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: Impotent Women, Discarded Wives Fría es y más que fría la que ni pare ni cría. (Cold and colder still is she who neither bears nor rears children.) —Spanish saying¹ As with men, but more so, societies have defined women by their bodies and their sexuality (e.g., virgin, wife, prostitute). So the fact that women were prosecuted for sexual impotence may not be all that surprising, even though impotence has most often been described as a male curse. Indeed, descriptions of impotence in early modern Spanish dictionaries refer exclusively to men.² The debates about women’s bodies in female impotence trials reveal three important ways women’s sexuality fits into the early modern worldview. Foremost was the uterus’s economic role in creating legitimate new generations . Without these new people, of course, there would be no one to continue the life of the community, care for the elderly, and pray for the souls of the dead.³ Second, men’s licit use of women sexually in marriage maintained the male socio-sexual order. Third, women’s sexuality and genitalia were thought to be connected to greater supernatural and physiological forces, beyond the comprehension of men. The church court could define women as “impotent,” and even “castrated,” because such language clearly resulted from typical early modern concepts of the female sex.⁴ Early modern women could be and were determined to be sexually impotent because their sexual organs were considered to be potent. Early modern concepts of female sexuality imbued women with considerable power in their sex. Between  and  the bishop’s court decided eight cases of wives charged with impotence. It also heard one case against an allegedly castrated woman. Seven of the eight women charged with impotence came from rural Spanish villages, and only two of the eight women came from the Basque area north of the Ebro River. Spanish doctors, surgeons, and midwives of the period generally referred to female biology using male terms. They regularly cited scholastic authorities on female sexual anatomy, including ancients like Galen and Aristotle, as well as moderns like canonist Thomas Sánchez or medical jurist Paolo Zacchia. Like men, “impotent” women could not participate in the penetrative sex act using the “natural” sexual members;⁵ like men, in order to conceive a woman had to emit a white, foamy seed during coitus; and like men, women had “testicles” rather than ovaries. The clitoris, were it to be recognized at all, and it never was in these cases, might have been explained away as a diminutive penis.⁶ The Spanish functionaries of the court and its medical experts employed what today is seen as a deficient male anatomical vocabulary to discuss women’s genitalia and sex. These Spaniards, then, were steeped in the medical scholasticism that still dominated education in Salamanca and Valladolid (as well as Oxford and Cambridge, for that matter). Like Galen and Aristotle many centuries earlier, they understood women’s sex as imperfectly formed male genitalia.⁷ Early modern Spaniards, then, did not comprehend female sexual behavior and biology using any single logic. Attorneys selected the most appropriate understanding of the nature of female sex for their particular purposes in arguing a court case. Medical experts did the same when they tried to diagnose or explain a woman’s particular condition. When necessary, these legal and medical professionals described women as sexually unique and unlike men. As we will see, in some cases doctors portrayed women as having sexual powers men did not have. However, a medical expert would equate a wife’s sex with that of her husband if a lawyer’s case would better be supported by such an interpretation. Attorneys and the expert witnesses they employed used concepts of women that would make the best argument in court. They might just as easily argue that women were cold, moist males as that the female sex was unique and different from the male sex. The speaker or the writer of any particular statement about women often determined what lens they used to understand female sexuality. Husbands often focused on the reproductive mission of their wives’ sexuality. Many of the court functionaries were more concerned with the role of marital sex in preventing scandal, adultery, and illegitimacy. More rarely, litigants and witnesses referred to female genitalia as magical or physiologically powerful. It is impossible, then, to reconstruct a unified early modern Spanish discourse on women’s bodies and female sexuality because there were competing and/or parallel sexual views...

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