Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe (review)

Kevin Siena's Sins of the Flesh is an excellent collection of interdisciplinary essays dealing with the impact of widespread sexually transmitted disease – traditionally identified as syphilis – in sixteenth-century Western Europe. The volume is divided into three sections: 'Scientific and Medical Responses,' 'Literary and Metaphoric Responses,' and 'Institutional and Policing Responses.' This tripartite division creates a dialogue between three different critical approaches: medical history, literary criticism, and institutional history.

The first section opens with an overview of early modern medical discourse on the pox by Jon Arrizabalaga. David Gentilcore addresses the role of ciarlatini in treating the disease in early modern Italy. And Darin Hayton analyses the astrological explanations for the disease put forward by the German scholar Joseph Grünpeck.

The second section, on literary and metaphoric responses to the pox, begins with an engaging, provocative essay by Jonathan Gil Harris, who argues passionately that early modern sexual disease should be understood primarily as a textual construction. Despite the brilliance of his analysis, which centres on a perceptive and deconstructive reading of a single, relatively obscure play (The Three Ladies of London, c 1580), the objections to Harris's arguments are fairly predictable. Although he is right to suggest that disease is culturally understood through linguistic discourse, it also exists (many would insist) as a non-textual, biological event. People become infected and die, whatever their understanding of their illness and however it is described and discussed. (Incidentally, the one aspect of the epidemic that comes across most strongly throughout the volume is the sheer level of suffering associated with sexual disease in early modern Europe.) Even if all understandings are culturally and textually constructed, some modes of understanding disease may well be more effective than others when it comes to treatment and prevention. The contrast between Harris's approach and that of the previous essays could not be stronger, and the stubborn contradictions between them give the volume life and resonance.

Rose Hentschell and Diane Cady both address the ways in which the naming of sexual disease functioned to blame the epidemic on alien cultures. In almost every area of Europe the disease was given a name associating it with a foreign country: the English, Germans, and Italians called it the French disease; the French called it the Neapolitan disease, and so on. Hentschell focuses especially on the English scapegoating of the French, which she argues extended to English anxieties about imported French cloth. Cady explores the ways in which foreign language was equated with contagion in early modern England. The section concludes with Domenico Zanrè's survey of the variety of literary approaches to sexual disease in cinquecento Tuscany, from savage satire to pious lamentation.

The final section, on institutions and policing, includes Laura J. McGough's essay on the confinement of beautiful young women in Venetian religious institutions, Mary Hewlett's analysis of the relation between syphilis and sodomy in Lucca, and Kevin Siena's discussion of sexual disease and London hospitals for the poor from 1550 to 1700. Each of these essays demonstrates the complexity of institutional responses, which, as Siena writes, were shaped by the contradictory imperatives of mercy, scorn, and need. Impulses to Christian charity were countered by fear and loathing for the victims of the pox, and yet the magnitude of the crisis ensured that society was obliged to respond in some fashion, however inadequate.

All the essays in the volume are well written and argued. But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. One is made abundantly aware of the ways sexually transmitted disease led to scapegoating and hatred of the socially marginal: women, foreigners, sodomites, and the poor. But Sins of the Flesh goes beyond this sadly predictable dynamic to evoke a society struggling with an insoluble dilemma and faced with a mind-numbing level of sheer misery, pain, and loss. Given our own mixed record of coping with aids, it...