this excellent study, Patricia Simons finally makes comprehensible the conceptual framework that shaped understandings and experiences of the body that, she argues, have been largely obscured by both psychoanalytic theory and cultural history. While the book’s primary focus is men’s bodies, the relational foundations of sex and gender underpin the analysis to the extent that it entirely revises our understanding of both female and male physiology and anatomy in early modern Europe. Based on diverse sources from medical to popular literature and encompassing a wide range of visual and material culture, the analysis is alert to the interrelationship between representation and metaphor on the one hand and action and experience on the other, which affords mutual agency to the cultural and corporeal.

The main contention of the book is that modern assumptions privileging the phallus as the universal and hegemonic root of embodied masculinity have made historians blind to the fact that humoral theory located virility in the testicles rather than the penis. Simons coins the term “semenotics” to stress that it was the delivery of semen, rather than the act of penetration, that provided the guiding rationale for explanations and experiences of coitus and embodiment. This has resounding ramifications for the historicization of sexual difference before the era of sperm and ova, and for approaches to masculinity in the early modern past. First, by taking us beyond the “one-sex” model of a hierarchical continuum of difference represented by genital homology, Simons not only shows the coexistence of difference and sameness in medical constructions of sex, but also releases the female body from the strictures of a male mould. Properly contextualized, the one-sex model featured (often cursorily) in medical literature as a loose analogy [End Page 480] and a basic starting point rather than a coherent theory of sexual oneness. An “unequal two-seed theory” is proposed as a more historically accurate framework within which the parameters of sexual difference were established. Semenotics, while prioritizing men’s testicles, also produced a utero-centric model of the female body as a receptacle for the intermingling of (superior) male and (inferior) female seed that stemmed from complementarity rather than homology.

Second, Simons highlights the extent to which coitus was represented as pleasure-driven as opposed to being understood as solely or even primarily generative, while also cautioning against anachronistic assumptions that the mutual orgasm required for conception constituted a universally recognizable or constant event. Significantly, a close alliance between patriarchal masculinity and fatherhood is rejected, while early modern concepts of virility are linked to a far wider set of male privileges. Simons posits “projection” as the most fitting model for early modern male anatomy and patriarchal action, in terms of both corporeal signs such as ejaculation and facial hair as well as forceful action in public arenas.

Third, and most important, by locating masculine agency in projection (as opposed to penetration) Simons rejects accounts of masculinity that accord causal significance to anxiety stemming from bodily instability. The book offers a welcome and thorough critique of anxiety as an interpretative device by situating an analysis of embodied masculinity firmly within structures of power. Noting the implausibility that anxiety consequent on anatomical mutability should be gender-specific, Simons also argues that it was linked more to shoring up patriarchal power than to undermining it, and also counterbalanced by a humoral economy that privileged men at every turn. Besides producing superior seed, men were represented as valiant sexual agents with healing powers that constructed them as the “cure” required to maintain women’s health. Male sexual pleasure was deemed greater than women’s, despite misogynist representations of female sexual insatiability. The complexity of early modern embodiment did not necessarily produce instability, and principally constructed men as “performers of power more than vessels of anxiety” (p. 4).

Building on the cultural historical contribution that “sex and gender are not neatly...

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