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: The Prosecution and Sexual Persecution of Impotent Men El querer y no poder es más antiguo que el peer. (To want to and not be able to, is more ancient than the fart.) —Spanish saying¹ Traditionally, Catholic Church courts have been blamed for the persecution, exposure, and humiliation of impotent men. Few events in early modern courts seem as alien to modern sensibilities as impotence trials. These legal procedures can strike the modern reader as violations of individual integrity and sexual privacy. Historian Pierre Darmon, for instance, does not hide his consistent horror when he writes about how Parisian judges probed and exposed the intimate lives of husbands and wives under France’s ancien régime: “the questions of the Church judge during the cross-examinations had the cutting edge of a scalpel, and the incisions made so carelessly into the already scarred past of the couple were clearly an exercise in mental torture.”² Darmon ’s blunt anger is the product of our own age. His clear respect for sexual privacy clashed with the early modern sentiments he read in the court documents . Unlike Darmon, the common person in the early modern period understood sex to be a public concern. Institutions and individuals of early modern Europe yearned for a well-ordered society, a society in which change was rare and everyone acted according to their place in a well-defined hierarchy . The rights and privacy of an individual were of secondary concern. When sex was not enjoyed in its legitimate place—the marital bed—and by spouses with one another, it could always cause social disorder. Illegitimate pregnancy, violence, bigamy, and venereal disease all disrupted the Christian peace that Spanish communities idealized but obviously never achieved. The sexual function ordered marriage, placing husband over wife and parents over the sexual product: children. So even though charging men in public with sexual incapacity may appear bizarre or barbarous to modern readers, the impotence trial was a logical part of early modern institutional efforts to ensure that only legitimate individuals entered into unions that would, in turn, create future legitimate individuals. Even though we cannot say that impotence litigation was common in early modern Europe, it clearly was common knowledge that impotent men should not marry. The famous Martin Guerre case demonstrates that nearly everyone knew a sexually unconsummated union could be annulled. As already mentioned, the Basque Martin Guerre was impotent during the first eight years of his marriage. Urged on by her family, Guerre’s unsatisfied wife nearly went to court to press for an annulment. Clearly Guerre’s in-laws expected the marriage to be consummated, and when it was not, they knew enough about canon law to suggest ending it.³ Ever more evidence shows that impotence trials were not rare. The earliest law code allowing divorce on grounds of impotence can be traced back to Justinian.⁴ Catherine Rider has recently demonstrated that several famous medieval impotence trials, especially that of Philip Augustus of France in , likely increased the use of the impotence plea to gain annulments.⁵ She has also documented twenty-two cases of magically induced impotence between  and .⁶ For the early modern period , Thomas Max Safley counted  impotence trials between  and  in the Diocese of Constance.⁷ Guido Ruggiero and Joanne Ferraro have both documented several impotence cases in early modern Italy.⁸ María del Juncal Campo Guinea found twenty-seven cases of annulments based on impotence in the Diocese of Pamplona during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁹ According to Darmon, the years between  and  yielded twelve Parisian cases, but these were only those extraordinary cases appealed to the high court in that city.¹⁰ There were more than eighty-three cases between  and  in my own study of the Spanish Diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada. Considering the number of documents that have survived over the centuries, escaping fires, wars, mildew, worms, and premeditated destruction , it becomes apparent that even though impotence trials were not everyday events, they also were not rare. Any study that focuses on annulment cases brought on grounds of impotence must overcome the morbid curiosity they provoke; the very word “impotence ” elicits, to paraphrase Foucault on sex, a response of either shame or ridicule. The mere mention of impotence remains a taboo today, especially in the company of men, despite the publicity and popularity of the antiimpotence drugs of Pfizer Pharmaceutical and others. And yet the rich documentation of impotence trials reveals for the modern historian intimate lives and mentalities long forgotten...

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