The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History by Patricia Simons (review)

This is a book about semen. Male semen. Semen in fact is so central in constructing the flow of The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe that it requires the invention of a hermeneutic term of its own: semenotics. The author argues that the sperm-oriented culture of today was not present in the Sixteenth century, and this not simply because there was no knowledge of sperm prior to the application of the microscope to fluids, but because from a historical point of view the idea of the phallus as central to everybody’s desire is relatively novel.

As we know, premodern medicine was grounded on Hippocratic and Galenic understandings of the body as a repository of humors. Good health meant a perfect balance of four humors, but this balance could be achieved only through their proper management. Expelling noxious humors through menses and sweat, for example, was beneficial to the body, but so was managing semen: too many exertions for the sake of Venus were harmful and men were at risk of desiccating, but too few were hardly beneficial. Male semen was also important to women because it was understood that women received pleasure as a result of getting male seed into their womb. By concentrating on a semen and humor-centered construction of sex the author argues that the idea launched by Thomas Laqueur in his extremely influential book, Making Sex—that the male and the female body were seen as homologous until the 18^th century, and thus there was only one sex model operative in culture until then, the male, because the female was simply an inversion of the male—was already contested by the end of the Sixteenth century. In her view, by moving from anatomy to physiology it becomes clear that the male and female body were already ontologically distinct at that time and that masculinity was based not on possession of the penis alone (and on its capacity to engender) but on three factors: genital signs (including the testicles), tangible ways of behaving (such as the mode of pissing), and cultural demeanors (such as the way one talked, dressed, communicated, positioned himself in a group). Or, in her words, a man’spower “was grounded in projective, heated, active, semenotically potent and virile traits that were all considered natural.”

This rich argument, which relies upon an impressive array of sources and sound scholarship, already comes into focus in Chapter 1, “How to Be a Man in Modern Europe.” Here the author aims to capture the particularities of a hermaphroditic body, that of Elena/Eleno Cumano, who was assessed by medical authorities and by local neighbors as being alternatively male or female. It is by acting as a man, and not necessarily by giving a performance of masculinity through paternity, but by showing the range with which maleness expressed itself culturally (through bursting lances, spraying fluids such as urine and beer, displaying genitals, remarking on beards) that the gender of masculinity, to paraphrase the author, was tied at the time to a biologically sexed male. The next two chapters, “The Phallus: History and Humor,” and “Material Culture in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” trace the story and the history of the phallus—from illustrations of genital signifiers in Greek vases to pronouncements on its importance by Freud and Lacan—in order to argue that the anxiety that we associate today with the phallus as a symbol of masculinity was not so much present in the past because emphasis then was more on testicles, body heat, and fluids.

The second section of the book, “Projecting Male Sex: Models and Metaphors,” is comprised of five chapters that delve, often splendidly, into a review of sex and generation with emphasis on testicles rather than penis. The central argument—that it is historically untrue that gender was always seen as unstable in the past—leads the author to the core of her book about...