The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance by Katherine Crawford (review)

In this extraordinary work, Katherine Crawford smartly seeks to understand the specificity of the Renaissance in terms of a series of elements that helped to shape its sexual culture. The book organizes its materials into five domains: "the Renaissance inheritance of antiquity, astrology, Neo-Platonism, poetry, and politics" (12). Chapter 1 is an ingenious reading of the ancient figure of Orpheus as he was "used" by the French. "Part of my aim is to suggest how Orpheus, and countless other, lesser-known figures from antiquity, haunt the ideological formations around sexual belief" (25-26). Crawford's working out of this thesis draws on a wealth of both sixteenth-century texts and translations and current scholarship on early modern sexuality. Tracing this figure through medieval Christian allegory, she describes in exquisite detail the Renaissance grappling with the rediscovered homosocial and pederastic elements associated with the mythical figure in antiquity. The appropriations of Orpheus in France were also meant to demonstrate the superiority of the French language, with dazzling revisions of the myth in Du Bellay, Scève, and the self-proclaimed "new Orpheus," Ronsard.

Chapter 2 examines the following claim: "As an element in the sexual culture of Renaissance France, astrology's generative preoccupations made the universe, not just Earth, devoted to heterosexual normativity expressed through fertility and generation" (74). The chapter examines astrological almanacs such as Le Grant Kalendrier et compost des Bergiers avecq leur Astrologie of 1529, revealing their growing importance in the conception of the body and its sexual functioning, since the Calendriers were reprinted quite often with increasingly elaborate descriptions concerning especially childbirth (76-84). From this perspective, "the world of human reproduction resulted from and reflected the universe" (87), an idea that the book traces from Aristotle through Ptolemy, Augustine, Pico, and even Calvin. The chapter highlights the astounding extent to which all of the major figures of the French Renaissance either commented upon astrological phenomena, engaged in predictions and prognostications, or consulted astrologers, with a list of names that reads like a who's who of important sixteenth-century figures. Its detailed readings of a wide range of extremely popular but largely forgotten texts from the period reveal that astrology was a major component in the period's conception of the body, sexuality, and generation.

Chapter 3 on Neoplatonism traces the transformation of Ficino's "homoerotics" into a "fundamentally heterosexual philosophical support for male-female desire" (112). Neoplatonists saw intense, homoerotic friendships between men as being more important than relationships with women, stressing "the uplifting and transformative power of love through connection to another man" (120). In the later decades of the century, Étienne Pasquier and Louis Le Roy reiterated this theme, even as they revealed "anxiety about . . . incorrect object choices" (121). The chapter concludes with a long and cogent discussion of the problem of beauty in Ficino and the necessity that the French felt to "add women" to the heady mixture of sex and salvation that had to be sorted out. As Crawford notes, "adding women to Neoplatonism significantly altered the dynamics of homosocial, salvific love" (139).

Chapter 4 on "bad poetry" examines French attempts "to absorb, remake, and outdo Italian art" (153) after Maurice Scève's supposed discovery of Petrarch's beloved Laura's tomb in 1533. Crawford sees French Petrarchanism as "somatic," focused on "masculinity, self-control, and poetic power" (156), and "traces the movement from love poetry to sex poetry" (157). For readers interested in graphic depictions of sex, this chapter contains a treasure trove of raunchy poems that were published in anonymous collections such as the Livret de Folastries attributed to the great Ronsard. Particularly interesting is Crawford's consideration of whether or not this kind of poetry constitutes pornography (174-75), which demonstrates a familiarity with an enormous poetic corpus that speaks to the popularity of erotic, obscene, and perhaps even pornographic writing at this time, which was also used to slander gender-bending figures...