Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England by Jennifer Evans (review)

This is a short and sweet book on the cultural place of aphrodisiacs in early modern England (1550–1780). Aphrodisiacs were used not only to provoke lust, but to promote conception, to treat infertility, and to stimulate menstruation; the chief significance of Evans’ book is in exploring how these issues were closely entwined in the medical and magical treatment of fertility problems in both sexes. Evans sets the context for her analysis by first examining readership and marketplace. Other chapter topics include infertility, lust and conception, magical causes and cures, and miscarriage and menstruation. Evans has looked at a range of published books, newspapers, and manuscript recipe books. She is upfront that her study is really only about how aphrodisiacs were understood, as “with the limited evidence presented in surviving early modern documents it is not possible to make any certain claims about the scale of the actual use of these substances” (p. 3). Her study is, nonetheless, intriguingly suggestive.

There is a core weakness in the book, however: its lack of breadth. This begins with Evans’ neglect of the wider European historiography, which is problematic given that she includes a number of translated primary sources by continental authors: how were they understood in their own languages and what was the distinct (if any) English usage of those texts? The field of scholarship on medieval and early modern fertility or sexual pleasure in Europe, moreover, is small, and Evans has consulted little of it beyond England. One notable exclusion from her bibliography, for example, is Patricia Simons’ The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe.¹

Evans’ interpretation of the primary sources also omits important context in places. For example, although she situates her topic successfully within the context of humoralism, she omits any discussion of iatromechanics, iatrochemistry, or vitalism—all issues that were crucial to the changing medical understanding of sexuality and reproduction in this period. She touches on the importance of salt in men’s seed when discussing the work of Isbrand van Diemerbroeck or Theopile Bonet (pp. 56, 79) and vitalism in Helkiah Crooke’s thought (p. 77), but never discusses the wider significance in terms of medical shifts. She does not consider the growing eighteenth century emphasis on loose fibres as a cause of infertility and impotence. But how a medical writer understood infertility directly shaped the remedies on offer.

Although Evans claims that she is looking at 1550–1780 (p. 29), her scope is much smaller, with her real strength lying in the seventeenth century. In the chapter on “Enchanted Privities,” for example, she skillfully considers magic in terms of post-Reformation changes but does not examine Enlightenment intellectual shifts at all. Her bibliography lists only fourteen pre-1600 sources, and the bulk of her eighteenth century material is from the first part of the century. The reader is left with a sense of fixedness for the period, given that Evans’ analysis does not engage substantially with changes and continuities. There is nothing wrong with focusing on a shorter time frame, such as the seventeenth century, and, in fact, doing so would have allowed her to deepen her analysis of a fascinating topic.

The subject matter will be appealing for undergraduates, as well as for more advanced researchers. Evans has made a lively contribution to the wider scholarship on sexuality, gender, and fertility.