From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

"Man reveals his true nature in his fears and desires. Show me what he is afraid of, show me what excites him, I will tell you who he is."--Sholem Stein

Related e

Wikipedia Wiktionary Shop Featured: Rhombicuboctahedron by Leonardo da Vinci

This page The History of Erotica is a placeholder for a draft of an English translaton of De geschiedenis van de erotiek: van holbewoner tot Markies de Sade by Jan Willem Geerinck, published in 2011 in Dutch.

Contents 1 Table of contents 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Prehistory 1.3 Greco-Roman 1.3.1 Coitus interruptus 1.3.2 A study in ideal form 1.3.3 The caveman is alive and well 1.3.4 Ovid and the loves of the Gods 1.3.5 Narcissus and Hermaphroditus 1.3.6 Zeus the proto-Don Juan 1.3.7 When gods lust after animals 1.3.8 How to pick-up women? 1.3.9 Fututa sum hic: I got laid here 1.3.10 In praise of love 1.3.11 The spectacle of love 1.3.12 Proto-feminism and the first sex strike 1.3.13 Ode to the penis 1.3.14 Gossip and tall tales 1.3.15 The first whore dialogue 1.3.16 The two "novels" of the Romans 1.4 The East 1.4.1 The scent of musk and the sultry East 1.4.2 When fiction is a matter of life and death 1.5 The Middle Ages 1.5.1 The Middle Ages: Sex is dirty, but the flesh is weak 1.5.2 Boccaccio and Chaucer 1.5.3 Il Decamerone 1.5.4 The Canterbury Tales 1.5.5 The tale of the miller: Kiss my ass 1.5.6 The story of the wife of Bath: do you want me pretty and unfaithful or ugly and faithful? 1.5.7 The story of the clerk 1.5.8 Bawdy, farcical and ribald 1.5.9 The caveman (still) isn't dead 1.5.10 The Ring that Controlled Erections 1.5.11 Of talking cunts 1.5.12 A 'ring' as chastity belt 1.5.13 The wife with two openings 1.5.14 The Snow-child 1.5.15 The little wheel 1.5.16 When the heart is full the tongue will speak 1.5.17 Sexual demons 1.5.18 Lilith 1.5.19 A most cruel and shameful punishment 1.5.20 The eye is left wanting 1.5.21 Atone for your sins in hell 1.5.22 Bulb-like women and root-like men 1.5.23 The medieval adonis 1.5.24 The caveman hides in the church 1.5.25 Love is magical 1.6 Renaissance 1.7 France 1.8 The love that dare not speak its name 1.9 The Low Countries 1.10 Baroquerotica 1.11 The 18th century: Eros Enlightened 1.12 Verantwoording 1.13 Bibliografie 2 See also

Table of contents

Introduction

I am millions of years old. You don't believe me? Whatever. My provenance, you ask? There's so much to tell. And all is true. You pick the version which pleases you most.

Some argue that I was created ex nihilo, out of prima materia, the primal soup. In that scenario, I am a force of nature and I have no human attributes. Those who want to ascribe parents to me say that my mother was both a whore and goddess. My father? Muckrakers claim that not even my mother knows. Is it cowardly and disfigured technician with whom my mother at a young age was forced to marry? Is it the brave ambassador or the bloodthirsty warrior with whom she secretly had an affair? If I were to choose one of them, I would pick the latter. Anyway, they both regarded me as their child and as things go, I learned a lot from them. They are still alive. Just as my grandparents, about whom even wilder rumours circulate.

I was a happy child. Along with my raucous half brother Dionysus we raised hell more than once. But despite the fun we had, the number of souls we liberated, I soon became bored. My mother introduced me to the nine daughters of a friend of the family, a notorious flirt, a man for whom we had infinite respect. Together with my half brother and our good friends Logos and Sophia we decided to capture the volatile nature of our antics in words and pictures. You owe this book to them. I dedicate it to mortals like you, whose questions can only be answered by Gods like us.

Once I fell prey to my own arrows. I accidentally jabbed myself and fell in love with one of you - my mother played a dubious role in that affair - but I have long since forgiven her. My love for this mortal woman was brief, it disappeared as quickly as it had flared up. The fruit of our passion was one daughter, we named her Hedone, Greek for pleasure.

My name is Eros. This makes my mother Aphrodite (goddess of love), my father Ares (god of war), the nine sisters, the Muses and the mortal beauty I was in love with, Psyche. I am the god of love, usually depicted as a boy with bow and arrow, a childish Valentine figurine I still find hard to cope with.

In prehistoric times, I watch how cavemen paint their cave walls. They know not of my existence, although I keep their kind in existence with my well-chosen and expertly fired arrows. My written history begins with the Greeks. Although I have existed since all eternity, I then spend my golden days.

No one doubts my existence, I am honoured everywhere, my exploits are immortalized in poems and my image graces many a vase. I have never had it better. Our family falls on hard times in the Middle Ages. Competition comes from the Middle East. Everyone begins to rave about one God, who tolerates none of us in his vicinity. My mother and I suffer severe blows. We are the deification of the body and Christians abhor the body. My half brother Phobos, the god of fear, experience his heyday.

The muses have a the time of their life during the Renaissance. With the help of Hephaestus, my mother's husband, they invent the printing press. Text and images glorifying my mother and me can now be mechanically reproduced. Our flame blazes across Europe. But our technical ingenuity are at the same time our downfall. The large numbers in which we are distributed make us the object of hostilities of a new class: the moral crusader and the censor. The body parts that serve for reproduction of your species are anatomically analysed. Our magical powers are apparently revealed. The past two centuries see Hephaestus and the muses seeking refuge in new technical trends: photography, film and the internet. During the sexual revolution, the censor has bury the hatchet. The result is the AIDS pandemic, for which only Pandora can have been responsible. Indeed, she who spread syphilis over Europe in the past. In the 20th century we witness further attempts by medical science and psychology to strip us from our lure. But neither of these sciences knows the answer to the mystery of eroticism, the mystery that keeps human kind alive and of which my mother and I are the treasurers.

Do you believe me now?

Eros.

Prehistory

Eros is the oldest of the gods, said Plato. He is the god of love, lust, blind passion and sexual reproduction. If Eros with his bow and arrow hits someone, the victim falls in love immediately. His parentage is significant: he is the son of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Ares, god of war. He is thus born out of beauty and belligerence, out of love and hate. Out of two opposites that are united nowhere else than in the most intimate space of the human psyche: the sexual act, and its abstraction: eroticism.

The prehistoric caveman, who we imagine to be hardly in command of language, communicating with jolting sounds rather than words, experienced this act just as sacredly and profanely as 21st-century man. Just as elusive, ineffable, unnameable and indescribable as today's mortal. Yet he tries to give expression to what he feels, to convert the immediacy of his experience into a tangible and visible image. The male desire and the heaving and pumping of his pelvis, apparently at random, without anyone having ever taught him. The woman receiving his pelvic blows and undulating under his strength, still unaware that her pregnancies are the result of their frenzy. Their mutual obsession with the other, the sense of wonder that transcends the animalistic but never entirely succeeds in escaping it. This powerful cocktail of confusing emotions provides the first erotic images and the first erotic art, from its beginnings two-fold, with a male and female version.

The cave painting Shaft of the Dead Man in the French Lascaux depicts male eroticism, and the Austrian Venus of Willendorf figurine depicts the female variant. Both date back to thousands of years before Christ, long before the Greeks and Romans. The painting in Lascaux and the Willendorf statue are the icons of prehistoric erotica. The dead man symbolizes male aggressive sexuality, as dictated by the hormone testosterone, the hormone at the root of the two basic male instincts, so aptly described by American New Age philosopher Ken Wilber as "fuck it, or kill it." The two instincts which the cave dweller needed to reproduce their kind.

The dead man shows a recumbent male figure with an erect penis, drawn as a straight line, as a toddler would. Towering above him is a wounded bison whose intestines protrude from its body, next to the bison is a broken spear. Has the man conquered the bison before the fight became his fatal end? Is it the depiction of a dream vision? Impossible to answer that question, but the violent struggle of the man and his obvious sexual arousal are juxtaposed here in one image, and are both symbols of male eroticism. His excitement - which once put on fire, is sometimes extinguished after a few minutes - has far-reaching consequences for her. Her breasts become fuller, her mound swells, her belly gets bigger and her buttocks heavier, her nesting instinct requires protection. She is the pregnant woman, the Venus of Willendorf, the idealization of femininity, the incarnate womb, the embodied protector of the species. The mother goddess. The hunter of Lascaux and the mother of Willendorf are the archetypes of erotic art. They symbolize the irrationality of love, which despite of its apparent incompatibility of the aggressive male and protective female eroticism, results in its most brilliant moments in a miraculous and divine harmony between Venus and Eros, the protagonists in the history of erotica.

Greco-Roman

In contrast to our caveman, our Greco-Roman ancestor understands agriculture and literally reaps its fruits. The elite of this new civilization can read and write, paint and sculpt. One who masters the written word can compose a love letter, but just as well write erotic poetry, a novel or a book about sex education. And thus love becomes an art, practised by both gods and mortals.

Thanks to these skills, which produce cultural artefacts, our understanding of Greco-Roman love life is much more precise than that of prehistoric man. The Greeks are popularly known for the love of older men for young boys, called pederasty and for homosexuality, the love of men for men, in general. In fact, the term Greek love has became a byword for homosexuality, used well into the previous century. That kind of loving is also found in Roman society, but there the attitude towards homosexuals and pederasts is rather less positive, a Roman man had to be cautious not to be on the receiving end of this kind of love. From the Romans we especially remember their general debauchery, and the perversions of the decadent Roman emperors, handed down throughout history with famous examples the exploits of ruler Caligula and empress Messalina.

Supposedly, Greeks and Romans knew very little sexual shame. To prove this point the large number of utensils that are decorated in an erotic or sexual manner, like the grotesque penis-shaped oil lamps, are usually brought to the fore. Yet shame could not have been an unknown phenomenon in Greco-Roman times. It is noteworthy that the Greek and Roman terms for the genitalia, aidoion and pudendum, mean 'shame' in their literal translation. The corresponding goddesses Aidos and Pudicitia are deifications of modesty, chastity and shame. If the Greeks and Romans embellished their surroundings with -- to our eyes -- obscene objects, the truth is that these objects are not a sign of their general debauchery. The penis as ornamental element has a symbolic value. It stands for fertility and fertility is essential for our ancestor. Fertility for the crops he grows and fertility for his family, because that shall assure him of a carefree retirement. Sexually suggestive objects for everyday use are not about sex but about happiness. Just as a four-leaf clover in a locket around someone's neck or a horseshoe above the door. These do not betray one's interest in botany or equestrianism, they are simply signs trying to enforce luck. Thus for the Romans, the penis is simply is a sign of good fortune, a means to ward off the evil eye. Whoever is offended by this phallic object is sorely mistaken.

Coitus interruptus

For the first time in history - and this fact cannot be stressed enough - man can have sex with a significantly reduced risk of pregnancy. He's mastered the mystery of reproduction and recognized the male role in it. The most popular method of contraception was coitus interruptus, first described in the Jewish Bible with the story of Onan, who preferred to shoot his seed onto the rocks instead of trusting it to the vagina of his wife, simply because he does not wish to beget children with her. The name Onan gives us later the term "onanism" which will both stand for "masturbation" and "premature withdrawal". Other kinds of of birth control methods can be found, similar to today's, including abortion. Love had become a game, a playful pastime that did not necessarily needed to have far reaching consequences. The first sexual revolution is a fact.

A study in ideal form

‘I'd rather die than use obscene and improper words; but when you, Priapus, as a god, appear with your testicles hanging out, it is appropriate for me to speak of cunts and cocks.’ Priapeia 28

For some years we know that in antiquity it was the custom to paint sculptures in bright colours, which would undoubtedly have added to the lustre of this work.

The playfulness of the sexual act is accompanied by an aesthetization of the human body, a body that no longer serves merely for the biological role it was allotted. A body which can now be displayed for purely aesthetic reasons.

Eroticism became a study in ideal form. Examples are the pictures of the Parisienne of Knossos, the Venus Anadyomene, the Venus Kallipygos and the Barberini Faun. All four show near perfect people with ideal physiques and beautiful faces. The Parisienne is almost a real contemporary Parisian woman, including red painted lips, a slender neck and large eyes. Beauty is so important to the Greeks that when the famous courtesan Phryne during a trial where her life is at stake, suddenly stripped before the judges of the Areopagus, she was promptly acquitted. The judges could not believe that a woman with such perfect forms might be capable of wrongdoing. Her physical beauty cannot be anything else but a sign of God, the old judges agree.

Thanks to her beauty, Venus is privy to various favours. Venus the beautiful. In the arts it is enough to drop her name to make clear that she is a female nude. That nudity can take two forms: heavenly or earthly. Or to put it in the words of Plato: "Venus caelestis" and "Venus vulgaris." The first lives in the heavenly firmament and the second among the people. That dichotomy between the two Venuses will keep popping up in the depiction of the female nude. The heavenly Venus is respected, she's a beauty ideal, the unattainable goddess and she is thought of in flattering terms such as "artistic nude" and "erotic". The popular Venus is the object of pitying glances. She is the girl next door, available, rather than nude she is simply 'naked' and the word accompanying the pointing finger will more likely be 'pornographic'.

Venus came fully grown, nude and perfect in the world. She rises from the waves of the sea as the most beautiful of all women. Conceived and born when the genitals of the sky god castrated Uranus hit the silver foam of the sea after a long fall. Venus is white as the foam from which she was born, and amiable and lovely as a flower. When she comes ashore the grass shoots under her feet as she strides past. She was painted first in a lost work by Apelles, the greatest painter of antiquity. It is the beginning of a long tradition. The version of Pompeii is a copy of that work. On that mural she is shown lying in a scallop seashell and that is not by coincidence, the shell is a vulva symbol. Although the anonymous painter has has tried his hardest, I'm sure to depict her at her comeliest, he was only partly successful. Especially her legs are poorly rendered. They seem snapped like matchsticks. Her gaze is absent and directed towards the sky. The Venus Kallipygos is more sensual. It is a life-size marble statue of a woman who lifts up her dress and offers us a glimpse of her backside. It comes as no surprise that 'Venus Kallipygos' literally means Venus with the beautiful buttocks. " She glances over her shoulder: does she want to inspect her own buttocks? Or does she show her derrière, stealthily trying to tempt to us? In the second case we are reduced to voyeurs. Arousing such feelings is the prerogative of the Venus vulgaris.

What is the male sex symbol during this era? He is a faun, the marble Barberini Faun. This statue shows a very shapely young man leaning back, legs spread, so that his penis is clearly visible, his face squeezed into a contorted drunken ecstasy, as if he is offering himself to an imaginary partner. Has the drunkenness fuelled his desire? Will he still be capable to perform the deed of deeds? We do not know, but it may be that the sculptor asked himself that very question when he made the sculpture of this fleshly Adonis.

The caveman is alive and well

Although our Greco-Roman ancestor is concerned with beauty ideals, his world view is still close to that of the caveman: his world view is of a religious, superstitious and eroto-magic nature.

There are several archaeological finds from the Greco-Roman times, that even by today's standards could be called downright obscene. Objects such as Baubo [1] - an elderly woman shamelessly showing her vulva - seemingly display an unabashed erotic audacity. But it is a feminine sensuality meant to symbolize fertility, not eroticism. The chimes [image][2] in the shape of a flying penis does the same for male fertility, just as the the Satyr and the Goat [3] and the giant phallus of the fertility god Priapus on a mural in Pompeii [image][4].

The chimes consist of a hanging phallus upon which three other phalluses and two wings are mounted. From the shaft of the penis three bells dangle, which when stirred by the wind chime harmoniously. It served as a symbol of fertility and votive object, they were called 'fascina' (plural of 'fascinum'), where our word "fascination" is derived from.

I know of no bigger penis in a realist painting than the erection in the life-size mural of Priapus in Pompeii [image]. In a bizarre detail, this horny fertility deity holds a pair of scales in his right hand, with which he weighs his erection against a bag full of coins. His phallus clearly outweigh the coins. Money can buy anything but a big penis is even worth more, would seem the allegorical interpretation of this tableau. Our word "priapism," the medical term for a painful, persistent and non-sexual erection, reminds us of this well-hung deity.

The Satyr and the Goat is an anonymous sculpture of the god Pan, a satyr in Greek mythology, a faun in Roman mythology. He is the god of the forest, the patron saint of shepherds and their flocks and the god of animal instinct. He has the lower body and the horns of a goat - an animal that is still known for its sexual appetite - but a human torso, a long narrow face, a big nose and yellow eyes. He will later appear in Christian demonology, where the devil often sports horns and walks on hooves rather than feet. Pan has left traces in modern English. If he shows himself screaming in the woods, the nymphs run away and people panic. Fauns are -- in the polytheism of the Romans and the Greeks -- the horniest of gods, they known of no taboo, rape hordes of virgins and animals alike and generally lack any sense of shame. Next to sculpture, the majority of archaeological finds among the Greeks is pottery. An almost completely preserved plate upon which is depicted an orgy (Kylix with Erotic Scenes[5]) is in the collections of the Louvre. Whether it is currently on display, I do not know. If you are visiting, just ask for it.

If the Priapus from Pompeii is the personification of the penis and virility, than Artemis of Ephesus [6] is the personification of the breast and the female ability to feed. In visualizations such as these, the mythological sexual characteristics are inflated to gigantic proportions in order to highlight their power and effectiveness. Quality loses out against size and quantity. Artemis of Ephesus is portrayed with three rows of breasts, although some modern scholars nowadays interpret them as deified testicles of a bull. The most famous version is a first century copy of a Roman original and is located in Izmir, Turkey.

Ovid and the loves of the Gods

In our monotheistic concept of God, God created man in his image and likeness, but in the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans the people created the gods in their likeness. Nothing human is alien to the gods and no one has described the gods better than Ovid (43 BC. - 17 AD). He made his début at the age of eighteen with his Amores, but had previously made a name for himself as a love poet.

He is wealthy and can devote himself entirely to poetry. His collection Amores are followed by the Ars Amatoria (The art of love) and his best-known work, The Metamorphoses. He can afford a luxurious and dissolute life in the cosmopolitan metropolis Rome and is a bona fide society figure. The poet marries three times, and is survided by his last wife.

Despite his success, and for reasons which remain unclear, he is exiled at the age of 51 by Emperor Augustus to the distant shores of the Black Sea. It is possible that the emperor considered the poet too light-hearted but others believe that a conspiracy theory was the reason for his exile. Although political subversion and sexual freedom often go hand in hand it is generally supposed that his exile was for political reasons rather than censorship. As an exile in a remote corner of the Roman world, languishing amidst what he called "the barbarians", the frivolous Ovid city man leads a desolate and lonely existence. Even his wife had remained in Rome. Without ever being rehabilitated, he dies in exile at the age of 60. His self-written epitaph reads:

I that lie here, the bard of playful love,

The poet Ovid, perished for my play.

Oh passing lover, scorn not thou to pray

That no ill chance my restful bones may move.

Tristia tr. via Ovid and his influence Edward Kennard Rand

Fortunately, his oeuvre almost entirely survived. Two works are particularly relevant to our research. The Metamorphoses and the Ars amatoria. The Metamorphoses tells of the love adventures of the gods and the Ars amatoria is the first book of sex education. Neither uses explicit language, which in any case cannot be found in the work of Ovid, no direct references to mentula nor cunnus, the Latin terms for cock and cunt.

In the Metamorphoses, the gods are not depicted as exalted beings . Ovid describes them in a playful manner as ordinary mortals, with typical human foibles and amorous whims. The epic poem describes the creation and history of the world according to Greco-Roman mythology. Gods, demigods and mortals are constantly undergoing dramatic transformations (metamorphoses) and shifted into plants, flowers, trees, rocks, clouds, rivers and animals. Their bizarre behaviour is easily explained; many of them are indeed plagued by the arrows of Eros. Bewitched by love, they are not their ordinary selves.

Some of the more sexual stories are that in which the nymph Daphne is changed into a laurel tree to escape an impending rape by Apollo. Or the story of the hunter Actaeon who is turned into a deer after he had spied on the naked goddess Diana. As a deer he is torn to pieces by his own hounds. Serves him right.

Narcissus and Hermaphroditus

Narcissus and Hermaphroditus are well-known even today, they both live on in contemporary psychology and sexology. Hermaphroditus is a handsome deity worshipped by Salmacis, a nymph so in love with him that she first tries to rape him and when that fails desperately prays to the gods that they would be united forever. Her prayer is answered and they are fused in one body. If in one individual both male and female reproductive organs are found, the term hermaphroditism is used.

Narcissus is an equally a handsome young man who lives for the hunt. He has a made lots of hearts skip a beat with his exceptional beauty, but wants nothing of love and he rejects suitor haughtily and cruelly, a fate that would also befall the lovesick nymph Echo. One day his wanderings bring him to a sacred pond of crystal clear water. When he bends over, he sees his reflection in the water, but he thinks it is a beautiful water spirit that lives in the pond. He instantly falls in love with his own reflection and cannot bring himself to separate from this beautiful apparition which disappears whenever he tries to touch it. Thus he slowly withers away altogether. To him we owe the term narcissism, coined by Freud to denote a excessive self-love.

Zeus the proto-Don Juan

But the main character of the Metamorphoses, the Don Juan of the entire pantheon is Zeus / Jupiter himself, the king of the gods. He is married to his sister, the goddess Hera, the eldest daughter of Kronos. To her great sadness and anger Zeus can not resist other women. Hera was very jealous and tries in many ways to keep him from his amorous escapades. All too often in vain: we know of at least seventeen relationships with goddesses and twenty-six with mortal women. He fathered dozens of children with them.

His most famous conquests are those of Danae, Io, Leda, Callisto, Antiope, and Europe. Whenever he sets out to conquer a woman, he changes shape to increase his chances of success and to escape the watchful eye of his jealous wife. Depending on the woman he sets out to seduce, he has to be either sweet and gentle or tough and frightening, and accordingly changes his appearance. That this is efficient, is well-known to contemporary man.

With Danae he changes himself into a golden rain, and while she is caught in a tower, he lands comfortably between her legs through the bars of her prison. With Io he shifts into a cloud, with Leda to swan, with Callisto he passes for for the goddess Artemis, with Antiope he pretends to be a and with Europa he takes the shape of a white bull.

Zeus is a seducer, a conqueror, but you might just as well say that he abducts women, or kidnaps or rapes them. The multiplicity of meanings is caused by the Latin term raptio, which may mean any of the aforementioned. But that same ambiguity is also symptomatic of the nature of male-female love and the battle of the sexes described in the Metamorphoses. This theme of forced seduction is celebrated today in the 724 romance novels of Barbara Cartland, in which women chant "No, no, no", but inwardly cheer "Yes, yes, yes".

Zeus's last conquest is the one of Leda, the wife of a Spartan king. When he cannot convince her to give herself to him immediately, Zeus turns into a swan and overwhelms her. Ashamed of what has happened, Leda has intercourse with her husband the same evening, and after nine months she gives birth to four children, coming from one egg. Castor and Helen were the children of Zeus, Polydeukes and Clytemnestra of her husband. It is no coincidence that Ovid chose for a swan in this story, it's the only bird (along with ducks and geese) that has a penis. With a little imagination, the slender neck of a swan can even be taken for a penis symbol.

When gods lust after animals

Greco-Roman mythology includes a number of stories that speak of sexual love of man towards his different-footed counterpart. Sexual contact between humans and animals is an undisputed reality in present and past times. Rarely is it the object of beautiful art, except in the images of the hybrids that arise from such contact.

We have noted how Zeus turned himself into a swan in order to overwhelm Leda. There is also the story of Pasiphaë, the wife of King Minos of Crete. Her husband has insulted the god Poseidon, upon which the God punishes the couple by instilling in Pasiphaë a inordinate sexual desire for a beautiful white bull. Pasiphaë's lust is of such a magnitude that she just had to consume her love with the mighty beast, so strong is her lust. She asks the leading inventor Daedalus to build her a wooden cow, in which she hides and assumes the proper position in order to be mounted by the bull.

The transgressive nature of this story has prevented its depiction -- at least sufficiently explicit to be called erotic and to merit inclusion in this book -- in the arts for over centuries. A print[7] that does not exactly leave little to the imagination but hints at the carnality of the scene, is by 17th-century publisher and artist Johann Ulrich Krauss. He insinuates the heart of the matter by showing Pasiphaë just before she takes her place in the wooden cow, in which back to back, belly to belly and groin to groin her wish will be fulfilled moments later. Only in Ovid's inexhaustible imagination could this communion lead to offspring some months later, when the famous Minotaur was born, a human figure with the head of a bull.

How to pick-up women?

Ovid takes ample pleasure in telling of the love affairs of the gods, but he also wants to give love advice to us plain mortals in his Ars Amatoria, an early sex manual. Ars amatoria (The art of love) is a poem in three books in which Ovid -- in his usual breezy style -- raises topics that people find so hard to put into words. He has Venus say, "... what you blush to tell is the most important part of the whole matter". Each volume ends with a bed scene. Ovid writes remarkable passages about simultaneous orgasm and his dislike of gay love. More than anything else the poems are a guide to the courtship of women and remarkably up-to-date - except perhaps in those passages on the use of love potions:

   Remember that every woman can be conquered.
   Work on your character and develop your intellect.
   Take care of your hair.
   Be on good terms with her maid.
   Avoid harsh words.
   Choose beautiful but not too expensive clothes.
   Choose the right time.
   Be patient and be obliging.
   Be careful with make-up.
   Write her a letter full of flattery and promises.
   Win the sympathy of her staff.
   Groom yourself in private.
   Learn to be eloquent and persevere.
   Send small but precious gifts.
   Camouflage your imperfections.
   Stay as near to her as possible.
   Read her a love poem.
   Laugh and cry in a distinguished manner.
   Make the most of your appearance, but do not act effeminate.
   Let her take credit.
   Walk elegantly.
   Drink wine with moderation.
   Appeal to her vanity.
   Uncover an arm and or a bit of shoulder.
   Be friendly with her lover.
   Be her loving care.
   Learn to sing and make music.
   Make abundant oaths and promises.
   Do not go a away for a long time.
   Know thy literature.
   Praise and kiss her.
   Do not get caught in adultery.
   Practice your dance and play.
   Use gentle violence with her.
   Do not drink love potions.
   Do not participate in sports, but stroll in the city.
   Take the initiative, but be prepared to step back.
   Confess infidelity for a passionate reconciliation.
   Mingle.
   Make sure you look pale and thin.
   Know yourself.
   Beware of imposters.
   Beware of friends and relatives.
   Endure setbacks.
   Instil hope and fear by taking a short delay in answering a love letter.
   Adjust yourself to her.
   Do not be jealous rivals.
   Take care of your correspondence.
   Exercise discretion in love.
   Do not get angry.
   Gloss over her shortcomings. 
   Do not be haughty.
   Enjoy a mature woman.
   Make eye contact and smile.
   Prolong love making and strive for a simultaneous orgasm.
   Look happy, not sad.

Fututa sum hic: I got laid here

Next to Ovid we find a whole series of writings that deal with "the beast with two backs" as the act of love is sometimes colourfully called. These writings range from obscene graffiti on the walls of Rome to the satirical poems of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and Propertius, from the bedroom farces of Plautus and Terence to the picaresque novels Satyricon and The Golden Ass, from the Priapea (odes to the penis) and gossip to the whore dialogues of Lucian. In Greece the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander find favour with the public and there is the curious case of the Milesian tale.

A foretaste, Catullus, Carmen 16:

I'll fuck you up your ass and down your throat,

you cock-sucker Aurelius and fudge-packed Furius!

Just because my verses are tender doesn't mean

that I've gone all soft. Sure, a poet should focus

on writing poetry and not on sex; but does that

mean they can't write about sex? If a poem is

in good taste, well-written and sexy,

it can tingle and stiffen even hairy old men,

not just horny teenagers. You think I'm a wuss

because I write about thousands of kisses?

I'll fuck you up your ass and down your throat! --tr. Wikipedia

When man invented writing, he immediately used it for the loftiest as well as the basest purposes. The obscene graffiti, that can be found abundantly on the walls of Ancient Rome, falls in the latter category. If, as the early 20th century Austrian architect Adolf Loos argues, the degree of civilization of a country can be measured by the extent to which its toilets are smeared with obscene graffiti, Ancient Rome was not exactly the most civilized place on earth. Thus we read on the walls of Pompeii "fututa sum hic (I got laid here) and the walls of the gladiator academy carry inscriptions such as "Celadus makes the girls sigh." But that it does not always have to be of such a prosaic nature is proven by an inconsolable soul who leaves the following on a Roman wall:

Now lovers come. For I am bound

To crush Dame Venus' frame.

With cudgel stout and right arm sound,

A smacking blow I'll aim

If she can break my tender heart.

Why, Lovers, tell me pray,

With cudgel cannot I make smart The goddess' head today ?

--[...]tr. Elizabeth Hazelton Haight from Essays on Ancient Fiction

In praise of love

From the obscene graffiti on the walls of ancient Rome it is but a small step to the sometimes very cynical poems of Juvenal, Martial, Catullus and Propertius. Satirist Juvenal, who lived between approximately 60 and 135 AD is known as a misogynist. In his infamous Sixth Satire - also known as Against Women- he writes about the character flaws of the opposite sex: they are adulterous, nymphomaniac, pretentious, quarrelsome, rude, superstitious and know no restraint. Above all the sixth satire is a pamphlet against marriage. The poet advises men not to marry: "You might as well commit suicide or sleep with a boy." That same love-hate relationship to women is also evident in the amusing and often obscene epigrams of Martial (40 - 103? AD).

That the more lyrical Catullus (84-54 BC.), who thanks his Carmina Catulli is known as the Roman love poet, is sometimes challenged in his love encounters with women can be seen in the following lines of poetry, perhaps his most famous ones:

"I hate and love. Why so I cannot tell

I feel it and endure the pains of hell"

(From: Carmen 85 - translation James Cranstoun)

Although Catullus, just like Martial and Juvenal, sometimes deals with the bitter aftermath of a love relationship, his poems are more amorous:

Let us live, my Lesbia, and love.

As for all the rumors of those stern old men,

Let us value them at a mere penny.

Suns may set and yet rise again, but

Us, with our brief light, can set but once.

The night which falls is one never-ending sleep.

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred.

Then, another thousand, and a second hundred.

Then, yet another thousand, and a hundred.

Then, when we have counted up many thousands,

Let us shake the abacus, so that no one may know the number,

And become jealous when they see

How many kisses we have shared.

--(Carmen 5 - WP translation)

But despite the occasional setbacks that the quest for love may engender, they all go for it (ervoor gaan), and Propertius (47-15 BC.) writes in his Elegies, "The humbler I behave in love, the more I have of her to expect." The 19th-century English poet Alfred Tennyson paraphrases the poet when he says: "Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all."

The spectacle of love

For both the Greeks and the Romans, theatre is the main source of fiction, film has of course not yet been invented, and the first real novels remain to be written. It goes without saying that tragedy is not only diversion the ancients have a liking for, laughter was high on their wish-list. A large number of improper plays meets that demand.

The forerunner of Roman comedy writers was the Greek scribe Menander (342-291 BC), writer of comedies with evocative titles as The Grouch, Double Deceiver, The Hero, The Flatterer, Drugged Women, Drunkenness, The Man She Hated and The Possessed Girl, titles that would not look out of place on the cover of contemporary airport novels. Love and all its complications are about the only topic in these plays.

A century later, the Roman writer Plautus (250-184 BC) introduces the typical cardboard characters from classic comedy, stereotypical characters like the dirty old men and women of loose morals. In short, in this type of theatre, all women are whores and all men are stupid. Plautus transposes a lot of Greek comedies, including those of Menander, to a Roman setting, and does so in a scintillating Latin. The farces of Terence (c. 195-159 BC.) also hark back to indecent Greek comedies, but they are less frivolous and with greater psychological depth than in those of Plautus. He is best-known today for saying "homo sum, et nihil humanum a me alienum puto" (I am a man, I consider nothing that is human alien to me).

Theatre in Greece originates as a feast in honor of the god Dionysus (Bacchus to the Romans), the god of wine and fertility, of ecstasy and the good life. The main companions of Dionysos satyrs and nymphs, the two archetypes of lust. A theatrical genre is even named after this lusty God, the satyr play. It was the custom that after three tragedies, one satyr play performed, consisting of mainly of jocular entertainment with a horny, elated, lazy and drunken character. One must imagine actors with huge strap-on dildos storming the stage like madmen, dispersing the seductive and screaming nymphs.

Proto-feminism and the first sex strike

The coarse humour I just described is amply surpassed by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes (446-386 BC) in his play Lysistrata, which has a witty, smart and significant sexual plot. Lysistrata concerns a company of Athenian ladies who use a sex strike to force their men to lay down their arms. Under the leadership of the militant Lysistrata - a name which means "she who disbands armies" - these women occupy the treasury of the Acropolis to financially drain the war. They do not yield until peace finally exists among the Greek city-states.

"Let us wait at home with our faces made up and then advance to greet our husbands with nothing on but our little tunics. . . then, when they are panting with desire, if we slip away instead of yielding, they'll soon conclude an armistice, I can tell you ... So no more legs in the air."

But, retorts a woman "if our husbands drag us by main force into the bedchamber?" Then you should "hold on to the door posts" answers Lysistrata. And when another woman asks "and if they beat us?" In that case, advises Lysistrata "yield to their wishes, but with a bad grace; there is no pleasure for them, when they do it by force." "Because," Lysistrata concludes "there's no satisfaction for a man, unless the woman shares it." Which is a surprisingly modern advice, remembering that the play was written about 2,500 years ago.1

Ode to the penis

But sex strike or not, the penis would not be held down so easily. He is only too eagerly praised in 95 of most obscene epigrams that ever saw the light of day, the so-called Priapeia. The author and the origin of these poems are quite unclear, but we do know that they are fully dedicated to the stiff fertility god Priapus, and his principal tool the phallus. This collection was not translated until the second half of the 19th century.

Though I be wooden Priapus (as thou see'st),

With wooden sickle and a prickle of wood,

Yet will I seize thee, girl! and hold thee seized

And This, however gross, withouten fraud

Stiffer than lyre-string or than twisted rope

I'll thrust and bury to thy seventh rib.

--Priapeia 5

Gossip and tall tales

There's lots of gossip in the Roman Empire. There are many things to gossip about: there are the exploits of the mad emperors Caligula, Nero, Domitian, Commodus and Elagabalus, whose adultery, debauchery, malignancies and perversities herald the end of the empire. But it are primarily the women Cleopatra and Messalina who make tongues wag. Cleopatra supposedly fucked her way to the top via the beds of many an influential man.

And of Messalina it is said that she is so horny and insatiable that she rents a room in a brothel where under the pseudonym Lycisca she gives herself to complete strangers. Juvenal describes in his sixth satire how Messalina challenges the well-know Roman prostitute Scylla to engage in a veritable sex competition. Whoever pleasures the highest number of men within a certain time, is the winner. After 24 hours Scylla gives up, making Messalina the undisputed winner with a score of 25 men. Then she is "tired but not satiated, still burning with the rigid tensions of her vulva". An average of one man per hour is not a bad score. The current record -- established in 2004 and still standing at the time of writing this book -- stands at 919 men in one day. Pliny the Elder (ca. 23-79 AD) may have had the nymphomaniac Messalina in mind when he raises the issue of the collapse of 'modern morality' in his Naturalis Historia, complaining that "the human race has invented every possible form of perverted sexual pleasure and crimes against nature, while women have invented abortion. How much more guilty are we in this respect than animals?" Based on this statement Pliny may be proclaimed the first moral crusader. We will find his type more frequently in the following pages of this book.

The first whore dialogue

In Antiquity the tradition of the whore dialogue is born and in time it will become a genuine literary genre. The whore dialogue is a mixture of sex education, medical folklore and erotic literature, and usually takes the form of an experienced older woman who reveals the mysteries of physical love to a younger girl. Since it is In Antiquity, there are no women writing in the field of eroticism. There are no women writers, except for the Greek 7th century BC poet Sappho. So it are male authors who write the whore dialogues. They avail themselves of female personae, from temple harlots to stale street walkers to nubile ingénues who wound up as orphans in a brothel to successful Madames. Why was the whore so popular and would her voice sound with such clarity and frequency throughout the history of erotic literature? The answer is simple. Like no other she understands the male psyche, having slept with so many of their kind. "All men began as flecks of tissue inside a woman's womb. Every boy must stagger out of the shadow of a mother goddess, whom he never fully escapes....Women have it. Men want it. What is it? The secret of life..." (footnote: the metaphor we use here is by American professor and author Camille Paglia from 1984.)

Lucian of Samosata (c. 120-180 AD.), a Greek-speaking author from ancient Rome, writes the oldest preserved whore dialogue, the so-called Dialogue of the Courtesans in the second century AD. Its most famous dialogue is that between the young Corinna and her mother Crobyle:

"Well, Corinna, you see now that it wasn't so terrible to lose your virginity. You have spent your first night with a man. You have earned your first gift, no less than a hundred drachmas. With that I'll buy you a necklace."

What follows is lots of advice, about how she should dress from now on, how she ought to behave and that she should not attract young, but also older men. They may not be as attractive and virile, but they pay better. The view of women is obviously a very cynical one, but that is not to uncommon to the Greeks. There is an obvious misogynistic tradition in Greek literature. Hipponax writes in the sixth century BC on woman the following lines: "Two happy days a woman brings a man: the first, when he marries her; the second, when he bears her to the grave." The Romans are generally much more friendly towards the opposite sex.

The two "novels" of the Romans

The novel as we know it today has not yet emerged in Antiquity. Precursors exist in the form of frame tales and they can all be safely called licentious. We qualify them for convenience as "novels" because they are written in prose and consist of a certain length. The text by Petronius, nowadays known as Satyricon (1st century AD.), is only partially preserved. The only fully preserved novel, The Golden Ass of Lucius Apuleius (c. 123-175 AD) is thematically very similar to the picaresque novel that will rise to the fore in the 16th and 17th centuries. Racy passages with sexual overtones are found in abundance. The Golden Ass (the work is confusingly called Metamorphoses officially) is an imaginative and humorous story about the adventures of one Lucius who experiments with magic and accidentally turns into a donkey, without however losing his human faculties of mind. In this unwanted disguise he hears and sees a lot of unusual things. Within this frame story, we get several short stories, the longest and the most famous is that of Cupid and Psyche. Before Lucius turns into an ass, he and a friend experience some adventures as human beings. In one of the first stories, his travelling companion is killed by witches. The witches ponder if they will let Lucius live, since he is a dangerous witness. They spare his life, but take revenge with a cruel and humiliating punishment: "and then they strid over mee, and clapped their buttocks upon my face, and all bepissed mee until I was wringing wet" leaving him "on the ground like one without soule, naked and cold, and wringing wet with pisse."¹ Poor soul.

Fortunately, our hero fares much better later in the book, when he has a very pleasant and intimate encounter with a maid. This provides one of the earliest passages in world literature in which the game of love is described realistically and explicitly.

Passage awaiting translation:

De meid ‘rukte zich alle kleren van het lijf ... en zei: “neem me, neuk wild”. ... Ze klom op het bed en liet zich beetje bij beetje op me neerzakken, haar ruggengraat golfde van de snelle stoten en geile bewegingen en met haar wellustige geschommel deed ze me heerlijk klaarkomen.’

The Satyricon is also a frame story, in which the protagonist Encolpius, along with his brother in arms Ascyltus and their lust slave Giton, get caught up in a series of adventures. Just as Odysseus roams the seas to escape the wrath of Poseidon, this trio is propelled by the vagaries of the fertility god Priapus. Among the numerous fragments of this "novel" that have been preserved, the meal of Trimalchio (Cena Trimalchionis in Latin) takes centre stage, due to the accurate characterization of the wealthy parvenu Trimalchio and his friends. Another fragment, the widow of Ephesus illustrates the prosaic and transitory nature of human love.

A very pious and recently widowed woman decides to starve herself to death while mourning at the grave of her husband. Not far from where she is slowly killing herself, a rather handsome soldier is guarding the crucified corpses of some robbers. The widow and the soldier start to chat and despite her grief, she increasingly starts to like the young man. After a while she succumbs to his charms but their happiness is suddenly disrupted. While making love on the grave of her deceased husband, one of the crucified men is stolen. The guard faces a severe punishment, but the widow has a cunning plan. She wisely proposes to exchange the body of her husband to take the place of the crucified corpse. Petronius borrowed the story of the Greeks, where the genre was known as the 'Milesian tale.'

2 Footnote: A frame story is a narrative technique where one story is the frame for a series of embedded stories. For example, different characters tell each other stories that happened in the past, as flashbacks. The best-known of these frame stories are 1001 Nights, Boccaccio’s Decamerone and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The East

The scent of musk and the sultry East

Illustrations: erotic papyrus of Turin, composite animal

No one today will deny that the art of storytelling comes from the Orient, the Far and the Near East. The primeval story of the Orient is undoubtedly the tale, or should I say tales, of The Thousand and One Nights, but that The Nights, as the work is also briefly known, are essentially a collection of highly erotic stories, is rarely appreciated. Admittedly, its most popular stories, Aladdin and the magic lamp, Sinbad the Sailor and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves are more adventurous than sexual. For hundreds of years however, the erotic reputation of The Nights was so widespread that the stories were associated with sultry nights, dark princes, eunuchs, harems and white slaves, rather than with flying carpets, magic lamps and distant voyages.

In the West, there is an idea that the art of love in the East is more sophisticated than ours. Whether this is true, cannot be said with certainty. After all, what is sophisticated and how can we look into the bedrooms of countless couples who make love every night in the East? Do they make love like we do or is their business conducted in a more tantric way? Hard to ascertain, difficult to refute. We owe the image of the supposed oriental sexual sophistication to the Kama Sutra, a work that was written in the third century in India in Sanskrit and which shows similarities with the aforementioned Ars amatoria of Ovid, but is much more common and better-known. The Kama Sutra discusses in great detail every conceivable subject in the field of eroticism and teaches a husband to please his wife and so win her love.

The forty chapters of the Kama Sutra are collected in seven volumes. They instruct on love in general and on its place in life, the division into types of women, sexual union, on various sexual position and techniques, on courtship and marriage, on the wife and the wives of others, on prostitutes and finally on how to make yourself attractive. For 21st-century man, the Kama Sutra rings synonymous with complex sexual positions. The book will only be legally available in the sixties of the previous century.

When fiction is a matter of life and death

The erotic masterpiece from the East are the tales of Thousand and One Nights. Nowhere in antiquity does one find lyrical passages on bulging breasts and swelling pudenda such as these :

"She hath breasts like two globes of ivory, like golden pomegranates ― beautifully upright, arched and rounded, firm as stone to the touch ― with nipples erect and outward jutting."

and

"She hath thighs as unto pillars of alabaster, and between them there vaunts a secret place, a sachet of musk, that swells, that throbs, that is moist and avid."

Eroticism is the raison d'être of the The Nights, up to the point of life and death. The Nights is a frame story. The premise of the frame story is sexually in itself and concerns a love affair between King Shahryar and the young virgin Scheherazade, a love story with a rather unusual beginning. One day the king discovers that his wife is unfaithful. He has her executed, declares all women adulterous and in an act of revenge decides to 'marry' a virgin every night and coldly execute her the next morning. His Grand Vizier is ordered to provide him with a constant supply of maidens, but after a while the supply is depleted. Scheherazade, the virgin daughter of the Vizier, offers herself as the next bride and her father reluctantly accepts the offer. In order to escape execution Scheherazade tells the king a story on their 'wedding night', after he has had his 'carnal will' with her. But clever Scheherazade stops abruptly, just before the denouement. She promises him to tell the end of the story the following night. The curious king has no alternative but postpone her execution and save her life for the time being. The following night Scheherazade tells him the end of the story, and again tells him the beginnings of the next story, and again stops with a cliffhanger. The king grants her one more night. Scheherazade keeps this routine up for thousand and one nights, ending each night with a prelude of a new story. Meanwhile, she bears him three sons. When the stories finally come to an end, the king has sincerely come to love Scheherazade, he pardons her and she becomes his wife.

There is no better story to illustrate the vital importance -- and I mean this literally -- of fiction and the art of storytelling. If Scheherazade's storytelling skills would not have been up to par, she would have lost her life after the first night. But the opposite happens, night after night the king is fascinated by her every word. Her sweet voice and exciting stories transform the embittered and vengeful king to a loving husband.

The erotic tales of Thousand and One Nights conquered the entire Mediterranean, the cradle of Western civilization. They later appear in Boccaccio's Decameron and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The archetype of the older, dim-witted and often impotent husband and his young, attractive, smart and manipulative wife, which are a staple in medieval literature, surfaces here for the first time. Exemplary is the story of the Simpleton Husband, a story of exactly one such woman and her schlemiel of a husband who is openly unfaithful to him and makes the poor fellow believe he is seeing ghosts:

"There once was a silly and ignorant man very rich, and whose wife was in love with a handsome young man. Every time the husband was absent, the lover came to her and so it was quite some time.

[Insert story of Simpleton Husband here]

In another striking passage of the nights is the moment when Shah Zaman, Sultan of Samarkand and brother of King Shahryar inadvertently witnesses the aforementioned infidelity of his sister-in-law and her attendants, described in this orgy scene:

"Shah Zaman drew back from the window, but he kept the bevy in sight espying them from a place whence he could not be espied. His brother's wife and twenty slave-girls walked under the very lattice and advanced a little way into the garden till they came to a jetting fountain amiddlemost a great basin of water; then they stripped off their clothes and behold, ten of them were women, concubines of the King, and the other ten were white slaves. Then they all paired off, each with each: but the Queen, who was left alone, presently cried out in a loud voice, "Here to me, O my lord Saeed!" and then sprang with a drop-leap from one of the trees a big slobbering blackamoor with rolling eyes which showed the whites, a truly hideous sight. He walked boldly up to her and threw his arms round her neck while she embraced him as warmly; then he bussed her and winding his legs round hers, as a button loop clasps a button, he threw her and enjoyed her. On like wise did the other slaves with the girls till all had satisfied their passions, and they ceased not from kissing and clipping, coupling and carousing till day began to wane; when the Mamelukes rose from the damsels' bosoms and the blackamoor slave dismounted from the Queen's breast."

Especially amusing is a footnote to this passage, written by 19th century English orientalist and translator of the Thousand and One Nights Richard Francis Burton,

"Debauched women prefer negroes on account of the size of their parts. I measured one man in Somali-land who, when quiescent, numbered nearly six inches. This is a characteristic of the negro race and of African animals; e.g. the horse; whereas the pure Arab, man and beast, is below the average of Europe; one of the best proofs by the by, that the Egyptian is not an Asiatic, but a negro partially white-washed. Moreover, these imposing parts do not increase proportionally during erection; consequently, the "deed of kind" takes a much longer time and adds greatly to the woman's enjoyment. In my time no honest Hindi Moslem would take his women-folk to Zanzibar on account of the huge attractions and enormous temptations there and thereby offered to them. Upon the subject of Imsák = retention of semen and "prolongation of pleasure," I shall find it necessary to say more.

The male member, the "Long John", I mean the penis, occupies a prominent place in The Nights. "Ali with the Large Member" is a story about a boy who is constantly humiliated by his mistress. When one day his friend calls out to him with the words 'Ali with the large member', within earshot of his mistress, she suddenly looks at her servant in a different light. But even at the time of The Nights people realized that the benefits of a large penis are but relative. "If the length of the penis were a sign of honor, then the mule would belong to the (honorable tribe of) Quraysh," remarked the ninth-century Afro-Arab philosopher al-Jahiz.

Some of the stories in A Thousand and One Nights are older than the Christian era, others are more recent, as far as one can state this with any certainty. Their influence is felt in the popular Medieval chivalric romance Floris and Blancheflour, a story featuring sultans and white slaves in which bizarre plot twists, the idea of liebestod and virginity tests directly refer to the stories from The Nights, although they might as well have been lifted from a contemporary South American telenovela of questionable merit.

Blancheflour ("white flower"), a white and deeply devout Christian girl, is kidnapped while on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. She is raised as a lady-in-waiting to a Muslim king in Spain. There she develops a close friendship with the son of the king, Floris ("belonging to the flower"). When the king and queen discover that this friendship has turned into love, they decide to intervene, for fear that their beloved son Floris would marry this "pagan' girl. They devise a ruse to thwart the forbidden love between the Muslim Floris and the Christian Blancheflour. He is sent by his parents to study abroad. While he is away, Blancheflour is sold to white slave traders. A fake grave must convince Floris of Blancheflour's death.

When Floris returns and finds out that his beloved Blancheflour has died, he wants to commit suicide, so great is his grief. Then his parents decide to tell him the truth and the boy goes in search of his beloved. During his search he discovers that Blancheflour, along with 140 other women, is held in the "tower of maidens" of an emir in faraway Babylon.

Each year the Emir chooses one of the women to be his new wife and he has his previous wife killed. Floris learns that his Blancheflour has been chosen to be the future wife of the emir. The 'tower of maidens' where Blancheflour is kept is heavily guarded, but the inn-keeper where Floris staying, tells him about the weak spot of the tower guard: he is obsessed with chess and money. Floris challenges the tower guard to a few games of chess, all of which he purposely loses, so he owes the man a lot of money. But Floris wins the last game. In return the tower guarded promises Floris eternal fidelity of which Floris makes crafty use immediately. The guard smuggles Floris inside the tower in a basket of flowers.

The two lovers are once again united, but when the Emir catches them in bed together, he wants to pierce them with his sword. During the trial that follows the emir and his advisers are so impressed at the willingness of the young lovers to die for one another that they persuade the emir to spare their lives. They marry and on their wedding Floris learns that his parents are deceased. The lovers return to Spain together, where Floris succeeds his father as king, and he and his subjects are baptised to become devout Christian people. Blancheflour gives him a daughter with a deformed foot. Bertha with the Big Foot will later be the mother of the legendary Charlemagne.

The Middle Ages

The Middle Ages: Sex is dirty, but the flesh is weak

We are in the Middle Ages, an era somewhat unfairly known as dark times. Significant technological progress has been made, but art and literature remain reserved for the elite. The biggest influence on our sexual mores comes from Christianity. From the 4th century, the Judeo-Christian faith becomes official state religion of the Romans and is steadily gaining in popularity.

The Judeo-Christian world-view introduces three new concepts in sexuality. First there is the idea that marriage is exclusive and indivisible, in which men lose the right to arbitrarily divorce from their spouses.

Secondly there is the notion of original sin, a direct consequence of the Fall. In the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve are the first humans in the paradisical Garden of Eden, but God has forbidden them to eat from the apples from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. At the suggestion of a snake - a symbol of Satan - they eat from this forbidden fruit. As a result, they gain knowledge of good and evil, and they are expelled from Paradise. Since Eve is the first to fall for the seductive words of the serpent, women get the blame for the fact that all at once, all mankind becomes mortal and possessed of a sinful nature. Another consequence is the fact that both occupants of paradise suddenly are ashamed of their nakedness and try to cover their genitals with a fig leaf.

Thirdly, the notion of virginity as a moral ideal arises, allowing sexuality within marriage as a concession to the inherent weakness of the carnal man which is - unfortunately - necessary for reproduction. These three new developments have their merits and advantages. The protracted virginity and the indissolubility of marriage itself provide for a stable society, in which children know where they come from and generations of families can now work long-term projects.

In summary, Mary gives birth to Jesus as a virgin, flesh is weak and should be chastened, and celibacy is the highest ideal. The demonization of sexuality by Christianity can also be considered its specific achievement. It gives sexuality its aura of forbidden fruit, and regular sex becomes exquisite eroticism. Predictably, Christianity failed to stamp out all relics of the pagan polytheism. Rest assured, there is sexuality in the arts of the Middle Ages, although one has to scrape the skin of official historiography.

The medieval arts are totally dedicated to the new Christian morality, painters work on behalf of the Church and writing is equivalent to the 'Scriptures'. And these writings are carefully passed on to next generations by the patience and skill of literate copyists of the clergy, monks who copy manuscripts - literally, "hand written" - in desolate monasteries. Copying a book can take years. To make multiple copies at a time, one reads the original to a room of copyists who scratch letters with feathers dipped in ink. The world of a copyist is beautifully described in the novel The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco in 1980.

Boccaccio and Chaucer

Although they do not belong to the clergy, both the Tuscan Giovanni Boccaccio (1313-1375) and the Londoner Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) are part of the medieval Christian manuscript culture. Born to merchant families, they are educated and become bureaucrats, but their passion is writing and poetry. Boccaccio completes the Decameron in 1353 and Chaucer works tirelessly for the last years of his life on The Canterbury Tales, two as frame stories conceived collections of stories which are considered the crème de la crème of Western literature.

Both books hark back to Ovid's Loves of the Gods, but also to a medieval culture of debauched tales: farces and comedies, sotternies, fabliaux and boerdes (the daring tales of itinerant minstrels), dirty jokes and contes en vers, an amalgam of oral culture which is being put to paper for the first time. In fact, the Decameron and The Canterbury Tales are on the same footing as the Arabic Thousand and One Nights. We find the theme of the Simpleton Husband from the Thousand and One Nights by Boccaccio in the story of Lydia and Pyrrhus and in Chaucer's in The Merchant's Tale. In folkloristic morphology, the science which concerns itself amongst other things with the thematic subdivision of folk tales, the story is catalogued as "AT 1423" or "The Enchanted Pear Tree".

Very remarkable is that Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales momentarily interrupts the misogynistic literary tradition which has dominated since ancient times, with a strong woman-friendly tale in which a man finds out "what a woman really wants," and becomes all the better for it. Furthermore, we note that the eroticism in these two story collections manifests itself as a persistent undertone, as a slight itching on the skin after frolicking for too long in the corn in summer, an undertone that never quite reaches the surface, as was the case in Greco-Roman times.

Il Decamerone

The Decameron is a frame story of the 14th-century Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio. The title literally means "Book of ten days. The compilation contains hundreds of stories that ten guests at a country estate outside Florence tell each other during the Black Death of 1348. The guests are seven young women and three young men. The frame story is packed with symbolic and allegorical references. The seven young women represent the four cardinal virtues - prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude - and the three religious virtues - faith, hope and love. The men represent the Greek tripartite division of the human soul: reason, anger and greed. Every day one of the ten people is the leader of the company and thus determines the subject of the stories of the day. The themes range from "stories of adversity that still have a happy ending" to "stories of how women manage to cheat their husbands'. Each day begins with a brief introduction to the topic and ends with a conclusion. The themes are mostly derived from older Italian, French and Latin sources.

In the course of history the work meets with unavoidable resistance from moralists. Thus in 1497 the preacher Girolamo Savonarola condemns it to be burnt because of its supposed immorality. The Church in general is altogether unhappy with the book, not only because of its sexual explicitness, but especially due to the way the clergy are portrayed. This gives rise to edited and expurgated versions. The Decameron faced this kind of opposition until the 20th century, which significantly contributed to the popularity of the collection.

A story that only rarely is included in the expurgated version of the Decameron is the remarkably bold Alibech and Rustico [image]. Alibech is an aspiring female hermit who is apprenticed to Rustico, an older experienced ascetic. She knows nothing of the ways of life, and he is benefiting from her naive ignorance to put his 'resurrection of the flesh' -- his devil who painfully teases him -- in her 'hell-hole'. A story that deserves some elaboration.

Almost immediately after Alibech becomes a disciple of Rustico, he gives her precise instructions. "Do like me," he says. He undresses, she follows his example and soon they are standing face to face, eye to eye, stark naked. She asks, "Rustico, what is that I see on thee which thrusteth forth thus and which I have not?" "This is the devil thereof I bespoke thee" he replies. "and see now, he giveth me such sore annoy that I can scarce put up with it" "God be praised," said the girl, "I fare better than thou, in that I have none of yonder devil." "True" confirms Rustico. "But thou hast other what that I have not, and thou hast it instead of this." "What is that?" asks Alibech; and he, "Thou hast hell, and I tell thee methinketh God hath sent thee hither for my souls health, for that, whenas this devil doth me this annoy, and it please thee have so much compassion on me as to suffer me put him back into hell, thou wilt give me the utmost solacement and wilt do God a very great pleasure and service." The young girl replies in good faith: "Since I've hell, put your devil in it." He puts her on his little bed so he can easily put his devil in the damnation of her hell. Since it is the first time that she is putting a devil in hell, it hurts a little at first, but soon the young girl develops a taste for it and she has to open the gates to her hellhole six times before the devil's head is subdued.

No lack of eroticism in the late medieval Decameron, it would appear. The foundation of this kind of literature is of course the cliché, the characters are one-dimensional and the psychology is that of a child. Alibech is the perfect example of the ingénue stock character, an unspoiled and naive girl. This infantile psychology and the childish magical thinking is prevalent in the totality of Medieval literature. Psychological realism in Western literature is at that time entirely in its infancy. But the depiction of every imaginable human passion, flaw and folly is new and are a harbinger to the Renaissance. The Decameron is sometimes called the human comedy, contrasted with La divina commedia, the divine comedy of Dante Alighieri.

That some passages are difficult to digest for the censor, can be inferred from the fact that Charles Balguy, the 18th-century translator who was one of the first to venture a translation of this story, left the sexual awakening of Alibech untranslated. He excuses himself with these words: "The translators regret that the disuse into which magic has fallen, makes it impossible to render the technicalities of that mysterious art into tolerable English; they have therefore found it necessary to insert several passages in the original Italian."

We find in the Decameron the same misogynistic tone that was so prominent among the Greeks. Unlike today, woman in the Middle Ages was perceived more licentious than man. Today, men are said to chase their dicks, but in medieval times, woman was the weaker sex, weak not because of a lack of bodily strength, but because of their inability to resist worldly pleasures. Thus we read - again in the Decameron - that "whereas a single cock is quite sufficient for ten hens, ten men are hard put to satisfy ten women." And flipping a few pages further in the book, we hear Calandrino - one of the narrators - say about his wife, "this woman's going to be the death of me... with her insatiable lust..."

The Decameron is full these kind of sarcastic remarks about women. Moreover, there is an epilogue in which women are explicitly warned not to read the stories that might displease them. And yet paradoxically, the Decameron is primarily directed towards women, more than a few passages begin with the salutation: "most notable damsels." Nearly 700 years ago, Boccaccio had already understood that the the pastime of reading fiction is largely the province of women.

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories chronicled in the 14th century by Geoffrey Chaucer. They are again part of a frame story that deals with a group of travelling pilgrims. Each day one pilgrim, in order to pass the time and for education and entertainment, tells four stories. The topics vary widely and concern matters such as love, betrayal, greed and adultery. The group of storytellers, described in minute detail, consists of people from all walks of life: a mother superior, a monk and a pardoner travelling side by side with a sailor, a miller, a carpenter, a bailiff, a squire, a forester and a knight.

Chaucer 'lends' stories from Ovid's Metamorphoses, but the tales feature obvious parallels - more than with any other work - with Boccaccio's Decameron. Like the narrators in the Decameron, the journey which Chaucer describes so admirably, is an attempt to escape the Black Death. Like the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales end with an apology to the female readers. In addition, one quarter of the stories in The Canterbury Tales has an analogous story in the Decameron published forty years earlier. In those days, the notion of copyright clearly did not exist yet. Stories belonged to everyone and made their way via the Silk Road to practically anywhere in the world.

The tale of the miller: Kiss my ass

A drunken miller tells a story of adultery, the tale of the young apprentice miller Nicholas, who wants to spend the night in the bed of the adulterous young wife of his old boss John Alison. To achieve their plan, the two succeed in getting John to leave his home. They make him believe that a flood is coming. The old man decides to spend the night in a tub hanging from the roof of his mill. Now the two can consume their passion undisturbed. Absolon, a man from the village who is also after Alison, has heard that John is not around. He kneels by the window of Alison and asks for a kiss. In the dark, Alison sticks her behind out of the window and lets Absolon kiss it. Angry because of this humiliation, he returns with a hot iron from a forge and ask again for a kiss. This time Nicholas sticks his buttocks out of the window and Absolon burns the hot iron on his cheeks. Young Nicholas cries loudly for water, which wakes John, who, thinking that a flood has come, cuts the ropes of this tub and falls to the ground. The village runs out and finds John hurt and bruised on the ground. He explains what just happened to him and becomes the laughing stock of the village. This is yet another story of a horny old man with a cunning wife.

The story of the wife of Bath: do you want me pretty and unfaithful or ugly and faithful?

In the story of the unnamed wife of Bath, Chaucer shows himself at his most woman-friendly and points us men in the right direction on how we should treat women, although the male audience is sniggering in the background while doing so. Following the sound advice of the female narrator, men can best be accommodating and give to women "what they want most." The narrator knows the male species through and through. She's been married five times, which was very unusual at that time. On this trip she is actually looking for her sixth husband, who probably will be the travelling clerk.

The story begins with a knight who rapes a woman. As punishment he is forced to travel and is given one year an a day to learn "what women really want". The answer to this question is difficult to get by and on the very last day of his quest he asks a witch for help. She gives him the answer but -- quid pro quo -- he has to give something in return. Upon which the ugly witch tells the knight that what women really want is to be the masters of their men. In return for this precious information the witch demands that he marry her, our knight agrees half-heartedly. Once married, she gives him a choice: do you want me pretty and unfaithful, or ugly and faithful? The knight, having learned his lesson, lets her choose, and she, happy with the power she wields over her husband, decides to be both pretty and faithful. And they lived happily ever after.

The story of the clerk

The clerk, who is fancied by the wife of Bath, tells us a story that is remarkable for its devastating mental cruelty towards women. His story is about Walter, the Marquis of Saluzzo, a bachelor who is invited by his subjects to marry in order to secure an heir. He decides to marry a poor peasant girl by the name of Griselda, accustomed to a life of pain and hard labour. After Griselda has given him a daughter, Walter decides to test her fidelity. He orders an officer to take away her baby, the child is supposedly murdered, but in reality secretly hidden elsewhere. Griselda does not offer resistance and goes through this ordeal with opposition. When a few years later she bears her husband a son, Walter repeat his cruel ritual. After many years, which Griselda spends in loneliness without her children, Walter devises the ultimate test. He forges a papal bull that annuls their marriage and allows him to leave his wife. He lets Griselda know that he will remarry and demands of her that she prepares the festivities of his marriage with his new bride. Again she concedes. Secretly, he brings back her children and introduces their own daughter as his new bride. Only then, after many gruesome years of horrible ordeals, he confesses the masquerade to Griselda, and again they live happily ever after.

We have rarely encountered so much misogyny in one text. Taking away a woman's children, supposedly killing them, divorcing her, asking her to prepare for the new marriage: women have killed their husbands for far less and been acquitted. This fragment is typical of the misogyny in medieval literature, which connoisseurs have dubbed "medieval anti-feminism" and against which the French writer Christine de Pizan will so so violently react when she wrote The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, 1405) a couple of years after Chaucer's text was disseminated.

Bawdy, farcical and ribald

We may assume that Boccaccio and Chaucer were avid readers and eager listeners, constantly on the look-out for stories to fill their collections. They obviously have an almost unstoppable source, since medieval oral culture is very rich in what are now generally known as fabliaux, a genre in which all that is bawdy, farcical and ribald is featured. This literary production is also called the 'joyful wisdom' or 'gay science' by the minstrels, troubadours and jugglers who considered it their philosophy. They roamed medieval Europe in the name of courtly love, but also tried to seduce the wife of a knight, with a bawdy jest.

All these bawdy and ribald farces have been largely ignored by history, as often happens when historians disapprove of something. History books feature what we like to remember, not what we want to forget. If it is the victor who writes history, he does not use a frank tongue. The chronicler of service is apparently always more prudish than his corpus. The scabrousness of medieval literature is all too often and too eagerly covered up with the cloak of love, courtly love. But rest assured: courtly love is not always courtly and under the tenuous fabric that covers it, we find lust and debauchery. Was medieval love courtly and refined or obscene and course? Both. As Johan Huizinga, author of the authoritative The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919) puts it:

"Reality at all times has been worse and more brutal than the refined aestheticism of courtesy would have it be, but also more chaste than it is represented to be by the vulgar genre which is wrongly regarded as realism." tr. Frederik Jan Hopman (1877-1932)

'Realism,' Huizinga calls it, but 'coarse eroticism' is not lacking in these stories. Realistic, coarse erotic stories about long penises, talking cunts, rings as chastity belts, children of snow and a wicked seducer who lets a small wheel do the work for him.

The caveman (still) isn't dead

In the 13th-and 14th-centuries, travelling troubadours roam France and tell fabliaux, short, usually bold and humorous stories. Fabliaux are close to the dirty joke on one side and to primitive wisdom literature on the other. Favourite subjects are cheated husbands, greedy clergymen and stupid peasants. The topics are tailored to the audience and tales about stupid peasants are told to the clergy and stories about greedy clergymen are told to the peasants. Humour is a main ingredient in all fabliaux. To this day, humour is used to render thorny and unspeakable subjects -- such as sex -- palatable, it is, as it were, the sauce that makes something non-digestible a gourmet meal for the mouths of a broad audience. But humour in these stories is also used as mockery, a way to make fun of people ("te kakken zetten"), even to make them look bad. These two components, the irreverent mockery and social lubricant, are the raison d'être of the fabliaux. They are also the literary primordial soup of the Middle Ages, dished, spiced and seasoned by Boccaccio and Chaucer, whose works, although often considered part of the Renaissance, are thoroughly medieval.

The Ring that Controlled Erections

One could fill an entire book with stories and images of big and stiff penises. Every man desires such a weapon, many women want to feel it. The clergyman with greedy fingers in the story "The Ring that Controlled Erections" just can't get rid of it. In the very first lines of this short narrative poem we are introduced to the narrator and the risqué subject:

Haiseau has yet another thing

to tell. A man once owned a ring

which, when worn, by a magic spell

at once would make his manhood swell.

The owner of an enchanted ring washes his hands in a river and forgets his precious gem. When a bishop finds this ring and slides it on his finger, his manhood begins to swell. He leaves on horseback, but his penis continues to swell until it drags along the ground. In desperation he sends out a messenger to

find someone who could advise

him how to bring it back to size

Word reaches the owner of the ring. He offers assistance to the bishop in return for the two rings the bishop wears and 100 pounds on top. The bishop agrees to these conditions and when the magic ring is removed from his finger, his erection disappears instantly. Both gentlemen are now satisfied, one because he loses his temporarily virility, the other because he has regained it eternally.

wasn’t it a fair exchange

when each was glad to have the change?

Of talking cunts

Just imagine one minute that your genitals could suddenly speak. What would they say? Would they speak the truth and dare to disagree with your real mouth? Would the new mouthpiece reveal your most intimate secrets and surprise you with details of which you are not even aware yourself? This conceit is on the mind of medieval man, the story is widespread, one can find the theme in no fewer than seven manuscripts throughout Europe. It will be a timeless topic, and to my feeling an all too rarely used storyline that will crop up later in this book. The first appearance of the theme is found in the medieval fabliau "Le Chevalier qui faisoit parler les cons et les culs". The story is told by a certain Garin, a writer we know little about. Garin tells of a knight

who had a truly remarkable talent,

for he could make cunts speak, this gallant,

and conjure arseholes from all parts

to answer his summons by magic arts.

The knight in question is a prizefighter and with his squire he earns a living by roaming from to tournament to tournament. He is poor, spirited and lazy. Travelling to his next tournament, he encounters three naked ladies at the edge of a fountain. The women, who had gone for a quick bath, have been robbed of their clothes and our knight helps them recover them. When they are dressed they reveal that they are actually fairies and each of the them wants to reward him with a special gift. The first fairy promises that in the future the knight will be received with open arms wherever he comes and that from now on he shall not want any more. The second fairy has a rather more original gift to bestow on him:

"Sir knight, my gift's no small one:

wherever you go, west or east,

you shall not find a maid or a beast,

so she have two eyes, whose cunt can refrain

from answering you if you but deign

to speak to it. There's you reward.

The third fairy steps up the game and says:

"Sir knight, to this second gift I add,

as is just and right, that if the cunt

be blocked or stoppered up in front

and cannot answer you straightway,

the arsehole will, without delay,

speak for it, if you give leave,

no matter whom it hurt or grieve."

He assumes that the fairies are pulling his leg and even starts to blush when the third fairy has spoken, but shortly after he is set on his way he addresses the cunt of a horse, just in case, by way of a test. The horse's cunt which promptly replies, without mincing its words, because genitals are not in the habit of lying, as is well known.

When night falls, the squire and the knight arrive at a castle, where they ask for shelter. Our knight is indeed a greeted with great hospitality, just as the first fairy had predicted, even by the mistress herself. Although the lady of the house would love to "lie" with this attractive knight, she is unfortunately impeded by the presence of her husband, and orders her maid to take her place in the alcove of the knight. When the girl is in his bed and after he tasted her delights, he speaks to her cunt and asks,

"Sir Cunt, I would like to know why you came to lie with me?" The addressed Mr. Cunt replies: "I have nothing to hide, my mistress sent me." Startled by the words of her speaking cunt, the girl jumps out of bed in terror and runs to her mistress to tell the terrible news. Of course, the mistress does not believe the story and when the next day she invites the knight to dinner, she reveals the most curious incident to the other dinner guests. She challenges the knight to perform this magic tricks on her. A small fortune is being bet, but before the test can continue, the lady of the house asks to be excused to withdraw to her private quarters. When she arrives in her room, she stuffs her cunt with cotton. Back down the knight asks: "What was your mistress doing in her room when she withdrew?" The cunt doesn't answer and the knight repeats his question. There is a long silence, and again, the cunt declines to answer. Then the knight remembers the gift of the third fairy, and he focuses on the lady's arse, "Lord's Arse," he said, "why isn't Mr. Cunt answering my questions?" Upon which Lord Arse answered truthfully, "Because it is stuffed with cotton from top to bottom, it cannot speak, her mouth is silenced. It would be able to speak if it was not blocked. "The Knight wins the bet, and from that day on he is a wealthy man.

I cannot help it but find it strange that the cunt is addressed as a masculine 'Mister'.

A 'ring' as chastity belt

The story of the ring of Carvel is extremely old, but was first put to paper in squeaky clean Latin by the 14th-century Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), a papal secretary. He belongs to that new caste of literate copyists to which Boccaccio and Chaucer also belong, but what Poggio sets aside, is his inordinate love of humour and the grotesque.

In his capacity as papal secretary, he travels throughout Europe, during which he has the opportunity to satisfy his bibliophile appetite. He collects the humorous and indecent manuscripts he finds under the name Facetiae, and a book by that title sees the light for the first time in 1451. Facetiae is a literary therm derived from the Latin word facetus. The word became common in the Renaissance in the form of facetia, and at that time it meant jest or joke. In its plural form it became associated with collections of witty tales, the best known of which were the Facetiae by said Poggio. Ultimately the term facetus derives from facis, Latin for torch, so there is also a tinge of 'glow' or 'fire' in the word.

The history of Hans Carvel is the 133rd story in Poggio's anthology. The version of the French Renaissance humanist François Rabelais in the cycle of novels Gargantua and Pantagruel (written between 1532 and 1552) is probably the best known, but the tale has inspired sundry authors over the centuries. We find the story in the 15th century collection Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, in the oeuvre of the Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) and in a treatment by the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695).

HANS CARVEL took, when weak and late in life;

A girl, with youth and beauteous charms to wife;

And with her, num'rous troubles, cares and fears;

For, scarcely one without the rest appears.

Bab (such her name, and daughter of a knight)

Was airy, buxom: formed for am'rous fight.

tr. London Privately printed for members of the Aldus Society, 1903

Hans Carvel's - once again - a jealous old doctor with - yes - a much younger wife, called Bab. One evening, while they are sleeping, he dreams that the devil gives him a ring. As long as he wears the ring, so assures him the devil, his wife will not be unfaithful to him. When he wakes up he finds that his finger is stuck in Bab's cunt. The devil was right of course. As long as his finger is stuck there, his wife will not be unfaithful.

Hans dreamed, as near his wife he snoring lay,

The devil came his compliments to pay,

And having on his finger put a ring,

Said he, friend Hans, I know thou feel'st a sting;

Thy trouble 's great: I pity much thy case;

Let but this ring, howe'er, thy finger grace,

And while 'tis there I'll answer with my head,

THAT ne'er shall happen which is now thy dread:

Hans, quite delighted, forced his finger through;

You drunken beast, cried Bab, what would you do?

To love's devoirs quite lost, you take no care,

And now have thrust your finger God knows where!

As in innumerable other medieval tales, the protagonist here is again the adulterous woman, la femme infidèle. What makes her so popular is beyond the scope of this book. Perhaps it has to do with the Freudian theory of the madonna-whore-complex, which suggests that men divide their relationship into two categories: chaste women to marry and to raise their children, and desirable women to play around with. The two categories are presented as incompatible. The fact remains that the stereotype of the adulterous wife returns ever so often, although at that time the punishment for an adulterous woman was very hard and the adultery of the husband often went unpunished. The Gallo-Romans allowed a cuckolded husband who caught his wife and her lover in flagrante delicto, to kill the lovers on the spot and the Franks had the woman strangled or burned alive. If not her fault cannot be proven, she must take the most severe form of 'trial by drowning': a stone is tied around her neck and she is thrown into the river. When she sinks, she is found guilty. (History of Private Life)

Is this peculiar fascination for the adulterous woman related to the fact that most men will find their wives attractive once more, when another man has possessed her? Or to the fact that illegitimate children are detrimental to the husband? In any case, the men in these tales are generally portrayed as a losers. One may as well ask, since all of the above stories were written by men, if we are therefore dealing with bouts of male self-torment, bordering on masochism.

The wife with two openings

In the same Facetiae by Poggio Bracciolini yet another male fool takes centre stage. The idiot in question discovers that his wife has two "openings."

A peasant of our district, a stupid devil, who was utterly ignorant in matters of sex, got married. Thus it happened one night that his wife turned her back to him in bed, so that her buttocks rested in his lap. He had his weapon ready and landed by chance right in the goal. Marvelling at his success, he inquired of his wife if she had two openings. And when she answered in the affirmative, he cried: “Hoho! I am content with but one; the second is entirely superfluous.” Upon which the sly woman, who was secretly consorting with the local priest, replied: “Then we can give the second away to charity. Let us grant it to the church and our priest.” The peasant, thinking to be relieved of an unnecessary burden, agreed.

Accordingly, the priest was invited to the evening meal, and the matter was set before him. Thereafter, the three ate heartily and then proceeded to bed, being careful to have the woman between them. The priest, hungry for this rare tit-bit, made the first advances, which the woman answered with soft whispers and familiar sounds. At this, the peasant, fearing that the priest was attempting to trespass on his side of the fence, called out: “Hey there, old friend, remember the agreement. You stick to your own side, and let mine alone!” But the priest was equal to the occasion. “God forbid!” he replied. “I care nothing for your possessions, so long as the property of the church is at my disposal.”

With these words he reassured the dull peasant, who thereupon urged him to continue to serve himself at his own discretion with the share which had been granted to the church. --Anonymous English translation[8]

The Snow-child

The merchant in the following story is much smarter than the previous two men and proves that revenge is a dish best served cold. Very cold, in this case. A merchant returns home after an absence of two years to find his wife with a newborn son. She explains that one snowy day she swallowed a falling snowflake while thinking about her husband which caused her to become pregnant. Pretending to believe her story, he raises the boy as if it was his own. When the boy turns fifteen, the man takes him on a business trip to Genoa, where he sells him into slavery. On his return, he explains to his wife that the sun in Italy shines so brightly, that the boy melted in the heat.

The little wheel

It's time to reverse the roles. In this story, taken from a German collection of medieval fabliaux, the girl is gullible and the young man cunning. A young clerk fancies the maid of the house. She, however, scorns his advances. One evening, exhausted from a hard day's work, she falls asleep on a bench in the kitchen. He sees her, dips his finger in the soot of the kitchen fire, pulls up her dress up and draws a little wheel with his sooted finger on her belly. The next morning she is as unfriendly towards him as she always is. He acts as if he is surprised by her unkindness, noting that she has given herself to him the previous night. She does not believe him. He assures her that he tells the truth and says "if you don't believe me, see what I have drawn around your navel." She lifts up her skirt and to her suprise, sees the little wheel. For days she wonders how he could have achieved to have his way with her. In order to find out, she finally decides to give herself to him. They make love five times in a row and she says:

"The bliss of this love no one can describe ... I saw red roses flourishing from the dew of a green meadow. Our passion is indescribable! Thousand years appeared as short as one single day. In my mouth, I had the taste of milk and honey flowing to my throat. While I enjoy these pleasures, I felt I was floating."

Thus, the amatory efforts of this cunning young man, which had been in vain for so long, are amply rewarded in the end.

When the heart is full the tongue will speak

Despite the fact that during the Middle Ages, the clergy considered sex a horror rather than a godsend, the fire of Eros burns with great intensity in the loins of our Church Fathers and nuns are challenged by regular bouts of passionate ecstasy. Penitential books of the 12th-century French abbot Bernard of Clairvaux and the 11th-century Italian theologian Peter Damian display a sincere but exaggerated hatred of sex, so exaggerated in fact that it cannot indicate but a dark and subconscious fascination with the matter. If one reads one of their works, one can not escape the impression that the abstinence these Church Fathers preach - and hopefully also abide by, albeit perhaps with varying degrees of success - demonstrates an irrational obsession with sex, which by today's standards appears unhealthy and almost pornographic in nature. But the renunciation of Eros also provides very lovely passages.

"There seethed all around me a cauldron of lawless loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought what I might love, in love with loving, and I hated safety... To love then, and to be beloved, was sweet to me; but more, when I obtained to enjoy the person I loved. I defiled, therefore, the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence, and I beclouded its brightness with the hell of lustfulness." --Confessions 3.1.1, translation by Edward Bouverie Pusey[9]

And this sexual-religious obsession often found an outlet in unexpected places. Thus the Flemish 13th-century mystic and poet Hadewych describes herself as a passionate mistress of God:

"On a certain Pentecost Sunday I had a vision at dawn. Matins were being sung in the church, and I was present. My heart and my veins and all my limbs trembled and quivered with eager desire and, as often occurred with me, such madness and fear beset my mind that it seemed to me I did not content my Beloved, and that my Beloved did not fulfil my desire, so that dying I must go mad, and going mad I must die. On that day my mind was beset so fearfully and so painfully by desirous love that all my separate limbs threatened to break, and all my separate veins were in travail. The longing in which I then was cannot be expressed by any language or any person I know and everything I could say about it would be unheard-of to all those who never apprehended Love as something to work for with desire, and whom Love had never acknowledged as hers. I can say this about it: I desired to have full fruition of my Beloved, and to understand and taste him to the full. --tr. Mother Columba Hart

Sexual demons

It is common knowledge that Medieval man believes in demons, fallen angels and other helpers of the devil. That there are also sexual demons who prey on humans, is rarely mentioned in history books. These sexual predators come in male and female versions, and are called respectively, "incubus" and "succubus". They are henchmen of the devil and, according to popular belief, have sexual intercourse with people during their sleep. A succubus - from the Latin succubare, 'to lie underneath'- feeds on the semen of its victims. Her male counterpart, the incubus, from the Latin incubare, 'to lie down' on - preys on female sleeping beauties.

Works such as The Hammer of Witches (Malleus Maleficarum, 1486), the medieval handbook for tracking down, interrogating and prosecuting witches, assures us that only the lesser demons are given this dirty job. Incubi and succubi are the pariahs of the demons. Opinions are divided whether their communion with humans can conceive offspring. Some are convinced that this is impossible, because these demons only dispose of an etheric body. Others believe that a succubus takes the seed of a man, involuntarily withdrawn from a man, gives it to an incubus who then impregnates a witch who cooperates voluntarily and lasciviously, creating a new generation of witches. Most experts agree wholeheartedly that the seed of an incubus is freezing cold.

Sexual demons provide an answer to many questions with which the common medieval man is faced. It clearly shows how a wet dream occurs or why anyone in his REM sleep - a concept that was obviously unknown at the time - sometimes moves his or her eyes in a bizarre fashion when asleep.

French theologian and witch hunter Nicholas Remy (1530-1616) wrote a report of the confession of a young girl, Catharina Latomia, who says that a demon "twice raped her in prison," despite the fact that she had defended herself and her body had not been ready for intercourse. She added that "she very nearly died from the injuries she received by that coition". We will never know whether the confession of Catharina was an excuse for keeping the name of her rapist a secret, hiding the identity of her secret lover from the wrath of her parents, or if the girl actually believed she had been raped by a demon.

Lilith

The archetype of the succubus is Lilith [image], a sexual demon, a femme fatale avant-la-lettre. According to Jewish legend, Lilith was the first wife of our common ancestor Adam. The idea that Adam had a wife prior to Eve may have developed from an interpretation of the Book of Genesis and its dual creation accounts; while Genesis 2:22 describes God's creation of Eve from Adam's rib, an earlier passage, 1:27, already indicates that a woman had been made: "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." That first woman would have been Lilith, who, like Adam was created from the dust of the earth. It goes without saying that this version of the facts does not belong the biblical canon. As the story goes, Lilith refused submit to Adam and demanded equal rights, even in bed. She declined to be - quite literally so - the underlying party and resolutely refused the missionary position. This rebellion has given her great popularity with contemporary feminists, and earlier in the late 19th-century with the Romantic and Decadent movement.

A most cruel and shameful punishment

The medieval unnatural attitude toward an act inspired by nature itself, leads to a love tragedy unrivalled since then.

"any thing seems lovely to me, and nothing is frightful or difficult when you are by. I am only weak when I am alone and unsupported by you." tr. anonymous

This writes Héloïse (1101 - 164), the beloved pupil of Pierre Abélard (1079-1042) to her master, who is 22 years her senior. She, an orphan or the daughter of an unwed mother, is taught by poet and theologian Abélard. She receives instruction in literature and philosophy, but also - as will appear later - lessons in love. He fathers a child with her and they secretly marry. An open marriage would have compromised Abélard's vocation. When her infuriated uncle Fulbert becomes aware of the marriage, he orders to have Abélard castrated. Héloïse subsequently disappears in a convent in Argenteuil, where she will later become an abbess. The lovers never see each other again.

"Violently incensed, [Fulbert and his henchmen] laid a plot against me, and one night, while I, all unsuspecting, was asleep in a secret room in my lodgings, they broke in with the help of one of my servants, whom they had bribed. There they had vengeance on me with a most cruel and most shameful punishment, such as astounded the whole world, for they cut off those parts of my body with which I had done that which was the cause of their sorrow. This done, straightway they fled, but two of them were captured, and suffered the loss of their eyes and their genital organs." --[10] tr. Henry Adams Bellows

Abélard also seeks refuge for his shame in a monastery and after a long period without contact Héloïse begins a correspondence with Abélard, a correspondence that will later become one of the highlights of medieval literature. Their desperate passion is the archetypal example of a forbidden and thwarted love.

The eye is left wanting

The Middle Ages are as rich in texts with a sexual undertone as the era of Greco-Roman antiquity, but paintings such as those in Pompeii, innocent and straightforward scenes of the sexual act, are sorely lacking. The medieval arts are almost devoid of sensuality and the reason for this, is that they are dedicated to the new Judeo-Christian morality. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

The Church is the propagator of this new morality, and it views nudity and the world of physical love with no good will, and that Church happens to be the principal art patron. Biblical and Christian eroticism is limited to some passages in the Song of Songs, the story of Bathsheba in her bath, the pernicious story of Adam and Eve, the stories of Susanna and the Elders and Lot and his daughters. That's about it, lest we forget the genre of the Madonna lactans (Mary breastfeeding her son Jesus), which can also be regarded as a tribute to Eros. This latter theme will be depicted more or less explicitly by French painter Jean Fouquet (ca.1420-1480) (image) and the Antwerp based Joos van Cleve (1464-1540) (image). Even rarer of course is a depiction of Jesus with an erection, such as The Man of Sorrows by Dutchman Maarten van Heemskerck (1498-1574). Another popular theme are the temptations of Saint Anthony, the ideal excuse to portray nudity.

New in this period is that oil, according to many an invention from the Low Countries, replaces the fresco. The new art medium is wooden panels, even though Giotto still painted directly onto the wall in the ancient manner of the fresco.

Atone for your sins in hell

But in any case, the scarce instances of biblical eroticism are not depicted in paint or print until the Renaissance. For the time being, the only nudity a late medieval artist 'wastes' his brush strokes on are depictions of Adam and Eve or the Madonna, in other words, puritan renderings of innocent nudity. Or maybe not: nudity can also be found artists' depictions of hell, doomsday paintings in which nudity is inextricably coupled with sin. Between these two extremes, innocent nudity on the one hand and sinful and shameful nakedness on the other, there seems to be no compromise. The actual deed, the most joyous and adventurous of the erotic experience, is never depicted, not even alluded to. In these grim images of hell naked and humiliated people atone for their sins. These doomsday paintings are a condemnation of and a warning against sexuality. An excellent example of such erotic horror, one that is at times reminiscent of sadomasochist imagery of modern times, is the depiction of the Last Judgment - in Christian dogma still the moment when everyone's fate is determined - in works of art by Giotto, Memling and Bosch, Giotto representing the Italian Renaissance and Memling and Bosch the Northern Renaissance.

The Italian Giotto (fully Giotto di Bondone, ca 1267-1337) painted the Last Judgment [image] in 1304-1305. It is the oldest medieval image that we scrutinize. It is part of a fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua which portrays the lives of Mary and Christ. The Last Judgment is the largest fresco of the series and the last thing the visitor beholds before he leaves the chapel. Satan sits in the middle of the fresco, a dominating giant compared to the tiny people. In one hand he holds a woman and in his mouth are the half-eaten remnants of another human being. The scene that interests us here, is located to the right hand side above Satan. We see naked women molested by demons, women hung by their hair, their tongue, and men suspended by their genitals. Ouch. In short, we see all horrors that Satan could wish upon a a human body.

The Last Judgement by Hans Memling (c. 1433-1470) (The Last Judgment (Memling)), a triptych created between 1467 and 1471, omits any reference to the sexual act and simply equates the naked to the horror of hell.

In the triptych which Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516) devotes around 1482 to the theme of the Last Judgment, one can still -- with some Freudian good will -- detect traces of sexuality [image]. Bosch knew like no other to use the bible in order to satisfy the sensationalist fantasies of his clients - and undoubtedly his own. He devoted two works to the temptations of the Holy Saint Anthony and again we see how the purely earthly, including the seductive woman of course, tries to lead the saint astray from the righteous path. A striking example of his erotic imagination is the 'earth woman' [image] we find on the left panel of the Anthony triptych of about 1500. It shows a woman on all fours, sitting under a hill, we only see her backside. Her abdomen and genitals are a cavity in the hill. Women depicted as landscapes would become a trend in the so-called somatopia - from the Greek for body and place - in 18th-century English literature.

But at the same time, Bosch can be very lofty, and with a soaring imagination, he paints a man and a woman sitting lovingly in a bubble, in a detail of the central panel of his Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1500). The scene shows two young and playful bodies about to embrace each other. Her hand is on his knee and his hand rests on her belly. I used to think that the couple is sitting in a soap bubble and that Bosch is endowed with enough realism to show the bursts in the bubble, forecast the fragility of joyful passion. The tiny cracks -- I thought -- illustrated the fleetingness of love. I thought that Bosch's message was that any love bubble will inevitably and invariably pop open, thereby covering its residents with a sad veil of love sickness. But upon closer inspection, I noticed that the bubble is covered in veins, and cannot be considered anything else than an amniotic sac. British artist Paul Rumsey has noted that since the bubble is connected to a flower, "and has part of the flower inside it, the detail should be seen a mixture of the organic vegetable (flower/fruit) and the animal (womb), and the human figures as seeds, thus projecting human eroticism onto the cycles and forms of nature, and vice versa."

Bulb-like women and root-like men

The medieval adonis

The caveman hides in the church

Love is magical

Renaissance

• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Say 'ass, cock, cunt and screw'
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/The rebirth of Venus
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Ovid and The Painter's Bible
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Bonfire of the Vanities
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/On fig leaves, pubic hair and small penises
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Erotica Nordica
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Sex witches
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/La Petite Mort
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Vanity: for the fairest one!
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/The caveman looks at a print
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/The erotic vocabulary of the Renaissance everyman
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Biblical eroticism
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Gratuitous nudity
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Renaissance/Senex amans

France

• User:Jahsonic/AHE/France/Meanwhile in France: from Villon to Brantôme
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/France/Villon: 'My neck will learn the weight of my ass'
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/France/Rabelais and the lower body
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/France/Plump breast, whiter than an egg
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/France/Philis, everything is f..ed up
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/France/From hearsay: the gallant ladies of Brantôme

The love that dare not speak its name

• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The love that dare not speak its name

The Low Countries

• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Meanwhile in the Low Countries

Baroquerotica

• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/Venus in Spain
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/Poussin: The voyeur spies on the voyeur
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/Bernini: ecstasy in marble
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/Rubenesque flesh
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/The erotic realism of Rembrandt
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/The caveman takes a biology class
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/Baroquerotica/The beginning of the British libertine tradition

The 18th century: Eros Enlightened

• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/France: The land of love
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The Arcadia of Antoine Watteau
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The erokitsch of François Boucher
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The hypocrisy of Greuze
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The frivolous love of Fragonard
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Satirical pornography and pornographic satire, the caveman is agitated
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Therese's pornosophy
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/On the other side of the channel
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The British caricaturists
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Sex is a nightmare
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Betty, Pamela and Fanny
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Radical pornography and secret sexual societies in England
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Retour a la douce France
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Of talking cunts (2)
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Diderot's nun
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The sofa
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The most beautiful clitoris France
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Dangerous love affairs
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Adventurers, libertines and writers
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Restif invents pornography
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Rousseau and the 'new caveman'
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Sade, the divine monster
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Book illustrations
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Neoclassical puritanism vs. neoclassical eroticism
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/The phenomenal phallus
• User:Jahsonic/AHE/The 18th century: Eros Enlightened/Neoclassical porn

Verantwoording

Bibliografie

See also

• User:Jahsonic/Beeldenlijst van Schunnig, schalks en kluchtig
• History of erotica
• User:Jahsonic/Noten vertaling egvde