The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France Around 1200 (review)

The philosopher Guillaume de Conches wrote that sex is “natural and therefore not shameful, for it is a gift of creation. But our hypocritical varlets, averse to the word more than to the deed, run away from talking about such things.” ¹ This declaration, made in the 1140s, encapsulates much of John Baldwin’s magisterial study. In the first place, the book is about coitus and the essential concomitants of desire, pleasure and shame, and procreative potential; it does not diverge into love or mating as metaphor. The focus is on talking about sex, rather than on sexual practices—although the author, a model historian, never loses interest in the relation between word and deed. Speculation on the place of sex in human nature is central to the texts he examines, but he uncovers social parameters and implications far beyond the distinction between gentlemen and varlets.

Guillaume de Conches’s teaching was the major source for a didactic collection of problems, now commonly called the “Salernitan Questions,” that serves as the voice of the physicians for The Language of Sex. When a review concentrates on this voice in deference to the readers of the Bulletin, it does gross injustice to the richness of Baldwin’s insights, and particularly to the thoroughness and balance of his collation with four other discourses. A broad spectrum of late-twelfth-century culture is represented by the Latin treatises of moral theologians and grammarians or teachers of literature, and by the vernacular fantasies of the romances that entertained the nobility and the fabliaux that amused the lower aristocracy and urban commoners. The peasantry is deemed too brutish, not only for speaking, but even for hearing the language of sex.

The clerical background of the Salernitan Questions is evident in the terminology and scholastic dialectics as well as in some viewpoints shared with theology, including the linkage between coitus and offspring. Ecclesiastical positions may explain the lack or obliqueness of references to contraception and abortion. Ironically, the greatest contraceptive potential lay not in learned prescriptions but in the negative notions of sex that led Church authorities to approve fewer than a hundred days per year for reproductive intercourse. The authors of the Salernitan Questions parted with theologians in treating sexuality in a naturalistic framework. They broke new ground in their attempts to understand the psychology as well as the physiology of desire and pleasure.

It is somewhat misleading to characterize as “composed for learned physicians” (p. xix) a miscellaneous compendium that, though indebted to Constantinus Africanus and to the legacy of Salerno, belonged in the chronological and educational realm of phisica or natural philosophy. Student humor or pedagogical rhetoric may account for an illustrative classification of identified masters according to their libido and potency, which Baldwin takes quite literally (pp. 61 and 228). On the other hand, he misreads the ubiquitous humoral scheme when he identifies the hot and dry choleric temperament, rather than the cold and dry melancholic, as most repugnant to coitus (p. 176). On a more strictly medical aspect, the statement that “any consideration of venereal disease” is missing in the Salernitan Questions (p. 311 n. 10) overlooks several questiones on leprosy, and particularly one responsio in which the first symptoms are said to appear on the penis.

Quibbles aside, The Language of Sex is a significant contribution to medieval studies, to the history of sexuality, and even to the understanding of human nature. It should stimulate numerous further inquiries, for example into the sexual vocabulary adopted by vernacular translators of medical texts in subsequent centuries. Baldwin, together with a distinguished cast of recent authors, can enlighten anyone who has overlooked the complex notions of body and gender in the centuries between the Greeks and Freud. His perceptive analysis of the ways people wrote and talked about “it,” with inclusion of the bluntest vernacularisms—interestingly, would one quote such “vulgar” words in...