Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

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      FIGURE 1. The seduction of Eve, Notre Dame de Paris. Photograph by Pascal Lemaître.

      This interpretation of the Fall as not only introducing mortality but fallen flesh (signified by the naked genitals) was an important strain of Christian thought throughout the seventeenth century.⁷¹ The conceptual marriage of mortal with carnal knowledge helps to explain why the postlapsarian modesty topos—whereupon knowing themselves to be naked, Eve and Adam cover their genitals in shame—becomes so conventional in textual and visual representations across a wide swath of genres. It also provided convenient theological support for the common belief in women’s sexual insatiability, thought to result from deficient powers of reason. Insofar as lust was a mark of weakness and inconstancy, it not only was projected onto women, but was gendered feminine in ways that also redounded on men: excessive desire became a correlate of effeminacy.⁷² Fears of female insatiability, however, were not merely the result of misogynous fears of women’s erotic power over men. They are part of a larger epistemological configuration in which sex not only is the means of possessing knowledge but is its own form of knowledge. This knowledge is of a very particular kind: of and through the body and thus, according to church fathers, devoid of the reason that distinguishes humans from the rest of the animal world. Concerns about maintaining the distinction between humans and animals informed controversies, including commentaries by Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, over how to maintain the rational will while in the throes of passion and the degree to which sex does or does not momentarily turn humans into beasts. Given the associations among women, lust, and animality, the theological debate about the “beastliness” of sex is replete with gendered distinctions and implications.

      It is in this context that the depiction of the snake as female-headed and female-breasted becomes particularly arresting, for the colloquy between female serpent and Eve positions women in a special relationship to sexual knowledge.⁷³ It transforms the seduction of Eve into a gendered double whammy: on the one hand, the first woman is responsible for the Fall through her weakness, inconstancy, ambition, and the feminine wiles by which she tempts Adam to succumb; on the other hand, the snake as Eve’s seductress mirrors the temptress image while doubling down on the associations of female embodiment with duplicity, inconstancy, and rebelliousness. Authorized by the belief that “like” is most persuasive and effective with “like,” the image of the Eve-serpent interaction is also eroticized. According to the Jewish Midrash, the serpent was one of the two species of animals to have sex, as humans are conventionally thought to do, face-to-face.⁷⁴ The representation of two females engaged in such intimacy comes close to implying that Eve engaged in bestiality, a category of sexual sin that since Aquinas in the thirteenth century has been considered by many as the most grievous.⁷⁵ The unnatural human-animal conjunction implied in the snake’s homoerotic appeal thus spirals morally ever downward, turning sexual knowledge into something that is not only embodied but caused by the conjunction of two errant female wills.⁷⁶ And because the Fall is also a fall into human history, into temporality itself, the seduction of Eve registers women’s erotic embodiment and sexual knowledge as ambivalent agents of historical time. It is because of women, in this cultural narrative, that sex becomes intertwined with embodiment, sin, femininity, knowledge, and history.

      This nexus of associations is a far cry from the modern dispensation in which sex is the privileged site of truth—the truth of the subject, the repository of the secrets of the individual self. In contrast, the knowledge of sex associated with early modern women was a fallen truth, one that moved the desiring subject away from God, the progenitor of all meaning. In this context, sexual knowledge could only be fraught for early modern women—an ensnaring catch-22. In intellectual and theological terms, female bodies represented something that could not and should not be known (except by a privileged few), as well as something that should not be talked about (except by a growing community of male “experts”). Women not only inhabited this position of nonknowledge; they were thought to personify it. In the medieval period, women’s bodies were considered to be repositories of secrets: the secrets of nature, the secrets of knowledge, the secrets of sex.⁷⁷ As the quest for greater and more sufficient explanatory knowledge began to be pursued outside of the monastery through medical practice, the theme of secrets lodged within the female body became an authorizing topos for science itself.⁷⁸

      This official discourse, whereby sexual knowledge was assumed to be both lodged within the female body yet was supposedly known and articulated only by male elites, was contravened in practice. In domestic life, expert knowledge of the body and of sex was in fact the province of “ordinary women,” who, “through their practice of midwifery and of kitchen physic or medical care in the household” gained, practiced, and disseminated sexual knowledge.⁷⁹ Yet, the body that they supervised was simultaneously a source of knowledge shared with other women and a troubling source of vexed intimacy among them. It was also a frequent source of friction in their dealings with men. For women to express sexual knowledge in most public arenas, in particular, was self-incriminating, for it was virtually impossible to reveal such knowledge, particularly during legal processes, without seeming to confirm one’s own lack of chastity. “This was a culture,” in the words of Laura Gowing, “in which it was positively virtuous not to be able to describe sex.”⁸⁰

      Awareness of such gendered paradoxes and epistemological double binds inform the affective, analytical, and political substrate that has generated much of this book. Early modern women are descendants of the seduced, seducing Eve and simultaneously that of her mirror image, the female-headed snake. Such figures are desirous of knowledge and either lack the wisdom and restraint that would tell them what they don’t (need to) know or resist the presumption of such limits. At the same time, in Eve’s listening to the seductions of the serpent, in her grasping for that apple, we can see her foredoomed effort to push beyond the constraints on permitted knowledge, on the terms of her embodiment and sexuality. Precisely because Eve and her progeny are damned for it, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns reclaims the legacy of these figures, figured intimately in colloquy, on behalf of sexual knowledge itself.

      These knowledge relations take the feminist concerns of this book beyond a focus on positive and negative representations of women (and men) to ask about the structural, epistemological dynamics that constitute the possibility of representation of sex in the first place. These dynamics are mobile, unstable, and thus subject to the deconstructive work that often is allied with that of “queering.” Thus, one important strand of the analytical work of this book is to pause at the moments when the practice of queering meets up with the entailments of gender, where the fact of gendered embodiment and its relationship to ignorance and knowledge, power and authority, are both destabilized and materialized. Such a pause doesn’t merely challenge the universalizing pretensions of queer theory, which has based much of its intervention on distancing queerness from the minoritizing claims of identity.⁸¹ It encourages us to scrutinize the diacritical relations of gender to sexuality, while recognizing that gender itself is diacritical insofar as masculinity and femininity are knowable only through their difference and interaction.⁸²

      Identification Histories

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