Abstract
As our Introduction makes clear, the bulk of this history will be devoted to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. That was when, over a period of about 100 years, the notion of frigidity took on the thematic shape and discursive functions we recognize so easily today. The role of this first chapter is to enable our study by examining briefly some medieval and early modern discussions of ‘frigidity’ and the related matter of ‘impotence’. Summary analysis of the period before 1800 will allow us to approach our primary corpus with an awareness of historical elements that were still in play in the nineteenth century, although they may since have disappeared from view. By giving an account of these now rather obscure antecedents, we are answering the requirements of a long-term genealogy. Our examination will bring to light an intellectual tradition around an idea of frigidity that established authoritative interpretations and kept them available over five or six centuries, at least within an erudite milieu. That is why this first chapter corresponds to such a long historical period, extending from the mid-thirteenth century to the late eighteenth. Its function is to cover a great chronological span in an economical fashion.
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Notes
James A. Coriden, An Introduction to Canon Law (Revised) (London: Burns and Oates, 2004), 3.
Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 94.
Pierre Darmon, Le Tribunal de l’impuissance. Virilité et défaillances conjugales dans l’ancienne France (Paris: Seuil, 1979), 13–14. One leading Italian scholar who does acknowledge Foucault’s lead, although without taking up his theoretical insights in any sustained way, is Valerio Marchetti, author of a richly erudite work entitled L’invenzione della bisessualità (Milano: Mondadori, 2001).
See, for example, Paulo Zacchia, Quaestiones medico-legales (Lyon, 1661), 9.3.1.
Thomas Sanchez, De sancto matrimonii sacramento disputationum (Venice: Nicolaum Pezzana, 1726), 7.92.1.
For a detailed study of Sanchez’s writing on conjugal relations, see Fernanda Alfieri, Nella camera degli sposi. Tomás Sánchez, il matrimonio, la sessualità (secoli XVI–XVII) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2010).
Joseph Bajada, Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia (1584– 1659) (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Università Gregoriana, 1988), 26.
See Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).
Diderot et al., Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommann, 1995) [facsimile reprint of the first edition of 1751–80], article ‘Frigidité’.
Alain Corbin, L’Harmonie des plaisirs. Les manières de jouir du siècle des Lumières à l’avènement de la sexologie (Paris: Perrin, 2008), 258.
Chiara Beccalossi, ‘The Origin of Italian Sexological Studies: Female Sexual Inversion, ca. 1870–1900’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 (2009): 108.
George Rousseau, ‘Policing the Anus: Stuprum and Sodomy According to Paolo Zacchia’s Forensic Medicine’, in The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe, ed. Kenneth Borris and G. S. Rousseau (London: Routledge, 2008), 75–6.
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© 2011 Peter Cryle and Alison Moore
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Cryle, P., Moore, A. (2011). Frigiditas and Impotentia. In: Frigidity. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337039_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337039_2
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