What We Don’t Know about Early Modern Sex

In Christopher Marlowe’s (itself incomplete) Hero and Leander (1598), incompleteness lies behind seeming certitude; though they are keen to do something, Hero and Leander don’t know what they are supposed to be doing. ‘He askt, she gave, and nothing was denied’, Marlowe writes when the lovers first meet (D1^r).¹ This sounds final and all-encompassing, but then it is revealed ‘all’ they have done is hold hands, defying, perhaps, our common expectation of what a romantic and sexual climax is supposed to look like. Later, during their first night together, Marlowe tells us that, though the lovers ‘toy’, Hero remains a virgin; Leander ‘as a brother with his sister toyed | Supposing nothing else was to be done’. At one point during the night, Leander suspects that there is more to learn, ‘Albeit Leander rude in love and raw | Long dallying with Hero, nothing saw | That might delight him more, yet he suspected | Some amorous rites or other were neglected’ (D2^r).

When he first sees Hero, in a long attempt at persuasion (imbued with far more love of his own patriarchal rhetoric than of Hero) which argues that precious things are meant to be used not guarded, and that marriage is much more enjoyable than chastity, Leander states to Hero that his ‘goal’ is her ‘Virginitee’ (B1^r–C1^v). However, he also argues that she shouldn’t worry about losing her virginity, ‘Of that which hath no being, doe not boast, | Things that are not at all, are never lost’. Leander has a goal but, also, that goal does not exist. This foreshadows the fact that, later, knowledge of what specific sexual ‘rite’ would be involved in achieving this goal eludes him (B4^v). Leander has a lot of similes for virginity to hand (such as brass ornaments, mines, and jewels), but despite this capacity to refer words to more words, it seems that he speaks of losing virginity without knowing what act this might refer to.

‘He askt, she gave, and nothing was denied’ – in this exchange of asking and giving, which presupposes a precise request and a corresponding answer, something ungraspable nevertheless exceeds the framework. Leander asks for something definite and Hero grants it. But there’s something more, ‘neglected’, implicitly unknowable, which he, or Marlowe, cannot ask for or describe. There may also be a pun, of course, ‘nothing’ being a slang term for vagina and also a word that suggests the ‘nothing’ that Leander wants Hero to believe her virginity to be. She ‘gave’ something, but withheld ‘nothing’: the very thing that Leander declares himself to be most interested in.

Marlowe tells us that Leander finally realises what to do by doing it: it isn’t talk but action ‘which taught him all that elder lovers know’ (D2^v), and I have started my review with this example because (though she does not discuss Marlowe specifically), this is the sort of early modern moment that Valerie Traub’s new book can help us to unpick in new and interesting ways. Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns focuses on what it might mean to think with and through sex, not just about sex. To make sex constitutive of knowledge means, for Traub, also acknowledging when it is simply unknowable, rather than attempting to counter this unknowability by creating histories and definitions of ‘sexual attitudes and practices’ (p. 1). This book schematises historical and literary scholarship into a theory of (not-)knowing that is self-reflective both about Traub’s own practice and more generally about any profession or practice that involves writing about and teaching the topic of early modern sex. Traub emphasises knowledge relations and exchanges over definitions and labels, ‘recasting the issues as ones of epistemology and pedagogy rather than subjectivity and identity, of knowledge and ignorance rather than norms and their transgression, of erotic dissatisfaction as much as erotic pleasure’ (p. 34). Here, the inherent unknowability of sex...