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

Before the rise of modern germ theory, many diseases identified themselves with their social context or striking features: the English sweating sickness, childbed fever, the Black Death, and Saint Vitus’ dance, to name a few. Yet no malady suggested its context better than syphilis when it hit Europe in the late fifteenth century. The “foul disease” and “lues venereal” pointed to its sexual-moral nature, of course, but when dubbed by various peoples as “the French disease,” “the Italian disease,” “the Christian disease,” “the Polish disease,” or “the British disease,” it identified itself as an import from outside and from the “other.” Sins of the Flesh, an interdisciplinary collection in cultural studies, illuminates how “sexual disease,” as it is called here, was virtually inseparable from the politics and rhetoric of identity whether national or individual. As editor Kevin Siena explains: “Because the body was a primary metaphor for nation, the urge to preserve a clean national body and the anxiety of possible infection from without gave sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentators a powerful discourse to help formulate early notions of national identity” (15). Several of the ten essays engage this dynamic between the sexual and the social, and while the collection demonstrates striking regional and national differences in the institutional management of sexual disease, early modern Europeans maintained fairly consistent explanatory models that ultimately emphasized the polluting power of the other and the alien. It will not surprise readers that national and religious rivals were viewed as the source of disease or that the imagined conduit into one’s community was via gendered and sexual others, most often prostitutes and homosexuals.

Kevin Siena, the author of Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor: London’s “Foul Wards” 1600–1800 (2004), opens Sins of the Flesh with a compelling introduction calling for more widespread consideration of sexual disease, which comprised, he argues, “one of early modern Europe’s most significant cultural markers” (8). In part this was because venereal disease was new to Europeans in the 1490s, coincident with international warfare and rivalry, not to mention the conquest of the Americas; thus, the pox registered changing international boundaries and relationships in a dramatic, corporeal way. Siena and his contributors are not interested in retrospectively diagnosing early moderns or focusing on epidemiology. Instead, this collection focuses on meanings and representations of disease and proposes that the pox must therefore be understood on its own early modern terms rather than ours.

Jon Arrizabalaga’s “Medical Responses to the ‘French Disease’” serves as a highly effective primer in explaining contemporary theories of illness and health in the period. His exploration of humoral, astrological, and theological explanations for sexual diseases sets the stage for the other articles that emphasize the dynamics between an individual’s body and the social, between personal suffering and broad cultural meaning: “Disease was essentially the result of a humoural imbalance provoked by a concatenation of external and internal, remote and proximate causes operating according to an open and plural pattern, within a framework of permanent interrelations between macro and microcosmos” (35). Arrizabalaga identifies an interwoven theological question whose answer, according to other essays in the collection, dramatically altered cultural response to sexual disease: did people suffer because of “divine punishment for sin or undeserved calamities sent upon innocents to prove the sincerity of faith” (37)?

Given the many potential explanations for corporeal suffering that the humoral scheme and theology could generate, the very first generation of observers in the fifteenth century did not even agree that the pox was a sexual disease or that remedies would include prohibiting sexual relations. Indeed, as several contributors here show, the Renaissance understanding of the body and balance led some to encourage sexual relations—particularly with uninfected partners. Early moderns understood corporeal suffering in general as a state of internal and personal imbalance that could best be restored through diet, active sexual relations, and other...