Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England by Jennifer Evans (review)

Jennifer Evans’s Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England, in its extensive study of gynecological treatises from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provides an important intervention into assumptions about the subversive quality of aphrodisiacs and abortifacients. Rather than reading the imbibing of these substances as women’s taking control of their bodies and their sexuality, Evans considers these medicines as having “a legitimate place in medical treatments for infertility” (174) in the early modern period. Most of her scholarship works to articulate that “legitimate place” through citing print midwifery treatises and other medical texts, but she also calls upon broadside ballads, manuscript recipes, pornographic literature, and witchcraft pamphlets to argue for the presence that “printed medical literature” had in less authoritative discourse and, perhaps, vice versa.

Evans’s work is most impressive in its survey of the medical literature, which includes not only the well-known midwifery manuals of Nicholas Culpepper and Jane Sharp but also more obscure anonymous texts. Occasionally her analysis will distinguish between works by licensed practitioners and those by others, but the accumulation of examples across the print record provides persuasive evidence supporting the ubiquity of the practices she describes. Through these practices, early modern individuals expressed the belief that sexual arousal and fulfillment were the keys to fertility; thus fertility itself, not arousal and fulfillment, was the goal of undertaking these practices. In this discussion, Evans considers aphrodisiacs for both men and women as addressing the same problem — infertility — thus providing a corrective to the contention that medical discourse placed the sole blame for infertility on the woman. Similarly, emmenagogues, medicines that “bring down the terms” or menstruation, were conceived as part of a regimen that established regular menstrual health and therefore contributed to women’s fertility.

The legitimization of these treatments in medical discourse serves several purposes in Evans’s analysis. While it challenges suppositions about the oppositional significance of such practices as undertaken by women, it foregrounds infertility as a central concern in the early modern household. What is more, in giving aphrodisiacs a lawful place in medical discourse, Evans is able to analyze the variety of sexual stimulants described in the literature, including those that follow the “doctrine of signatures” (116) in their resemblance to the generative organs and those that dispel dark magic causes of infertility, as well as the more often discussed Galenic remedies that heat the body. Her analysis thus reveals how the use of traditional medicine was combined with the consultation of classical authorities in fertility treatments. One of the most significant implications of the textual background she describes is the reconsideration of witchcraft treatises. Rather than see the witch as healer as first-wave feminist analysis often did, Evans’s analysis looks at the ways in which a witch’s curse was thought to prohibit a couple from further procreation. In doing so, Evans is able to consider the cultural anxieties about infertility that permeate these treatises.

The limits of “legitimate” discourse, however, can also be felt in this analysis. Given the work that Mary Fissell has been conducting on the readership of medical texts, in particular Aristotles Master-piece — an early modern text Evans cites — these books could be read against their intended purpose. Yet Evans gives little evidence of how these books, in the various ways they conceived of their readership, may have been read. Similarly, while her analysis occasionally calls upon manuscript recipe books, the examples she cites are those that derive from the print text record. Evans does cite the groundbreaking work of Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell in asserting the “range of inputs” in the “kitchen physick” (45) of the time, but this range is confined to Evans’s analysis largely of the print record. This is particularly problematic given the predominance of male authors in the print record, for manuscript sources provide clear documentation of women who took care of women in gynecological crises...