In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

This book is about men—and women—accused by their spouses of being impotent in an era and place when such an indictment could dissolve unconsummated marriages. In itself, each impotence trial seems to be a trivial example of recognizable sexual and marital problems. There are the tales of a pathetic nobleman who could not “get it up,” a wife wanting to escape a marriage she never agreed to, and a young man who accused himself of impotence in order to desert his pregnant wife and flee on a ship to Mexico. But impotence trials serve the historian as much more than lurid and tragic tales of everyday life.They were deliberate, well-documented events that enmeshed several important societal institutions (church courts, the law, marriage, and the practice of medicine) with fundamental aspects of daily life of early modern Europeans (sex, reproduction, gender, and property). Each trial involved issues that cut to the heart of the way early modern Europeans understood sex, religion, community, gender, and marriage. The authority of the church and its role as arbiter of the proper use of sex to order communities is revealed in the language of impotence cases. More importantly, the records of these trials allow us to see such practice at the level of commoners and in a parochial area of Europe: in this case, the Castilian/Basque borderlands of northern Spain. My curiosity about impotence trials, and history in general, has always been guided by the conviction that the broadening of human knowledge should never be impeded by cultural taboos, especially nothing as petty as prudishness, bashfulness, or attempts to maintain gender stereotypes. Nevertheless , a challenging feature of this project from the start has been the taboo against speaking about impotence. Few men want to think of the condition. Recently, for instance, a colleague told me he would rather talk about incontinence than impotence. But the word itself has lost some of its frightfulness, perhaps because most impotence has been recently conquered by pills. And after I had pronounced the word dozens of times publicly, it seemed less and less daunting to me, too. Whatever the reason, it is my conviction that the bashfulness about impotence has caused impotence trials to be historically minimized. These cases were not uncommon and were about much more than a simple sexual malady. Still, several intrepid historians—James Brundage, Natalie Z. Davis, Thomas Max Safley, Valeria Finucci, among others—have tackled the topic.  I first learned about the existence of early modern impotence trials from Jeffrey Merrick at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Speaking about early modern French sexuality, Merrick tangentially discussed impotence trials, drawing on Pierre Darmon’s work as well as his own research. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries impotence trials reached “epidemic” proportions, according to Darmon, and they often included proofs of potency that could range from doctors’ visits to a “trial by congress,” an attempt by the accused husband to copulate with his wife in front of a judge and witnesses, thus proving his potency. These men invariably failed. Surely, I thought at the time, this was proof that early modern society, when compared to our own, was an alien place that had little respect for private sexual life or the individual. A few years later, in , I met with Renato Barahona to discuss his work on early modern Spain and Vizcaya and my own research plans. While explaining his work on sexuality in early modern Spain (later published as Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, –), he mentioned that he had come across some impotence court cases in church archives in northern Spain and the Basque country. When I learned this I immediately knew that I wanted to tackle this research topic. In the summer of  I traveled to Calahorra (La Rioja), Spain, to visit its diocesan archive, which holds most of the church court business of that vast diocese for much of the past nine centuries. I expected to find the twelve or so cases briefly noted by Renato Barahona. In fact I found many times that number; there were eighty-three impotence cases between  and  alone. Most ranged between twenty to forty folios (paper leaves) in length. Many others, however, contained more than one hundred folios, and one in particular went on for four hundred folios. Supported by a Fulbright scholarship , I spent a year during – reading these and other cases in Spain. These rich sources give modern historians the means to better...

Share