Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West.

Allen, Judith A.

Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, edited by Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler. Toronto, Ontario, University of Toronto Press, 1996. 315 pp. $60.00 (cloth), $21.95 (paper).

Introductions to historical anthologies matter. By definition, collections tend to be disparate, challenging editors to advance plausible rationales. Rigid coherence is an unreasonable demand for anthology introductions. Nonetheless, introductions can valuably inflect how readers approach collections, by flagging significant themes, and highlighting ongoing debates between contributors, casting them into the broader context of developments in the relevant field.

Murray and Eisenbichler's introduction is feisty and opinionated, yet finally somewhat misleading about the concerns of most of their contributors. They announce that the sixteen essays (including their introduction) belong within a re-periodization and re-characterization of European history from the twelfth until the seventeenth centuries as "premodern" rather than "early modern" or "Medieval." Attempting to frame their anthology's mission as a critique of French philosopher Francois Foucault's "meandering and impressionistic reading of the history of sexuality in the West" (p. ix), his "neglect of the relatively long period separating antiquity and modernity ... cavalier and unsupported allegations about this complex and rich society," the editors note critiques of his "masculinist perspective, his virtual exclusion of the experience of women, and his failure to recognize the profoundly different ways in which men and women experience sexuality" (p. x). Dubbed as "premodernists," their editors somewhat heroically characterize the contributors as slower to jump on the Foucault "bandwagon," in the embrace of a pluralism free of "theoretical conformity and interpretive excess" (p. xiv), the sins of their ancient and modern historian colleagues. The editors also endorse the criticism of Foucault for over-emphasis on discourse at the expense of biological and psychological aspects of human experience.

Despite this Foucault pre-occupied revisionist framing, some of the contributors endorse Foucault's readings in their interpretations. Upon reading their extremely interesting chapters, this applies most notably to Brundage, Shepard, and Poirier, respectively, on the centrality of discourse in ever-expanding legal definitions of sexual norms and deviance, the non-recognition of England's King James I's homosexual behaviors as a distinct sexual identity, and the complexity of Christian travellers' accounts of North African Muslim male sexualities. In fact, the only chapter explicitly taking issue with Foucault's theories is Cady's attempt to establish that the notion of distinct homosexual identity long predated nineteenth-century sexological discourses, through his examination of French Renaissance discourses upon sexuality, particularly those of Henri III. Cady labels Foucault and followers as "new interventionists" who mistakenly maintain that only a modern sexual vocabulary recognizes same sex orientation and a heterosexuality/homosexuality distinction. Conscientious readers will probably disagree about who has the best of this argument, and how convincingly the evidence and interpretations are advanced.

Meanwhile, more than half of the essays concern heterosexual behaviors and practices in premodern France, England, Italy, and Portugal, West Africa -- notably "conjugal debt" (Elliot's superb essay), prostitution, cohabitation, illegitimacy, adultery, promiscuity (in fascinating essays by Manzione, Karras, Goffen, and Straus). It would be quite a stretch to read these diverse works as existing to denounce or remedy Foucault's notorious phallocentrism. Instead, they each have rich agendas of their own, defying any attempted theoretical or historiographical homogeneity.

Some essays insightfully contribute to historical study of sexuality, asking sophisticated questions cognizant of inherent constraints in what can and cannot be known about sexualities past. Others display deliberate or acknowledged "presentism," reading the past in the light of current assumptions, theories, or beliefs. Still others seem unaware of heavy-handed imposition of certain late twentieth-century assumptions about the nature of sexuality upon very different historical contexts.

One of the challenges facing historical enquiry into sexuality is accounting for how male sexuality has been represented, relatively consistently, in terms of drives, needs, and instincts, in various historical periods -- thereby treated as hydraulic, inherent, irrepressible, and natural -- in contrast with less consistent representations of female sexuality. Unfortunately, some contributors reproduce such biologistic representations of male sexuality, rather than subjecting them to historical interrogation. In her account of Portuguese officialdom's failure to curb their male colonists' concubinage with West African women and adoption of the polygamous African sexual pattern, for instance, Elbel interprets this as the "sexual deprivation", "tension between biology and law", "sexual needs" (p. 61), and "the obvious need for sexual fulfilment and the need to populate the overseas holdings" (p. 62). With her report of the "attraction that the Europeans felt for African women," biology, she concludes, "clearly won its battle with law," with men without wives "suffering hardly arty sexual deprivation while in Africa." Yet the polygamous lifestyles these happy colonists adopted, which she calls "a fascinating instance of cross-cultural blending" (p. 76) arguably had little to do with biology.

The lack of editorial intervention in essentialist interpretations in this essay ensures its sharp contrast with other contributions concerned with heterosexual dynamics. This is striking in comparison with thoughtful and shrewdly interrogated pieces such as Elliott's commanding dismantling of erroneous equalitarianism in previous readings of the doctrine of "marital debt." Dryly noting scholarly "oversimplification" in arguments that premodern doctrines of conjugal rights portrayed spousal sexual access as an equal opportunity duty -- including feminist scholars in search of reassuring instances of female agency in an "otherwise grim landscape" (p. 169) -- Elliott demonstrates the privileging of husbandly sexual demands to the disadvantage of wives, partly through her insightful interrogation of the fifteenth century sermons of the Franciscan Bernardino of Siena.

In contrast with Elliott's unquestionably historical and context-attentive essay, others approach their projects with strangely transhistorical hopes of uncovering the continuities between only apparently different premodern sexual behaviors and discourses, and those of the modern world. Indeed, the idea of the historicity of sexuality seems profoundly disturbing to some contributors. An urge to render premoderns intelligible, "like us," flavours some essays.

Unquestionably, the editors have assembled interesting, often forceful essays, which alter previous understandings of aspects of Western sexual culture between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries. Readers could wish that the editors had focused less on their own Foucault preoccupation, attending instead to the disparate sexual politics, theoretical missions, and concepts of sexuality and of history, informing the essays. Various feminist, libertarian, social constructivist, identitarian, and essentialist positions in fact, informed the essays without comment, intervention, or adequate framing. If the introduction less reliably foreshadows the critical purchase of the essays that follow than one might wish, several excellent chapters contribute to ongoing debates in the history of sexuality. Read critically, this anthology adds valuably to the field.

Judith A. Allen

Indiana University