purple motes

In academic literature and popular culture, prosecuting witches is commonly associated with persecuting women. However, in early modern Europe, about twenty-five percent of persons formally charged with witchcraft were men.[1] Throughout history, persons executed for any reason have been vastly disproportionately men. Malleus Maleficarum, a leading medieval Latin work on witches, provides key insights into gender, witches, and punishment. Malleus Maleficarum and its modern reception illustrates gender bias toward constructing men as demons, blaming men for corrupting women, and fabricating hateful claims about men’s privilege.

Malleus Maleficarum recognizes that some witches are men. Its first chapter considers whether witches (maleficos: masculine plural) exist. Its second chapter addresses cooperation between a male demon (demon: masculine singular) and a male witch (malefico: masculine singular). Eight contemporary scholarly endorsers of Malleus Maleficarum explicitly supported a statement referring to male witches and female witches (maleficos aut maleficas)[2] Overall, Malleus Maleficarum gives more prominence to female witches. Yet, like other early modern witchcraft literature, Malleus Maleficarum includes numerous references to male witches.[3]

Malleus Maleficarum blames male demons for generating witches. The reproduction of witches depends on semen from criminals:

They {witches / malefici, masculine plural} clearly derived their origin from a baneful mutual alliance … no one can deny that they derived their increase in number from these filthy acts, since demons {demones: masculine plural} engage in these acts not for the sake of pleasure but for the sake of corrupting. The arrangement will, therefore, be the following. The succubus demon releases a seed from a criminal man; if the demon is assigned personally to this man and does not wish to make himself the incubus for the female witch, he will hand the seed over to the demon assigned to the woman or female witch, and the second one will make himself an incubus for the female witch under a certain configuration of stars that serves his purpose, so that the man or woman begotten will remain mighty in physical strength for the purpose of performing acts of witchcraft. [4]

Just as in nineteenth-century social-scientific study of prostitution and current claims about rape, the underlying narrative blames males:

Final conclusion. It can be said that the incubus demons are not merely aggressive towards women begotten from their filthy acts or towards those offered to them by midwives, but with their whole effort they hanker after all the holiest virgins of a given land or town, having the female witches lead them {virgins} astray or couple them {virgins and male demons} together. This is what experience, which is the instructor of facts, has taught, in that certain women who were burned up in the town of Ravensburg asserted before final sentence something like this, that their masters enjoined them to strive with their entire effort to overthrow the holy virgins and widows.

Malleus Maleficarum has been socially construed as an exemplar of misogyny. Its misandry has scarcely been recognized even in the context of U.S. mass incarceration of men. Demonizing men generates relatively little deliberative concern.

The male authors of Malleus Maleficarum, like most men throughout history, were reluctant to disparage women. The chapter of Malleus Maleficarum that addresses the predominance of women among witches begins:

As for the first {question}, namely why a larger number of female witches is found among the delicate female sex than among men, it would certainly not be helpful to cite arguments to the contrary, since experience itself makes such things believable more than do the testimony of words and of trustworthy witnesses. Without looking down upon the sex in which God has always performed brave deeds in order to confound, let us say that while different reasons are given by different people for these facts, these reasons always agree in principle. Hence, this topic is quite worthy of being preached for the admonition of women — as experience has often shown, they are eager to listen — so long as it is propounded with circumspection. [5]

The male authors inject the claim of not looking down upon women. They implicitly acknowledge that women might be unwilling to listen to preaching. They advise circumspection so as not to offend women. They subsequently emphasize that advice:

Preachers should propound and mention these reasons {for the preponderance of women among witches} cautiously. In Scripture, they say bad things about women for the most part in the Old Testament — because of the first sinner {Eve} and her imitators — but later in the New Testament, because the name changed {Eve became Ave, Mary the mother Jesus} and because, as Jerome says, “All the evil that the curse {maledicto} of Eve brought in was removed by the blessing {benedicto} of Mary,” there are very many statements about women that should always be praised and preached. In modern times, however, this kind of Breach of the Faith {perfidia} is found more often in women than in men, as experience itself indicates

Authors cannot merely describe reality as persons’ experience perceives it. Prudent authors must be careful not to offend women in gynocentric culture.

Malleus Maleficarum rhetorically softens its explanation for the predominance of female witches. It adds two irrelevant assertions and a claim about variance rather than mean. Moreover, its explanation is distanced as not that of the authors, but of “some Doctors”:

Some Doctors give the following explanation. They say that there are three elements in the world that do not know how to maintain a middle course in terms of goodness or evil, and instead attain a certain pinnacle in goodness or evil when they pass over the boundaries of their condition, these three things being a tongue, a churchman and a woman. They do this in goodness when they are ruled by a good spirit, and as a result of this they become excellent. They also do this in evil when they are ruled by an evil spirit, and as a result of this they are rendered very bad.

Malleus Maleficarum elaborates at length on the extremes of good and evil for a tongue and a churchman. It does the same for a woman.

In one chapter, Malleus Maleficarum draws upon literature associated with men’s sexed protest. That chapter incorporates biblical wisdom, criticism of Helen of Troy, biographical stories of Xanthippe and Socrates, Jerome’s Theophrastus, the love letter of Valerius to Rufinus, Bernard of Cluny’s learned Latin play, and hagiography of Saint Pelagia. The chapter emphasizes women’s strong, independent sexuality. Yet the chapter also suggests that references to woman be read as non-gendered references to lusting of the flesh:

There is such praise of good women that it is read that they have even made men blessed and saved nations, lands and cities. … Hence, whatever diatribes against the lusting of the flesh are read can be interpreted in such as way that “woman” is always interpreted as the lusting of the flesh according to the passage, “I found woman more bitter than death,” and “A good woman is subordinated desire of the flesh.” [6]

Like women, men too experience desire of the flesh. Using “woman” to mean desire of the flesh corresponds to interpreting men’s sexuality as an other, demonic impulse.

The predominance of women among witches wasn’t sufficient to overcome the overall societal bias toward executing men. In New England from 1620 to 1725, 103 persons were formally charged as witches. About six women were charged for every man charged. Perhaps half of those charged were found guilty and hung.[7] Throughout all the antecedent U.S. colonies across those years, 317 persons were executed for any charge. Five men were executed for every woman executed. In the antecedent U.S. colonies and the U.S. since 1608, about 15,400 persons have been executed. Forty-two men have been executed for each woman executed.[8]

In England and Wales, persons executed have also historically been overwhelming men. About 1500 witches were executed in England and Wales from 1450 to 1750. Probably about nine women were executed as witches for every man executed as a witch.[9] In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England (the earliest period for which good data are available), about five men were executed per woman executed among executions for any charge. Since 1715, about 12,500 persons have been executed for any charge. Within that total, nineteen times more men than women were executed.[10] The sensational story of executing female witches has attracted far more attention than the long and continuing story of executing a far larger number of men.[11]

Malleus Maleficarum includes wicked humor. One of its bizarre stories about castration ends with a female witch allowing a man to recover a penis from a disembodied collection of penises. The witch, however, forbids the man from taking a big penis “because it belonged to a parish priest.” Malleus Maleficarum concludes with an ironic claim about men’s privilege:

Conclusion. Everything is governed by carnal lusting, which is insatiable in them {women} … for intelligent men it appears to be reasonably unsurprising that more women than men are found to be tainted with the Heresy of female witches. Hence, and consequently, it should be called the Heresy not of male witches, but of female witches, to name it after the predominant element. Blessed by the Highest One, Who has, down to the present day, preserved the male kind from such disgraceful behavior, and clearly made man privileged since He wished to be born and suffer on our behalf in the guise of a man. [12]

The thanks to God for preserving men from disgraceful behavior relies on abhorrence of homosexuality. Malleus Maleficarum took that thanks from a writer who argued:

since demons abhor homosexuality, they restrict their sexual attentions to human females, and for this he {the writer} was duly grateful to God. [13]

According to the prevailing demonology, demonic male heterosexuality corrupts women into witches. Men enjoy believing that their duty is to suffer and save the world. Humorless fantasy of men’s privilege now dominates public discourse far beyond beliefs about witches ever did.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• amour courtois & glorification of men’s love abjection
• Steven Pinker: sex, violence, and failure of enlightenment
• Matheolus: medieval Latin literature protesting church & wife

Notes:

[1] In the Holy Roman Empire and Luxembourg, 1480-1760, the share of men among witch prosecution victims was “nearly 24 per cent” (“c. 23.1” percent for just the Holy Roman Empire). The share of men ranged from 13% to 35% across seven specified regions of the Holy Roman Empire. Shulte (2009a), p. 55, inc. Table 31. In Normandy, 1564 to 1660, the share of men witch prosecution victims was 73%.  In Iceland, 1625 to 1685, the share of men victims was 92%. Apps & Gow (2003) p. 45, Table 1. About two-thirds of the persons charged with being witches in Finland through 1620 were men. Toivo (2014) p. 91.

[2] Mackay (2006) v. 1, p. 193 (table of contents), Malleus Maleficarum, Approbation 4B, id. v. 1, p. 204. Eight members of the University of Cologne’s Faculty of Theology signed an approbation prefixed to the substantive text of Malleus Maleficarum. Mackay provides modernized and annotated transcription of the first printed edition of 1487.

[3] In Malleus Maleficarum, 30% of the references to witch or witches (197 out of  650) use masculine forms. Johannes Nider’s Formicarius (written 1435-37) in its book on witches (book 5) used 47 masculine references to witches compared to 13 feminine. For reference counts for these and other early demonological texts, Apps & Gower (2003) p. 104, Table 2.  Schulte (2009b), Ch. 5, also reviews references in early demonological texts and finds considerable attention to male witches. Schulte exaggerates, in my view, the extent to which Malleus Maleficarum concerns female witches and condemns all women as potential witches. Malleus Maleficarum incorporates categorical criticism of women from literature of men’s sexed protest. Such criticism was not meant to be taken literally categorically.

[4] Malleus Maleficarum 109B (Pt. 2, Q. 1, Ch. 4), from Latin trans. Mackay (2006) v. 2, pp. 261-2. The subsequent quote is from id. 111B, p. 266. Mackay translated malefica, maleficus, and maleficium as sorceress, sorcerer, and sorcery (with corresponding plural forms). I’ve replaced these terms with female witch, male witch, and witchcraft, respectively, throughout quotations from Mackay’s translations.

Malleus Maleficarum is attributed to Heinrich Kramer (Heinrich Institoris) and  Jacob Sprenger. Some scholars believe that Sprenger was only a nominal co-author. Kramer served as inquisitor, but other authorities challenged his views. The elaborate endorsements prefaced to Malleus Maleficarum indicate its struggle to assert authority. Other inquisitors reportedly denounced Heinrich Kramer’s views in 1490. In 1505, the Franciscan Samuel de Cassini strongly criticized the claims in Malleus Maleficarum. The book had little influence in Spain and the Netherlands.

Between 1487 and 1496, Malleus Maleficarum was printed eight times. Then from 1497 to 1510, none; from 1511 and 1520, five; from 1521 to 1573, none; 1574 to 1588, six; 1589 to 1594, none; and from 1595 to 1600, one. Maxwell-Stuart (2007) p. 34. Compared to popular works such as De Secretis Mulieris, Malleus Maleficarum didn’t have an impressive record of editions. Its practical effects are not readily apparent:

It may seem odd in light of its modern notoriety to say that from its inception the Malleus was a work which exerted a limited practical influence, but the fact is, its numerous early editions do not seem to have stimulated any witch-persecutions in areas where none had been brought earlier

Id. p. 35. Montague Summers’s English translation, first published in 1928, is available online, along with Summers’s colorful introduction. Summers’s translation isn’t reliable for close reading. Among other weaknesses, Summers obscured male witches in Malleus Maleficarum by translating all masculine references to witches as witch/witches without gender distinction.

[5] Malleus Maleficarum 40A-B (Pt. 1, Q. 6), id. p. 112. The reference to “the sex in which God has always performed brave deeds in order to confound” seems to be an invocation of 1 Corinthians 1:26-9. The subsequent two quotes are from id. 42A, p. 116; 40B, p. 112.

More more widely cited is the etymology of woman (femina) that Malleus Maleficarum took from Antoninus of Florence’s Summa:

the word “femina” is spoken as “fe” and “minus,” because she has and keeps less faith.

Malleus Maleficarum 42C (Pt. 1, Q. 6), id. p. 117, and n. 324. Much more socially significant was the pedestalizing of women through the ideology of courtly love.

[6] Malleus Maleficarum 41D (Pt. 1, Q. 6), id. p. 115. Malleus Maleficarum provides as exemplars of good women the biblical figures Judith, Delbora (probably mistaking Deborah for Jael), and Esther. It similarly cites Gisela (lived about. 995), sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, and Chlothild (lived about 493), daughter of the King of the Burgundians.

[7] Witches charged by sex, Apps & Gow (2003) p. 45, Table 1. Hayton (2011), data appendix, indicates about two-thirds of those charged were executed. Levack (2006) pp. 22-3, inc. Table 1, provides execution rates for localities in Europe covering in total a small number of prosecutions. For Essex, England, 1560-1672, 24% were executed, while the execution rate in Scotland, 1563-1727, was 67%. The data overall suggest about half those charged were executed. Witches were usually hung rather than burned in England and in New England.

[8] The U.S. execution figures I’ve calculated from the acrosswalls.org U.S. execution statistics compilation.

[9] The total number of witches executed is based on Hayton (2011), data appendix, and Behringer (2004) p. 150. Table 4.5. The sex ratio is based on Schulte (2009b) p. 71, Table 3.1 (data for prosecutions in the Home Circuit, England). Available data on the execution rate by sex doesn’t show a clear sex difference. Id. pp. 66-7.

[10] The execution statistics for England and Wales I’ve calculated from the acrosswalls.org execution statistics compilations for England and Wales (London-Middlesex 1695-1839 sheet in Executions by year and sex about London before 1840; punishment yearly sheet in Punishment prevalence years by sex since 1715).

[11] At the general height of the European witch hunt in Danzig (1558-1608) and Nuremberg (1533-1632), about seven men were executed for each woman executed. Evans (1996) p. 44.

[12] Malleus Maleficarum 45A (Pt. 1, Q. 6), Mackay v. 2, p. 122.

[13] Id, editor’s note 141. The text was taken from William of Auvergne, De Universo (The Universe) 2.3.25.

[image] Murder of David van der Leyen and Levina Ghyselins, Ghent, 1554. Engraving by J. Luyken, from T. J. V. Bracht (or Thieleman van Braght), Het Bloedig Tooneel De Martelaers Spiegel. . . . Amsterdam: J. van der Deyster, et al., 1685. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress.

References:

Apps, Lara, and Andrew Colin Gow. 2003. Male witches in early modern Europe. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Behringer, Wolfgang. 2004. Witches and witch-hunts: a global history. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Evans, Richard J. 1996. Rituals of retribution: capital punishment in Germany, 1600-1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hayton, Darin. 2011. “How Many Witches Were Executed?!?” Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine blog (pachs.net), Oct. 27 (data appendix).

Levack, Brian P. 2006. The witch-hunt in early modern Europe. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge.

Mackay, Christopher S., ed. and trans. 2006. Malleus maleficarum: the hammer of witches. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press.

Maxwell-Stuart, P.G., trans. 2007. The Malleus maleficarum. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

Schulte, Rolf. 2009a. “Men as Accused Witches in the Holy Roman Empire.” Ch. 3 (pp. 52-73) in Rowlands, Alison, ed. Witchcraft and masculinities in early modern Europe. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schulte, Rolf. 2009b. Man as witch: male witches in Central Europe. Basingstoke {England}: Palgrave Macmillan.

Toivo, Maria Raisa. 2014. “Gender, Sex and Cultures of Trouble in Witchcraft Studies: European Historiography with Special Reference to Finland.” Ch. 4 (pp. 87-108) in Nenonen, Marko, and Raisa Maria Toivo. Writing witch-hunt histories: challenging the paradigm. Leiden: Brill.

Written in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries, De Secretis Mulierum (On the Secrets of Women) became a highly popular text.[1] Given the great power that women wield, men are naturally keen to understand the secrets of women. De Secretis Mulierum focuses on women’s sexually distinctive reproductive organs and bodily processes. While these are amazing and intriguing to men, they are not women’s most important secrets. Study of De Secretis Mulierum reveals that women’s distinctive social powers, which mystify men, are women’s most important secrets.

De Secretis Mulierum is primarily a work of popularized natural philosophy. The text itself describes sexual intercourse and conception as natural philosophy of a woman’s body:

When a woman is having sexual intercourse with a man she releases her menses at the same time that the man releases sperm, and both seeds enter the vulva simultaneously and are mixed together, and then the woman conceives. Conception is said to take place, therefore, when the two seeds are received in the womb in a place that nature has chosen. And after these seeds are received, the womb closes up like a purse on every side, so that nothing can fall out of it. After this happens, the woman no longer menstruates. [2]

Problemata Aristotelis and Secretum Secretorum, highly popular works in the European Middle Ages, included similar passages of natural philosophy. What makes De Secretis Mulierum distinctive relative to popular natural philosophy is its focus on women.[3]

The author of De Secretis Mulierum was amazingly ignorant of female biology. He believed that women urinate through their vaginas. For example, in discussing impediments to conception, he declared:

Sometimes it is caused by excessive fatness of the body because fat surrounding the opening of the womb constricts it and does not allow the male semen to enter. This can be seen in a woman whose kidneys are hidden and buried in fat on every side. If a woman of this sort receives semen during coitus, it cannot enter the womb, and so she ejects it with her urine. Thus if you examine her urine after coitus, you will be able to tell whether or not the semen is collected in the womb. [4]

No woman reader of this text could take its knowledge authority seriously after meeting such ignorance. Moreover, how women actually urinate probably wasn’t a secret to many medieval men.

De Secretis Mulierum stimulated sensational claims. A medieval commentary on it added discussion of miraculous conception:

it often happens that a woman conceives if she is in a bath where a man ejaculated because the vulva strongly attracts the sperm, and the sperm at this point is vigorous and has not evaporated, so that it can produce a fetus. This has been attested to by experience. [5]

Bath-water conception is a generating event in the deeply transgressive Pseudo-Sirach, written in Hebrew probably in the early Islamic world. The medieval commentary on De Secretis Mulierum also added discussion of hermaphroditic generation from cat semen:

If a cat ejaculated on some sage, and a man ate some of this sage, then cats would be generated in his stomach and would have to be expelled by vomiting.

The author of De Secretis Mulierum probably didn’t anticipate that his work would give rise to claims about bath-water conception and hermaphroditic generation from cat semen. But his misleading conception of women’s secrets encouraged elaborating upon female bodily functions and the biology of sexual reproduction.

De Secretis Mulierum provided sensational entertainment under the cover of informing. For good evolutionary-biological reasons, men are particularly concerned to ascertain the sexual fidelity of women with whom they seek a long-term intimate relationship. De Secretis Mulierum includes chapters entitled “On the signs of corruption of virginity” and “On the signs of chastity.” The chapter on corruption of virginity declares:

Sometimes virgins are gravely corrupted so that their vagina is greatly enlarged because the male member is exceedingly large and inept. When this happens the woman’s vagina becomes so widened that the man can enter there without any pain to his member, and this is a sign that the woman was first corrupted.

This is the reason why when young women first lose their virginity they have pain in the vagina for a time, because it is being enlarged and disposed for coitus. Another reason for this pain is that there is a certain skin in the vagina and the bladder which is broken. But the more they have sex, the more they become accustomed to it. [6]

The chapter on the exit of the fetus from the uterus discusses how women attempt to induce abortion and the grief that some women experience from having an abortion. The chapter includes sensational questions for discussion:

• if, when a man and woman are having sexual intercourse, a thunderbolt strikes, can the seed receive a new impression at the moment of ejaculation which would dispose it to be something other than its particular nature intends?
• if the lightning strikes at the moment of ejaculation, can the influences of the planets be prevented, and are the male and female seeds equally affected?
• if the lightning should strike both male and female matter alike, can it influence the power within the seed that causes a masculine form in what was first destined to be a female form and disposition, and vice versa? [7]

Albertus Magnus, the purported author of De Secretis Mulierum, was an authority that Victor Frankenstein assiduously studied. The questions about lightening striking at the moment of conception generically relate to a sensational novel like Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The most important secrets of women are clarified in modern scholarly study of De Secretis Mulierum. Trumping medieval commentators claims about bath-water conceptions, a modern scholar declared:

I will now argue that pseudo-Albert’s accomplishment of exaggerating and popularizing the ideas about women developed by Albertus Magnus and other thirteenth-century natural philosophers directly influenced the fifteenth-century inquisitorial treatise on witches, Malleus Maleficarum, and that the authors of the Malleus used the Secrets and the tradition they represent as an ideological basis for concluding that women are prone to witchcraft, for which crime they deserve death. …

Both pseudo-Albert and the inquisitors build upon the misogyny, inherent in thirteenth-century scholasticism, that we saw already in Albertus Magnus. We can regard each of their treatises as moving progressively toward the ultimate consequences of such a mode of thinking — extermination of those who most embody the evil carnality that is so feared. Woman, the temptress, the follower of Eve, the “devil’s gateway” had long been suspect to the theologians. Now, with medieval schoolmen’s interpretation of Aristotelian natural philosophy, ecclesiastical statements on the evil nature of the lesser sex become buttressed by the weight of scientific authority. Pseudo-Albert fuses theological and scientific tenets and lays the groundwork for a new kind of misogynistic document. The Dominican authors then incorporate both the spirit and the letter of the Secrets into their virulent verbal attacks on the female gender, which forms the basis for a much more serious assault on women by the inquisitorial procedure itself. [8]

De Secretis Mulierum itself offered men little insight into the most important secrets of women. But modern study of De Secretis Mulierum clearly reveals them.[9] No claim about women’s victimization is too outrageous to be taken deadly seriously by many women and men scholars.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Malleus Maleficarum: women witches, men witches, who’s executed?
• Wife of Bath, criminal justice & men’s subordination to women
• Matheolus: medieval Latin literature protesting church & wife

Notes:

[1] In the Middle Ages, De Secretis Mulierum was commonly attributed to the Dominican friar, bishop, and wide-ranging scholar Albertus Magnus. Scholars now generally regard the text as having been written by one of Albertus Magnus’s students. De Secretis Mulierum survives in 105 known Latin manuscript copies. Three-fourths of those manuscripts were produced in the fifteenth century. Green (2008) p. 212, n. 31. Fifty edition of the work were printed in the fifteenth century and seventy print editions in the sixteenth century. Lemay (1992) p. 1. Among the editions available online are one from 1501 and one from 1669.

[2] De Secretis Mulierum, Ch. 1, “On the generation of the embryo,” from Latin trans. Lemay (1992) p. 65. Lemay’s text is based on the clearly printed, influential Lyons 1580 edition. That edition “from spot checking, correlates well with other witnesses to this redaction.” Id. p. 2. Barragán Nieto (2012) provides the first critical edition of De Secretis Mulierum. I unfortunately wasn’t able to conveniently consult Barragán Nieto’s critical edition.

[3] Other Latin medical texts focusing on diseases of women existed in the twelfth century. The most widely known are commonly called the Trotula. De Secretis Mulierum was more sensational and hence better positioned than the Trotula to be a popular text. Not surprisingly, surviving diseases of women literature is closely associated with De Secretis Mulierum. Green (2000).

[4] De Secretis Mulierum, Ch. 12, “Concerning Impediments to Conception,” trans. Lemay (1992) pp. 135-6.

[5] De Secretis Mulierum, Commentary A, from Latin trans. Lemay (1992) p. 66. The subsequent quote is from id. The commentaries, by unknown authors, “were frequently printed with the text and exist in many of the manuscripts.” The text of Commentary A is taken from the Lyons 1580 edition of De Secretis Mulierum. Id. p. 2.

[6] De Secretis Mulierum, Ch. 6, trans. Lemay (1992) pp. 126-7. Calabre of Paris, a fourteenth-century woman physician, reportedly could make a vagina small again. By 1499, Celestina, the heroine of Fernando de Rojas’s pioneering Spanish fiction, was depicted as claiming to be able to repair women’s lost maidenheads.

An atomistic view of individuals greatly affects modern scholarship and healthcare. A leading historian of women’s medicine peevishly noted:

Ensuring women’s fertility and making women sexually attractive to men: these are the main features of the Buch Trotula in Hartlieb’s eyes, not the care of women’s diseases because they are distressing or dangerous to women.

Green (2000) p. 28. Many women care greatly about being fertile and being sexually attractive to men. Moreover, gynocentric society has enacted legal structures that make being attractive to men and bearing children potentially highly profitable for women.

[7] De Secretis Mulierum, Ch. 5, “On the exit of the fetus from the uterus,” trans. Lemay (1992) p. 105. The labeling of the text and Commentary B with respect to the first question is clearly mistaken.

[8] Lemay (1992) pp. 50-1, footnotes omitted. Id. notes “De Secretis Mulierum and the Malleus Maleficarum certainly belong to two different genres.”

Green, today’s leading historian of women’s medicine, less sensationally claims that De Secretis Mulierum and associated medieval gynecological literature have “one profoundly distinctive feature: a tendency toward misogyny.” Moreover, “what pushes the Secrets of Women into the territory of misogyny is the attitude of suspicion {emphasis in original} it projects toward women.” Id. pp. 216, 218. The diction of projected suspicion suggests lack of self-consciousness. On the other hand, men have sexually and legally distinctive biological reasons for being suspicion of women’s sexual fidelity. Green presents a medieval illumination that she interprets as a man sticking his tongue out a woman and observes that it is “suggestive of the text’s attitude toward women.” Id. p. 217, Fig. 5.1.

Men’s freedom to read, learn, and write cannot be taken for granted. Like nineteenth-century social-scientific concerns about reading Latin literature, Green declares, “the effect of medieval habits of reading about women’s secrets was permanent: the misogynous potential of male-controlled intellectual traditions on the female body had been realized.” For a related lament about inability to control men’s reading, Green (2000) p. 29. Caballero-Navas (2006) accepts the authoritative declarations that De Secretis Mulierum is misogynistic, but reports lack of misogyny in the Hebrew medical tradition. Permitting men intellectual and expressive freedom as long as authorities don’t deem such freedom to have “misogynous potential” is a tenuous structure of liberty.

[9] Green (2009), a massive, erudite work on the “rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology,” contrasts men’s knowledge and women’s knowledge. It pays scant attention to actual health outcomes. Among fourteenth and fifteenth century British ducal nobles, women’s and men’s life expectancies at birth were 33 years and 24 years respectively. By the mid-nineteenth century, those figures had risen to 62 years and 50 years, respectively. The alleged rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology coincided with a near doubling in women’s lifespans and a gender protrusion favoring women with 12 extra years of life on average relative to men. Here’s the analysis and data on long-run gender differences in lifespan.

Leading international organizations today measure gender differences in life expectancy with indices that feature built-in anti-men gender inequality. Green (2009) concludes with a triumphant reference to an elite woman who “erected a statue … to herself.” Id. p. 324. Rather than erecting statues to themselves, women who care about men might work to reduce gender bias against men and to improve men’s health.

[image] Anatomy of a woman’s body. Based on illustration from Isagogae breves by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, first published in 1522, digitized by the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. The version shown apparently is from a Bologna, 1535 edition. Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Barragán Nieto, José Pablo. 2012. El de secretis mulierum atribuido a Alberto Magno: estudio, edición crítica y traducción. Turnhout: Porto.

Caballero-Navas, Carmen. 2006. “Secrets of Women: Naming Female Sexual Difference in Medieval Hebrew Medical Literature.” Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies & Gender Issues. 12 (1): 39-56.

Green, Monica H. 2001. “From ‘Diseases of women’ to ‘Secrets of women’: the gynecological literature in the Later Middle Ages.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. 30 (1): 5-39.

Green, Monica H. 2008. Making women’s medicine masculine: the rise of male authority in pre-modern gynaecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lemay, Helen Rodnite. 1992. Women’s secrets: a translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus’s De secretis mulierum with commentaries. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Social science ideally informs policy proposals from “positive facts, and not deduced from a mere arbitrary theory.” William W. Sanger, a learned, highly respected civic leader in New York, published in 1858 a massive study of prostitution.[1] Sanger’s study included pioneering social-scientific surveys collecting facts about prostitutes and prostitution. Yet Sanger’s imagination dominated the facts. He imagined men as deceptively vicious and women as fundamentally virtuous. Just as with that gender stereotyping, in reading ancient Latin literature Sanger didn’t distinguish between cultural constructions and reality.

Sanger interpreted ancient Latin literature as both reflecting reality and shaping reality. Between life and literature, Sanger allowed no space for imaginative creation. He believed that a broad, amorphous class of expressions triggers harmful effects:

There is not a Latin author of the best age in whose writings the coarsest words can not be found. … The convenient adage, Charta non erubescit {paper doesn’t blush}, was invented to hide the pruriency of authors, and one of the worst puts in the wretched plea that, “though his page is lewd, his life is pure.” It is quite certain that, whatever might have been the effect on the poet, his readers could not but be demoralized by the lewdness of his verses. [2]

Rather than understanding Juvenal’s satire on women as scintillating literature of men’s sexed protest, authorities today understand it as representing Roman men’s anti-feminism and misogyny, or all men’s anti-feminism and misogyny. Sanger with similar tendentious obtuseness regarded Juvenal’s satire as representing typical Roman women:

Even allowing for poetical exaggeration, it may safely be said that there is no modern society, perhaps there has never existed any since the fall of Rome, to which Juvenal’s famous satire on women can be applied. Independently of the unnatural lusts which were so unblushingly avowed, the picture drawn by the Roman surpasses modern credibility. That it was faithful to nature and fact, there is, unhappily, too much reason to believe.

Sanger similarly interpreted Martial’s explicit epigrams:

A censor like Tacitus might indignantly reprove, but a Martial — and he was, no doubt, a better exponent of public and social life than the stern historian — would only laugh, and copy the model before him. [3]

Martial the poet-maker is thus reduced to Martial the copyist. Sanger conflated realistic style with correspondence to reality. Petronius’s outrageous burlesque in the Satyricon’s banquet of Trimalchio was for Sanger literally “the best recital of a Roman dinner that we have.”

Sanger read ancient Latin poetry as representing biography. Noting that Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Tibullus “devoted no small part of their time and talent to celebration of their mistresses,” Sanger observed of these poets:

All the five we have mentioned moved in the best society at Rome. Some of them, like Horace, saw their fame culminate during their lifetime; others filled important stations under government. Ovid was intimate with Emperor Augustus, and his exile is supposed to have been caused by some improper discoveries he made with regard to the emperor’s relations with his daughter. Yet it is quite evident that all these persons habitually lived with prostitutes, felt no shame on that account, and recorded unblushingly the charms and exploits of their mistresses in verses intended to be read indiscriminately by the Roman youths.

Sanger conceded that Ovid, a brilliant poet, “was not invariably coarse.” Martial’s poetry measured worse:

Martial knows no decency. It may safely be said that his epigrams ought never again to be translated into a modern tongue. Expressions designating the most loathsome depravities, and which, happily, have no equivalent, and need none, in our language, abound in his pages. Pictures of the most revolting pruriency succeed each other rapidly. In a word, such language is used and such scenes depicted as would involve the expulsion of their utterer from any house of ill fame in modern times. Yet Martial enjoyed high favor under government. He was enabled to procure the naturalization of many of his Spanish friends. He possessed a country and town house, both probably gifts from the emperor. His works, even in his lifetime, were carefully sought after, not only in Rome, but in Gaul, Spain, and the other provinces.

Today, Martial’s poetry, like Priapus poetry, is probably too hazardous for most university professors to teach. Some now even regard Ovid’s poetry as requiring trigger warnings. The potential harm to anyone today who twitters words that could be construed as offensive is chilling. With regard to freedom of expression, one might conclude that ancient Rome under the emperors was more civilized, humane, and liberal than modern high-income Western societies.

As elite men tend to do, Sanger imagined himself to be defending women. Sanger imagined prostitution to arise from men seducing and exploiting women, rather than vice-versa or vice-omnia. Just as he sought to repress prostitution, Sanger also sought to repress what he called prostitution of literature and prostitution of art.[4] In modern terms, Sanger was concerned that “prostitution culture” oppresses women:

A young Roman girl, with warm southern blood in her veins, who could gaze on the unveiled pictures of the loves of Venus, read the shameful epigrams of Martial, or the burning love-songs of Catullus, go to the baths and see the nudity of scores of men and women, be touched herself by a hundred lewd hands, as well as those of the bathers who rubbed her dry and kneaded her limbs — a young girl who could withstand such experiences and remain virtuous would need, indeed, to be a miracle of principle and strength of mind.

But even then religion and law remained to assail her. She could not walk through the streets of Rome without seeing temples raised to the honor of Venus, that Venus who was the mother of Rome, as patroness of illicit pleasures. In every field and in many a square, statues of Priapus, whose enormous indecency was his chief characteristic, presented themselves to view, often surrounded by pious matrons in quest of favor from the god. Once a year, at the Lupercalia, she saw young men running naked through the streets, armed with thongs with which they struck every woman they saw; and she noticed that matrons courted this flagellation as a means of becoming prolific. [5]

Sanger indicated relatively little concern about men. While men literally wrote the literature and made the art that Sanger denounced, he seems to have imagined men as being outside of culture in an eternal state of natural brutishness. Sanger sought to culturally suppress men and socially control men to defend women more effectively from men.

Distinguishing cultural constructions from reality provides critical insights. For human beings, death and incarceration are compelling positive facts. Compared to women, men die younger, men die from violence much more frequently, and men are vastly disparately incarcerated. Social science has failed to make these facts sufficiently salient in public discourse about criminalizing seduction and prostitution. The fundamental problem is poor imagination. Learning to read ancient Latin literature well can help to improve imagination.[6] Men and women deserve better than merely pornography and prostitution.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Sanger, pioneering social scientist, blamed men for prostitution
• coverture, domestic violence & criminalization of men
• nude, bathing maidens: classical Arabic poetry and fabliau

Notes:

[1] Sanger (1858). The previous quote is from id. p. 34.

[2] Id. p. 80. Sanger’s phrase “thought his page is lewd, his life is pure” refers to Martial 1.4. See also Catullus 16.5-6. Subsequent quotes are from Sanger (1858) pp. 79 (Even allowing …), 83 (A censor like Tacitus …), 81 (the best recital of a Roman dinner …), 78 (All the five …), 78-9 (Martial knows no decency …), and 80 (A young Roman girl …).

[3] Sanger added:

It may safely be asserted that there does not exist in any modern language a piece of writing which indicates so hopelessly a depraved state of morals as Martial’s epigram on his wife.

Id. pp. 83-4. That epigram is probably 11.43. Martial today is generally thought not to have been married.

[4] Reviewing prostitution in France from Louis XIII to the present day, Sanger observed:

under the brutal sway of the regent, and the lewd influence of the satyr Louis XV, the old prostitution of literature was revived. Thus we find that the most successful authors of the day, such as Voltaire, handled themes grossly immoral in themselves, and rendered still more offensive by their mode of treatment. The most popular novel of the eighteenth century — Manon Lescant {Manon Lescaut} — the work, by the way, of an abbé, is the narrative of the adventures of a prostitute.

Sanger (1858) p. 130. Regarding sixteenth-century France, Sanger observed:

We hear of all kinds of instruments of debauchery; of lewd books and lewd pictures; of indecent sculptures and bronzes being sold without let or hinderance in the stores of Paris. It was the age of Aretino; and besides that famous or infamous writer, a number of other Italians had competed for the prize of lewdness in composition. Poets, painters, sculptors, seemed to try how far art could be prostituted.

Id. pp. 112-3. Sanger declared that “obscene and voluptuous books … may justly be considered as causes, indirect it may be, of prostitution.” Id. 522. He was concerned that literature imported from Europe, along with Americans’ travel to Europe, were bringing to America harmful ideas and morals. Id. pp. 334, 569-72. Sanger summarized:

Every day makes the system of New York more like that of the most depraved capitals of continental Europe, and it remains for the good innate sense of the bulk of the American people to say how much farther we shall proceed in this frivolous, intriguing, and despicable manner of living; or whether they will not strive to perpetuate the stern morality of the Puritan fathers, our great moral safeguard so far, and thus put an effectual barrier against the inroads of a torrent which must undermine our whole social fabric, and finally crush us beneath the ruins.

Id. p. 572. Such a view is particularly astonishing within the context of Sanger’s work. He was not a moralist isolated from the everyday world. He was a leading physician and public figure within primary institutions of social control in New York City. He did pioneering social-scientific study of prostitution.

[5] While Sanger understood prostitution culture to be a cause of prostitution, Horace presented prostitution as a safeguard against adultery:

Seeing a man he knew come out of such a place {“smelly brothel”}, Cato praised him — “Decent fellow!” — and spoke wisely as a god: “When lowly lust has swollen up their veins, young men do right in coming here instead of grinding wives not theirs.”

Horace, Satires 1.2.31-5, from Latin trans. Fuchs (1977) p. 4 (verse lineation suppressed above). Sanger refers to this text indirectly. Sanger (1858) p. 79. Buckley’s English translation in 1863 makes Horace’s sexual imagery considerably more oblique.

By the beginning of the Roman Empire, Cato the Elder of Horace’s satire was a stock figure of traditional morality. On the literary tradition of Cato’s alleged statement, Gowers (2012) p. 98. Cato reportedly further stated:

Later, however, when he noticed him coming out of the same brothel quite frequently, he said, “young man, I praised you for coming here occasionally, not for living here.”

From Porphyrio’s commentary on Horace, cited and trans. Pollmann (2005) p. 93. Like Cato’s speech on the proposal to repeal Lex Oppia, these statements shouldn’t be interpreted as historical records of Cato’s words.

[6] Sanger himself offered advice on classical studies:

And here a word in regard to the bad effects of, so called, classical studies. Are they not oftentimes acquired at the risk of outraged delicacy or undermined moral principles? Mythology, in particular, introduces our youth to courtesans who are described as goddesses, and goddesses who are but courtesans in disguise. Poetry and history as frequently have for their themes the ecstasies of illicit love as the innocent joys of pure affection. Shall these branches of study be totally ignored? By no means; but let their harmless flowers and wholesome fruit alone be culled for youthful minds, to the utter exclusion of all poisonous ones, however beautiful.

Sanger (1858) p. 521. Given the astonishing lack of self-consciousness in Sanger’s social-scientific work and its support for broad criminalization and incarceration of men, a much different approach to classical studies is warranted. Careful study of works such as Priapea, the Life of Aesop, and Apuleius’s Metamorphoses should be central to classics curricula today.

[image] Diana and Actaeon. Painting by Titian, c. 1556-59. Held by the Scottish National Gallery and the National Gallery, London (item Edinburgh: NG 2839 / London: NG6611). Image thanks to National Gallery of Scotland and Wikimedia Commons. In Greek mythology, for the wrong of seeing women nude, Actaeon was transformed into a stag and devoured by dogs.

References:

Fuchs, Jacob, trans. 1977. Horace’s Satires and Epistles. New York: Norton.

Gowers, Emily, ed. 2012. Horace. Satires. Book I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pollmann, Karla. 2005. “Marriage and Gender in Ovid’s Erotodidactic Poetry.” Ch. 5 (pp. 92-110) in Smith, Warren S, ed. 2005. Satiric advice on women and marriage from Plautus to Chaucer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Sanger, William W. 1858. The history of prostitution: its extent, causes, and effects throughout the world. Being an official report to the Board of Alms-House Governors of the City of New York. New York: Harper.

knowing under a lyric song he soon set aside his anxious spirit
{cognovit et lirico sub cantico iam spiritum sollicitum removit} [1]

Gender equality in the Middle Ages wasn’t totalizing orthodoxy. Nonetheless, medieval thinkers struggled to reconcile men soldiering for love with gender equality in love.[2] That struggle led to separating fleshly life from words and ideas. That separation in turn enabled a totalizing myth of gender equality and made the experience of Margery Kempe’s husband the experience of many men.

her body without anxiety
takes no offense at a light touch.
The slim girl under her girdle
has a navel that reaches out
and a belly that slightly
swells
{caro carens scrupulo
levem tactum non offendit.
gracili sub cingulo
umbilicum preextendit
paululum ventriculo
tumescenciore.} [3]

A twelfth-century collection of Latin love lyrics known as the Arundel Lyrics disturbingly presents men’s burden of soldiering for love. Soldiering for love (militia amoris) figures in ancient Roman love elegy. Militia amoris was for ignorant men who hadn’t yet understood Ovid’s teachings on love. Like the servile chivalric lovers pedastalizing women and institutionalized sexist selective service, militia amoris represents grotesque gender inequality. The Arundel Lyrics describe men being shot and suffering wounds, men serving long tours as soldiers, and men being continually compliant to women’s will.[4] Amid their anxiety, anguish, torment and distress, men even internalized and celebrated their own oppression:

Into hardship I fall willingly,
not reluctant to suffer,
for I glory in my suffering.
{In laborem sponte labor,
nec invitus pacior,
quod me pati glorior.} [5]

Like fathers’ love for their children being transformed into serving as wallets, militia amoris conflates love and payment. Within the Christian context of medieval Europe, the transplanted idea of militia amoris wrongly induced men to believe that through work they could earn love.[6]

The Arundel Lyrics offer beautiful words supporting gender equality in love. The refrain of one poem celebrates mutuality in lovesickness:

Happy the sickness that cannot be healed
without knowing a matching sickness!
{Felix morbus, qui sanari
nescit sine morbo pari!} [7]

In the first poem of the Arundel Lyrics, the poet imagines divine action harmoniously producing gender equality in love:

Uniting two, the goddess
gives each one to its like,
rejoicing to inflame the pair
with a reciprocal torch;
no couple can explicate themselves
from the enfolding embrace.
And so that love remains regular,
the goddess equally the passion
divides:
a double knot is firmer
and stronger
with a twin fastening.
{Suo quemque donat pare
duo nectens diva,
duos gaudet inflammare
face relativa;
quo se nullus explicet,
implicat amplexu.
Et amor ne claudicet,
ignem bipertit nexibus
duplicibus:
bino nodus firmior
et cercior
fit nexu.} [8]

In the last poem of the collection, the poet yearns for gender equality with a woman:

who could experience as an equal the pleasures of Venus
{que blandam senciat ex equo Venerem} [9]

Gender equality in love was a beginning and end in learned medieval Latin love lyrics.

Beautiful words about gender equality didn’t transform the oppressive reality of men’s lives. The clash of men’s experiences and professed ideals generated reluctance to enter enduring relationships of love. Men even renounced interest in seeking to incarnate words:

Let love live on as idea,
not commonly revealed in practice.
I will live as yours, you live as mine,
but let us not proceed impetuously.
The goddess will still allow us
to see, to converse, to play.
May in a bond of equals we join
in loving relationship.
{Vivat amor in ydea,
ne divulgetur opere.
Vivam tuus, vive mea,
nec properemus temere.
Dabit adhuc Cytherea
videre, loqui, ludere.
Nos pari iugat federe
relacio Dionea.} [10]

The Arundel Lyrics don’t merely provide exquisitely sophisticated poetry in which “the ancient amatory metaphors of militia amoris are invested with new literal meaning.”[11] In the words of a perceptive critique, the poem above implies that “to become too deeply involved is to court disaster.”[12] That development in medieval Latin love lyrics is commonly felt today in high-income Western countries under a totalizing myth of gender equality. Dispelling that oppressive myth requires rejecting men’s love servitude and celebrating flesh-and-blood women.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Carmina Burana 178: blame men for lack of gender equality in love
• cleric-scholars’ Latin lyrics long for bodily action
• medieval Latin freedom of speech: cuius contrarium

Notes:

[1] Predantur oculos, 3b.5-10, Latin text from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 228, transcribed and trans. Moser (2004) p. 347, with my minor adaptation. I’ve removed the poetic lineation.

[2] While lacking totalizing orthodoxy of gender equality, medieval society understood gender equality as a fundamental aspect of human nature: “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).

In the absence of totalizing myth of gender equality, men and women writing in Latin in medieval Europe expressed thoughts scarcely imaginable today. Great women writers of the Middle Ages poignantly expressed their loving concern for men. Men exuberantly expressed their love for women.

[3] Arundel Lyrics 8 (Sevit aure spiritus) ll. 45-9, Latin texts and English translations available in McDonough (2010) pp. 38-9 and Moser (2004) p. 273. The translation above I’ve adapted from those sources. Servit aure spiritus also survives as Carmina Burana 83, with a refrain.

The Arundel Lyrics have been attributed to one of two clerics named Peter of Blois. Moser (2004) pp. 242-5, Meecham-Jones (2007) pp. 143-7. Dronke (1976), Appendix A, provides a tentative bibliography of poems he attributes to Peter of Blois, mainly on stylistic grounds. Highly learned and artful, the erotic poems of the Arundel Lyrics were associated with leading clerics. They comprise “one of the most sophisticated and ambitious collections of medieval erotic verse in Latin.” Meecham-Jones (2007) p. 143. Peter of Blois’s poetry has been described as “medieval ‘Alexandrianism.'” Godman (1990) p. 157. That description alludes to the learned, innovative poetry of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus and associated poets in Alexandria.

The Arundel Lyrics survive as a collection in British Library MS Arundel 384. Moser (2004) p. 262, Fig. 8 provides an image of a page of the manuscript.

[4] Arundel Lyrics 1.65-6, 8.11-20, 9.29-36, 10.8-10, Latin with English translation available in McDonough (2010).

[5] Arundel Lyrics 11 (In laborem sponte labor) ll. 1-3, Latin with English translation McDonough (2010) pp. 52-3, adapted slightly. Cf. Matthew 26:39, 42; Mark 14:36, Luke 22:42.

[6] Cf. Ephesians 2:4-10, Romans 4:4-5. Men being required to provide material goods for love is a theme of Arundel Lyrics 15 (Spoliatum). Medieval literature addressed that injustice through the “lover’s gift regained” motif.

[7] Arundel Lyrics 7 (Plaudit humus, boree) ll. 9-10 (refrain), Latin with English translation id. pp. 32-3, adapted slightly.

[8] Arundel Lyrics 1 (Dionei sideris) ll. 69-80, Latin with English translation id. pp. 6-7 and Moser (2004) pp. 280-1. The translation above I’ve adapted from both sources. Just before the quoted passage, the poem sharply contrasts the actions of Cupid and Venus. Horace described Venus’s practice much differently:

It is the will of Venus,
Who has a lot of fun,
With the cruel joke of putting
Like and unlike together
In the same brazen yoke.

Horace, Odes 1.33, trans. Ferry (1997) p. 87.

[9] Arundel Lyrics 28 (Quam velim virginum, si detur opcio) l. 12, Latin with English translation McDonough (2010) pp. 140-1. This understanding of gender equality obviously abstracts from physical sex differences.

[10] Arundel Lyrics 9 (Dum rutilans Pegasei) ll. 57-64, Latin with English translation id. pp. 44-7 and Wetherbee (1972) p. 142. The translation above I’ve adapted from both sources. This poem survives only in MS Arundel 384, a late fourteenth-century manuscript.

McDonough’s Latin text includes exclamation points at the ends of lines 58 and 60. Exclamation points didn’t come into use until the fifteenth century. Lack of bodily passion seems to me to be a theme of the stanza. I have re-punctuated the Latin text to suggest a cool, intellectual mood.

A few decades after the Arundel Lyrics were written, Lotario dei Segni’s De miseria humanae conditionis offered a stern warning about the misery of sexless married men. De miseria humanae conditionis 2.4 also took up the legal-nonsense theme of Arundel Lyrics 16 (Partu recenti frondium) ll. 31-36.

[11] Godman (1990), p. 168, in reference to Arundel Lyrics 10 (Grates ago Veneri). That poem offers the appearance of a man raping a woman and the substance of love satisfaction. The poem is a highly sophisticated, transgressive treatment of disputes about the Eucharist. Meecham-Jones (2007) pp. 147-52.  Recent scholarly treatment of rape in literature confirms a fundamental communicative principle of rape. More generally, the Arundel Lyrics self-consciously construct and resolve a conflict between militia amoris and ideals of gender equality.

[12] Wetherbee (1972) p. 142, n. 35.

[image] flower photo by Douglas Galbi.

References:

Dronke, Peter. 1976. “Peter of Blois and Poetry at the Court of Henry II.” Mediaeval Studies. 38: 185-235.

Ferry, David, trans. 1997. The odes of Horace. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Godman, Peter. 1990. “Literary Classicism and Latin Erotic Poetry of the Twelfth Century and the Renaissance.” Pp. 149-82 in Peter Godman and Oswyn Murray, eds. Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

McDonough, Christopher J., ed. and trans. 2010. The Arundel lyrics; The poems of Hugh Primas. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 2. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Meecham-Jones, Simon. 2007. “Sex in the Sight of God: theology and the erotic in Peter of Blois’ ‘Grates Ago Veneri.'” Pp. 142-54 in Amanda Hopkins and Cory Rushton, eds. The erotic in the literature of medieval Britain. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

Moser, Thomas C. 2004. A cosmos of desire: the medieval Latin erotic lyric in English manuscripts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Wetherbee, Winthrop. 1972. Platonism and poetry in the twelfth century: the literary influence of the school of Chartres. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Socially favored fictions can easily dominate social science. That effect is readily apparent in the horrifying history of domestic violence scholarly study and decades of fallacious public discussion about domestic violence. Today, major media eagerly peddle tendentious, misleading surveys purporting to show that 1 in 5 women on college campuses have been sexually assaulted. Such failure of social science isn’t a new development. William W. Sanger’s pioneering social-scientific study of prostitution, published in 1858, blamed men for women becoming prostitutes.[1] Sanger’s study shows an early, paradigmatic failure of social science.

Sanger, a physician, was a credential, respected, and well-known public health authority. In 1846, he received his medical degree from the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, the first medical college established in the American colonies. He served as a physician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital Center, the first public hospital established in America, as well as the Marine Hospital, the Clinton Hospital, and the Quarantine of New York. In 1847 and from 1853 to 1860, Sanger served as Physician-in-Chief on New York’s Blackwell’s Island.[2] Blackwell Island contained central New York institutions for the control of deviants: alms house, workhouse, penitentiary, and lunatic asylum, along with associated hospitals. In 1855, the Board of Governors of the Alms-House of New York submitted six questions on prostitution to Sanger in his capacity as Physician of Blackwell’s Island. Sanger wasn’t content with merely answering those specific questions. He contacted the Mayor of New York and other leading authorities and arranged to carry out an extensive study of prostitution in New York.[3] He subsequently extended his study to the history of prostitution and its extent, causes, and effects around the world.

Sanger began his study with a sensational introduction. He positioned himself as a courageous truth-seeker:

Few care to know the secret springs from which prostitution emanates; few are anxious to know how wide the stream extends; few have any desire to know the devastation it causes. … he who dares allude to the subject of prostitution in any other than a mysterious and whispered manner, must prepare to meet the frowns and censure of society. [4]

He depicted prostitution as a grave threat to everyone:

There is an ever-present physical danger, so fatally destructive that the world would recoil, as from the spring of a serpent, could they but appreciate its malignity; a malignity which is daily and hourly threatening every man, woman, and child in the community; which for hundreds of years has been slowly but steadily making its way onward, leaving a track marked with broken hopes, ruined frames, and sad recollections of stricken friends; and which now, in the full force of an impetus acquired and aggravated by concealment, almost defies opposition.

Sanger thus justified his extensive, scholarly study of prostitution:

These reasons were sufficiently powerful to induce the necessary researches for the accomplishment of this work, and they are considered sufficient to justify its publication.

Symbolic works, like physical goods, are commonly sold. Symbolic works are sold in human interactions much more complex than a fee-simple exchange. Sanger was an elite public figure selling his work to other elite public figures. He marketed a lurid story of social-scientific revelations about prostitution. Prostitution in Sanger’s story was a hidden, pernicious social problem much like rape culture on college campuses today.

Sanger directed a large, social-scientific survey of prostitutes and prostitution. The Board of Governors of the Alms-House of New York formally reviewed and approved 37 questions Sanger prepared to be asked of prostitutes in New York City. The questions were pre-printed on a standard questionnaire that police officers filled out during their interviews with prostitutes.[5] Sanger noted:

The mayor, the district attorney, the chief of police, and the captains of the several districts, willingly and zealously co-operated with Governor Townsend and myself, and every possible exertion was used to obtain accurate and extensive information. It became my duty to assist the officers in the execution of their task, and I am thus enabled to speak with certainty as to the authenticity of the statistics given, which were mainly collected under my own observation.

Sanger further documented how the survey was administered so as to control for potential sources of bias:

These women were examined singly and alone, and a person who has been engaged for a number of years in any particular inquiry is able, by his experience, to judge whether his informants are speaking the truth in their replies. For this, among other reasons, we are satisfied that in almost every case there was no deception practiced, but that the answers obtained were true in all essential points. … It is not denied that there were many difficulties to be encountered, although the mode of operation was simple. It may be briefly described as follows. The captain of each police district (and oftentimes the writer with him) explained his object to the keeper of the house, assuring her that there was no intention to annoy, harass, or expose her; and, particularly, that no prosecutions should be based upon any information thus collected. This latter promise was supported by a letter from a high legal functionary addressed to the Mayor and Police Department, assuring them that the particulars they collected should not be used in any manner prejudicial to the women themselves, as it was believed that a collection of the necessary information required by such a work as the present would be productive of good to the city. When satisfied upon the subject of prosecution, they were told that the real motive was to obtain correct particulars of prostitution without exposing individual cases, so as to enable the public to judge of its extent, and assist them in forming an opinion as to the necessity of arrangements which would ultimately become protective to our citizens at large, as well as to housekeepers and courtesans, and many of the housekeepers expressed a hope that the design might be accomplished. Their interests, therefore, led them to speak the truth. In short, from the precautions taken, and from the result itself, very little doubt can be entertained as to the authenticity of the principal part of the replies on all essential points

Complete survey responses were obtained for 2000 prostitutes in 1856-7. That was about a third of known public prostitutes in New York City. In addition, Sanger arranged for the inspectors of all 22 of the New York police precincts each to answer four quantitative questions about prostitution in their districts. Sanger also undertook an extensive survey of brothel keepers. He further surveyed other city mayors with six quantitative questions about prostitution.[6]

In contrast to his pioneering social-scientific surveys, Sanger interpreted the resulting data with fictional ideals of women and acute anti-men bias. In his introductory summary, Sanger described the “most useful portion” of his prostitute survey as prostitutes’ answers to the question: “What was the cause of your becoming a prostitute?” Sanger summarized the empirical findings:

These tend to expose the concealed vices of mankind, and to prove that many of the unfortunate victims are “more sinned against than sinning.” Among the reasons assigned for a deviation from the paths of virtue are some which tell of man’s deceit; others, where the machinations employed to effect the purpose raise a blush for humanity; others, where a wife was sacrificed by the man who had sworn before God and in the presence of men to protect her through life; others, where parents have urged or commanded this course, and are now living on the proceeds of their children’s shame, or where an abuse of parental authority has produced the same effect; and others still, where women, already depraved, have been the means of leading their fellow-women to disgrace.

Prostitutes’ answers to the question “What was the cause of your becoming a prostitute?” seem to have been controlled by a single permitted choice among a standardized list of causes. The 2000 prostitutes surveyed indicated 2000 causes distributed as follows:

1. Inclination: 513
2. Destitution: 525
3. Seduced and abandoned: 258
4. Drink and the desire to drink: 181
5. Ill-treatment of parents, relatives, or husbands: 164
6. As an easy life: 124
7. Bad company: 84
8. Persuaded by prostitutes: 71
9. Too idle to work: 28
10. Violated: 27
11. Seduced on board emigrant ships: 16
12. Seduced in emigrant boarding houses: 8 [7]

Causes that make no reference to others’ actions (1. Inclination, 4. Drink and the desire to drink, 6. As an easy life, and 7. Too idle to work) account for 42% of the causes for women becoming prostitutes. Heading the otherwise descending-frequency list with “Inclination” positioned it for initial dismissal. Sanger declared:

First in order stands the reply “Inclination,” which can only be understood as meaning a voluntary resort to prostitution in order to gratify the sexual passions. Five hundred and thirteen women, more than one fourth of the gross number, give this as their reason. If their representations were borne out by facts, it would make the task of grappling with the vice a most arduous one, and afford very slight grounds to hope for any amelioration; but it is imagined that the circumstances which induced the ruin of most of those who gave the answer will prove that, if a positive inclination to vice was the proximate cause of the fall, it was but the result of other and controlling influences. In itself such an answer would imply an innate depravity, a want of true womanly feeling, which is actually incredible. [8]

The actual facts became hypothetical and “actually incredible” relative to Sanger’s beliefs about “true womanly feeling.” Sanger rationalized:

The force of desire can neither be denied nor disputed, but still in the bosoms of most females that force exists in a slumbering state until aroused by some outside influences. No woman can understand its power until some positive cause of excitement exists.

Sanger without empirical reason believed that women are naturally innocent of what he regarded as sex crimes. “Outside influences” in Sanger’s view are responsible for women’s actions:

What is sufficient to awaken the dormant passion {of women} is a question that admits innumerable answers. Acquaintance with, the opposite sex, particularly if extended so far as to become a reciprocal affection, will tend to this; so will the companionship of females who have yielded to its power; and so will the excitement of intoxication. But it must be repeated, and most decidedly, that without these or some other equally stimulating cause, the full force of sexual desire is seldom known to a virtuous woman. In the male sex nature has provided a more susceptible organization than in females, apparently with the beneficent design of repressing those evils which must result from mutual appetite equally felt by both. In other words, man is the aggressive {emphasis in original} animal, so far as sexual desire is involved.

Like most rape victimization surveys today, Sanger’s survey didn’t survey men victims. In contrasted to his actual empirical findings, Sanger overwhelmingly blamed men, “the aggressive animal,” for women becoming prostitutes.

Sanger imaginatively re-wrote the facts that his social-scientific survey revealed. Regarding the cause “Seduced {by a man} and abandoned,” Sanger reported:

“Seduced and abandoned.” Two hundred and fifty-eight women make this reply. These numbers give but a faint idea of the actual total that should be recorded under the designation, as many who are included in other classes should doubtless have been returned in this. It has already been shown that under the answer “Inclination” are comprised the responses of many who were the victims of seduction before such inclination existed, and there can be no question that among those who assign “Drink, and the desire to drink” as the cause of their becoming prostitutes, may be found many whose first departure from the rules of sobriety was actuated by a desire to drive from their memories all recollections of their seducers’ falsehoods. Of the number who were persuaded by women, themselves already fallen, to become public courtesans, it is but reasonable to conclude that many had previously yielded their honor to some lover under false protestations of attachment and fidelity.

It is needless to resort to argument to prove that seduction is a vast social wrong, involving in its consequences not only the entire loss of female character, but also totally destroying the consciousness of integrity on the part of the male sex. It matters not under what circumstances the crime may be perpetrated, none can be found that will exonerate the active offender from the imputation of fraud and treachery. [9]

Blaming men and criminalizing men dominated Sanger’s social science on prostitution. At its center, his study devolved into stereotypes of feminine goodness and feminine natural affection:

A woman’s heart longs for a reciprocal affection, and, to insure this, she will occasionally yield her honor to her lover’s importunities, but only when her attachment has become so concentrated upon its object as to invest him with every attribute of perfection, to find in every word he utters and every action he performs but some token of his devotion to her. Love is then literally a passion, an idolatry, and its power is universally acknowledged.

With his feminine fantasies, Sanger left empirical study far behind. Idealizing women as perfect, he imagined that women become prostitutes because they wrongly idealize men as perfect. According to Sanger, women become prostitutes because of their rich, pure, unbounded love for men:

But how account for the participation of the female in the crime? Simply by viewing it as an idolatry of devotion which is willing to surrender all to the demands of him she worships; to the intensity of her affections, which absorbs all other considerations; to a perfect insanity of love, excited and sustained by a supposed equal devotion to herself. As soon as this conviction of a mutual love possesses her mind, as soon as her heart responds to its magic touch, she lives in a new atmosphere; her individuality is lost; her thoughts revert only to her lover. Devoted to the promotion of his happiness, she thinks not of her own; and only when it is too late does she awake from the spell that lures her to destruction. In such a case as this, a woman does not merit the contempt with which her conduct is visited. She has sinned from weakness, not from vice; she has been made the victim of her own unbounded love, her heart’s richest and purest affections. [10]

Sanger views men, in contrast, as vicious animals who engage in the crime of seducing women:

specious arguments and false promises are continually resorted to by many men for the express purposes of seduction; and, nefarious as these cases confessedly are, still they form common incidents in the lives of some who claim to be what the world calls respectable! Men who, in the ordinary relations of life, would scruple to defraud their neighbors of a dollar, do not hesitate to rob a confiding woman of her chastity. They who, in a business point of view, would regard obtaining goods under false pretenses as an act to be visited with all the severity of the law, hesitate not to obtain by even viler fraud the surrender of woman’s virtue to their fiendish lust. …  Unprincipled men, ready to take advantage of woman’s trustful nature, abound, and they pursue their diabolical course unmolested. Legal enactments can scarcely ever reach them, although sometimes a poor man without friends or money is indicted and convicted. The remedy must be left to the world at large. When our domestic relations are such that a man known to be guilty of this crime can obtain no admission into the family circle; when the virtuous and respectable members of the community agree that no such man shall be welcomed to their society; when worth and honor assert their supremacy over wealth and boldness, there may be hopes of a reformation, but not till then.

Along with his astonishing anti-men bias, Sanger imagined social bias against women:

Seduction {meaning men seducing women} is a social wrong. … The probabilities of a decrease in the crime of seduction are very slight, so long as the present public sentiment prevails; while the seducer is allowed to go unpunished, and the full measure of retribution is directed against his victim; while the offender escapes, but the offended is condemned.

Sanger’s argument is about as reasonable as focusing concern for gender equality on corporate and government elites and ignoring gender inequality in criminalizing and incarcerating persons. In short, Sanger’s discourse is today’s U.S. discourse.

Socially favored fictions subtly manipulate concepts and language of social science. To his estimate of 6000 public prostitutes in New York City, Sanger added “women who visit houses of assignation for sexual gratification” (estimated at 1260). A “house of assignation” was a place, other than their normal home, where persons could go to have consensual sex. A motel offering an hourly rate is a more recent form of “house of assignation.” In addition, Sanger added to his estimate of prostitutes “kept mistresses” (estimated at 200).[11] A kept mistress is much different from a woman paid by the act for sex and not seen in any other context.

Sanger actually considered prostitution to be any sex outside of marriage. Sanger buried in technical obscurities the big picture of what he meant by prostitute. He thus added for kept mistress half his estimate of kept mistresses, “assuming the other half to be included in those who visit houses of assignation.”[12] Campus sexual assault surveys likewise add sexual touching and kissing when the respondent reports being drunk. Sex with a buzz has a similar relation to sexual assault as sex outside of marriage has to prostitution. Sexual assault in today’s campus sex-scare surveys and prostitution in Sanger’s mid-nineteenth-century study are conceptually misleading terms within socially favored fictions.

Social science can degenerate into just another plot element instrumentally deployed in socially favored fictions. Despite the facts that his social-scientific prostitution survey showed, Sanger imagined sex outside of marriage as the crime of prostitution. In his imagination, that crime resulted from bad men seducing good women. Methodically collecting data is no substitute for distinguishing between fact and fiction. To do better social science, one must read fiction discerningly and develop better imagination.[13]

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• criminalizing seduction: the crime of men seducing women
• Steven Pinker: sex, violence, and failure of enlightenment
• rape: a fundamental principle of communication economics

Notes:

[1] Sanger (1858). Sanger’s book was printed in New York and London in 1858, and frequently reprinted. It was reprinted in 1859, 1869, 1876, 1895 (by New York’s American Medical Press), 1897 (new and revised edition by New York’s Medical Publishing Co.), 1899, 1900, 1900, 1906 (new edition), 1910, 1913 (new edition), 1919, 1921, 1927, 1937 (by New York’s Eugenics Publishing Co.), 1939, 1972 (Arno Press reprint), 1974 (New York’s American Medical Press), 1984, 1986 (in New Delhi, India), 1996, 2002 (in Amsterdam, The Netherlands), and 2004 (electronic edition by Harvard University).

[2] The biographical information on William Wallace Sanger is based on the entry for him in Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, information following his name on the title page of Sanger (1858), and Carlisle (1893) p. 146.

[3] Sanger (1858) pp. 28-32.

[4] Sanger (1858) p. 17. Subsequent quotes are from id., p. 18 (There is an ever-present physical danger … ; These reasons …), p. 31 (The mayor …), pp. 674-5 (These women were examined …), p. 33 (These tend to expose …), pp. 488-9 (First in order …; The force of desire …; What is sufficient …), pp. 492-3 (“Seduced and abandoned” …; A woman’s heart …; But how account …), pp. 495-6 (specious arguments …; Seduction is a social wrong)

[5] Id. pp. 450-1.

[6] Id. p. 575 (2000 prostitutes, about a third of total), pp. 579-80 (survey of police precincts), p. 553 (survey of brothel keepers), p. 609 (survey of mayors of other cities).

[7] Id. p. 488 (the causes are listed in the order Sanger listed them). Sanger added below his table “Total 2000.” That indicates that each of the 2000 prostitutes were associated with only one cause of becoming a prostitute.

[8] The actual results from Sanger’s survey are credible. A recent scholarly study of prostitution in mid-nineteenth-century New York observed:

For many, prostitution was not far removed from viable “respectable” alternatives, and thus it was taken up by a relatively broad group of women. Prostitution was not an occupation for only the most desperately poor and outcast but was an easy one to pursue if a young woman fell on hard times or wanted to establish her financial independence.

Hill (1993) p. 62.

[9] Gynocentric society favors criminalizing men relative to women:

Many stories of seduction reinforced the popular notion that men, even apparently trustworthy men, were really lechers. … few explanations of a woman’s fall could elicit as much sympathy as that of seduction and abandonment.

Hill (1993) p. 70. Hill (1993), Sánchez (2008), and Renner (2010) show no concern about discriminatory criminalization of men, punitive state regulation of men’s sexuality today, and the large gender disparity among persons incarcerated.

[10] For examples of Sanger mythologizing specific women’s responses, see e.g. Sanger (1858) p. 510. In mid-nineteenth-century American, the term “pornography” referred both to obscene texts and “supposedly well-intentioned examinations of prostitution.” Renner (2010) p. 190. Sanger was sensitive to questions of propriety. Sanger (1858) p. 21. He positioned his study as elite, authoritative, scientific work. Nonetheless, Sanger’s social science yielded to the story he wanted to tell:

History {Sanger’s History of Prostitution} blithely ignores distinctions of genre and style as it follows its fallen women from one scene of victimization to another, offering forgiveness, solidarity, sympathy, and asides about heroines and villains. Thus what would appear to be the most significant difference between the History and panic fiction— that the former is not, in fact, fictional— blurs as William Sanger and other moral reformers work to transform the fallen woman into one thing she has never been, a romantic ideal. … At times, it is unclear whether reformers like William Sanger remembered the difference between fictional fallen women and real fallen women … such blurring reminds us of the power of imaginative writing, and of sentimental narrative’s ability to move readers. Thus, it makes clear fiction’s appeal to reformers. Ultimately, the blurring of reality and fiction, of Blackwell’s girls and imagined girls, tells us that what reformers understood to be true about fallen women could not be contained in neat narrative categories. It could only be expressed in terms of which stories were wrong and which stories got it right.

Sánchez (2008) pp. 92, 96. The Rolling Stone rape hoax illustrates a similar effect with a less elite, less scientific text.

[11] Id. p. 584.

[12] Id. Sanger surveyed New York City police precincts with the question, “how many women in your district, who are not impelled by necessity, prostitute themselves to gratify their passions?” These women, whom Sanger associated with meetings in houses of assignation and kept mistresses, Sanger called “private prostitutes.” Id. p. 583. Describing his own study of New York City, Sanger reported “the most diligent search can discover in 1858 only 7860 public and private prostitutes.” Id. p. 616. He observed “all are included who are suspected to be lost to virtue, although of the number who visit houses of assignation for sexual gratification many are guiltless of promiscuous intercourse.” Id. p. 584. New York City then had a female population of about 366,000.  Sanger’s surveys were completely unsuited to estimating the number of women who had non-commercial sex outside of marriage. That number probably would be much greater than Sanger’s estimate of total public and private prostitutes. Accepting Sanger’s definition of prostitutes, Hill (1993) p. 30, Table 1, reports his figure of 7860 simply as “prostitutes.”

[13] Within his study, Sanger displayed his erudition with quotes from, among others, Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (title page), Alexander Pope’s poetry (p. 21), Shakespeare’s King Lear (p. 33, cf. King Lear 3.2.60: “More sinn’d against than sinning”), and Byron’s The Giaour (p. 486, substituting “her soul” for “his soul”). Sanger may have quoted some of his own poetry (p. 23). He also displayed considerable knowledge of ancient Greek and Roman literature and modern European literature. Nonetheless, Sanger’s imagination seems to have been constrained in a highly conventional way:

reading through Sanger’s stories of individual prostitutes, it is hard not to suspect that he is falling for them. As Sanger and reformers write about fallen women, they appeal to readers’ most intimate feelings about the female kin for whom they already care— daughters, sisters, mothers, and perhaps wives

Sánchez (2008) p. 94. The women-are-wonderful effect provides an alternate social-science perspective on Sanger’s narrow imagination.

[image] Illustration: “Dangerous Amusements — The Brilliant Entrance to Hell Itself.” From Bell, Ernest A. 1911. Fighting the traffic in young girls, or, War on the white slave trade: a complete and detailed account of the shameless traffic in young girls. Chicago.  Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Carlisle, Robert J. 1893. An account of Bellevue Hospital: with a catalogue of the medical and surgical staff from 1736 to 1894. New York: Society of the Alumni of Bellevue Hospital.

Hill, Marilynn Wood. 1993. Their sisters’ keepers: prostitution in New York City, 1830-1870. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Renner, Karen J. 2010. “Seduction, Prostitution, and the Control of Female Desire in Popular Antebellum Fiction.” Nineteenth-Century Literature. 65 (2): 166-191.

Sánchez, María Carla. 2008. Reforming the world: social activism and the problem of fiction in nineteenth-century America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Sanger, William W. 1858. The history of prostitution: its extent, causes, and effects throughout the world. Being an official report to the Board of Alms-House Governors of the City of New York. New York: Harper.