Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

of the nexus of knowledge, truth, and power that both the ars erotica and the scientia sexualis, however distinct their methods, tend to produce. Martha’s tenuous and ambiguous relation to erotic knowledge thus calls for a mode of analysis eccentric to Foucault’s opposition of initiation to discipline.

      Although Brome denies Martha access to an ars erotica, some knowledge of continental Renaissance pornography seems to inform his approach to the relation between sexual knowledge and sexual pedagogy. As pornography has developed in the West, it has seemed to possess an overdetermined relationship to pedagogy; not only, as Sarah Toulalan remarks, is “one person’s pornography … another person’s sex education,”³⁴ but one of the defining features of “modern” Western pornography from its inception in the sixteenth century is the extent to which it thematizes and dramatizes sex as tutelage. The enduring tropes of early modern literary obscenity were created by Italians such as Pietro Aretino, whose Ragionamenti (1534) depicts an older, experienced woman initiating a young, “innocent” girl into the arts of love—first by talking, then by doing.³⁵ Her own desire for pleasure drawn forth from a homoerotic scene of instruction, the girl then is emboldened to seek out more “mature” pleasures with men. While female naïveté is a compelling trope that invites instruction, mature women are also imagined as telling men how best “to do it” in Aretino’s Sonnetti lussuriosi and Thomas Nashe’s narrative poem “The Choise of Valentines.”³⁶ If, in Aretino’s sonnets, the women are simply egging their male partners on to try greater variety, in Nashe’s poem, the hapless male lover, Tomalin, is clueless about the mechanics of sex, specifically about how to pleasure a woman. Francis helpfully instructs him in what is needed, crying out “Oh not so fast” (line 179), and then directing: “Togeather lett our equall motions stirr / Togeather let us live and dye, my deere” (lines 183–84).³⁷ Considerably elaborated by the French later in the seventeenth century,³⁸ the pedagogical conventions of pornography pursue their purpose by means of a variety of narrative strategies: loquacious female speech; graphic nomination of body parts; sequential movement from sex talk to sex acts; a metaphoric inventiveness that mirrors the inventiveness of bodily postures and activities; and the eroticization of narrative itself.³⁹ And women, for whatever reason, often play the role of instructor.⁴⁰

      All of this inventiveness and loquaciousness is denied to Martha. On the one hand, as Laura Gowing remarks, “this was a culture in which it was positively virtuous not to be able to describe sex”—particularly, one might note, for women.⁴¹ Even within women’s unofficial oral culture, marital status tended to regulate the circulation of knowledge about sexual matters: “The key rituals of the female body, those where knowledge was shared and experiences were public, were organized by and for married women. Being single meant exclusion from the exchanges of reproductive knowledge.”⁴² Although alternative ways to gain entrance to such knowledge existed, especially among communities unconcerned with social legitimation (such as bands of rogues or prostitutes), Martha remains outside of such circuits of verbal instruction. And her plea to another wife for information results not in the sharing of women’s secrets but the communal orchestration of her husband’s sexual performance.