Sex in the Renaissance — Intimate Positions in Da Vinci’s Time and What We Can Learn from Them Now

Sex in the Renaissance charts the sexual codes of conduct in Michelangelo and Da Vinci’s age. In this macho culture, the ability to please a woman in bed raised a man’s status, her pleasure wasn’t the goal but proof of his manliness and potency. Fortunately, even then, there were feminist thinkers among the elite and the clergy, who propagated a more progressive ideology.

Men lived in dread of impotence since marital sex was a Christian duty. Unconsummated marriages could be dissolved by the church. For some potential grooms, this meant having their erections inspected and even tested with weights, or virgins, as happened to the Duke of Mantova. From the late fifteenth century, the courtesan became popular, a posh sex worker. These fancy ladies accepted only the richest, most prominent men as lovers.

Some ideas might sound strange to us now, like eating starling brains as an aphrodisiac, the belief that visualisation techniques during intercourse could improve a baby’s looks, or that men and women released sperm. Some ideas were atrocious: rape as a deserved punishment for a woman’s lusty feelings. Others are familiar: Renaissance folks also indulged in slut-shaming and laughed at small dick energy. Marlisa den Hartog shows how history is both entertaining and highly relevant to better understand our own times and sexuality.

• Debut by a promising young historian

• If David was 6 foot his 8.7 cm un-erect penis would only be half a centimeter smaller than the world average. Size was a thing then too. Renaissance men wore large codpieces to suggest large genitals (big balls were valued)

• The boys will be boys argument was already prevalent in the Courtly Novel, as was the idea that a woman who dressed provocatively was ‘asking for it’

• Many female illnesses were ascribed to ‘suffocation of the womb’ due to lack of sex

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Hayo Deinum

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