Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76989-1 - The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance Katherine Crawford Excerpt More information Introduction: sexual culture? France? Renaissance? The first premise of this book is that the French Renaissance understood sex and sexuality in ways that look strange to us. Neither a matter of identity nor restricted to individual acts, sexual expression occupied, saturated, and helped organize modes of thinking to which we, for the most part, have little access. Sex as it was understood in the French Renaissance was less a matter of modern origins and more a synecdoche that allowed for elasticity around the deployment of sexuality. This is not to argue that Renaissance sexuality was somehow more free than modern formulations of it. Rather, I contend that sexual knowledge and understanding organized and was utilized in ways that reflected Renaissance rather than modern sensibilities. Love, procreation, mar- riage, intimacy, friendship – all had sexual dimensions, the changing contours of which reveal much about sexuality and Renaissance society as it was, and is, constructed. It seems that some questions ought to be immediately obvious. What were those sensibilities? How were they different from Medieval ones before or modern ones after? How might I offer to explain why the Renaissance mattered? Why France? Why sex? Let me begin with the nature of the thing by way of a rather dense little ditty. Pierre de Ronsard wrote a sonnet that ended: Le Roi ne m’aime point pour estre trop The king does not love me for being too barbu: much with beard Il aime a` semancer le champ qui n’est He likes to seed the field which is not herbu, grassy Et comme le castor chevaucher le And like the beaver, rides the behind derriere: When he fucks the assholes that are tight Lors qu’il foute les culs qui sont cons cunts estrecis He takes after the nature of the Medici Il tient du naturel de ceux de Medicis, And in taking the lead he imitates his Et prennent le devant il imite son pere. father.1 1 Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres completes` , ed. Paul Laumonier, Isidore Silver, and ReneLeb´ egue,` 20 vols. (Paris: Marcel Didier, 1914–1967), vol. XVIII, 417. The editors reject the claims of earlier editors and accept this and other sonnets as part of Ronsard’s oeuvre. Laumonier, Silver, and Lebegue` point out that the piece appears in multiple contemporary manuscripts and is noted by the journalist Pierre de L’Estoile as by Ronsard. See Ronsard, Œuvres completes` , vol. XVIII, 1 © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76989-1 - The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance Katherine Crawford Excerpt More information 2 The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance I expect this is not the Ronsard most people know. The court poet who chal- lenged French writers to purify and exalt French language as exemplary of the heights of human achievement is using sexual slander to denigrate the king, Henri III. The simple back-story is that Ronsard was slipping out of favor. Younger poets such as Philippe Desportes were receiving more of the king’s largesse. The standard supplement to that very pragmatic set of issues is that Ronsard disapproved of Henri III’s management of the kingdom – Ronsard and seemingly almost everyone else. At this point, the Wars of Religion had left the country in tatters. The monarchy was in debt to the tune of 100 million livres by 1576 and enormously dependent on Italian financial expertise and banking resources.2 The intersections with sex are not always as obvious, but it is impossible not to notice how it saturates Ronsard’s poem. The reference to Henri’s alleged preference for his young male favorites, or mignons, is immedi- ately sexualized around the assumption that gender hierarchy within same-sex male relationships featured an older (bearded) man and his younger, not-yet- bearded, lover.3 The poem attacks Henri for enjoying such a relationship, but Ronsard puts the king, as the sexual initiator, in the dominant role. Sort of. Henri is also effeminized because he desires men. By invoking Henri’s Italian mother, Catherine de’ Medici, Ronsard tapped into the xenophobia directed at Italians, and merged it with the widespread assumption that Italians were sexu- ally corrupt. Henri was emasculated and corrupt by association. Henri’s sexual traits are cast as “genetic,” to use a deliberate anachronism, in that his gender and sexual miscues were inherited from his mother and father. More obliquely, Catherine was infamous for her devotion to astrology, and invoking her was to suggest that Henri was star-crossed progeny in the sense that generation – the Renaissance term for procreation – was marked by the configurations of the heavens. Henri’s failure to generate reflected the will of the heavens and cast doubt on him as the representative of the fertile realm of France. Oblique too, but in a cumulative sense, was the critique of Henri as a failed ideal, too bound by earthly concerns and desires to achieve either the status of a Platonic philosopher-king or the transcendence of a Neoplatonic lover. The sensibilities in this brief example are expansive, diffuse, and allusive. Rather than defining the sexual as a thing with specificity, Ronsard comes at it from odd angles and includes topical cultural referents to pack his poem with multiple levels of scandal and critique that ultimately imply Henri is not entirely fit to be king. 415, n. 1. This poem is discussed in Guy Poirier, L’Homosexualite´ dans l’imaginaire de la Renaissance (Paris: Champion, 1996), 139, relative to the controversies around Henri III. 2 Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 159; Henry Heller, Anti-Italianism in Sixteenth-Century France (University of Toronto Press, 2003), 164–70. 3 There is no analysis for France, but for England, see Will Fisher, “The Renaissance Beard: Masculinity in Early Modern England,” RQ 54 (2001): 155–87. The cultural origin of this sexual combination in the west is the Greek erastoi. © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76989-1 - The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance Katherine Crawford Excerpt More information Introduction: sexual culture? France? Renaissance? 3 All of the domains that figure in the essay that follows are represented in Ronsard’s lines. He includes the notion of the Renaissance, astrology, Neoplatonism, poetry, and politics as influences on sexuality. Through con- sideration of these categories, I will address the questions that opened this introduction. But first, my use of several terms requires some explanation. “Heterosexual,” “homosexual,” their other familiar forms (“heterosexuality” and “homosexuality”), and the less common “heteronormative” are anachro- nisms, but for these purposes, they abbreviate cumbersome, longer locutions that reflect much deeper historical patterns in French thought. In defense of their appearance in what follows, first, I use them always with an awareness of the anachronism. Second, I do not use the terms to refer to modern notions of foun- dational sexual identity. “Homosexual” refers to sex acts (actual or imagined) between persons of the same biological sex; “heterosexual” between persons of different biological sex. “Homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” are used when assumptions about persons and behaviors are attached to sexual expres- sion without presuming that the person about whom the assumption is made felt any generalized identificatory attachment. “Heteronormative” reflects the tendency to assume value judgments that construct limited heterosexual behav- iors as the norm and everything else (including a number of sexual practices involving men and women) as deviant. I use these terms in order to move past them. Invoked most often to describe modern identity categories, their origins and configurations have been debated. Historians and theorists have spent much energy analyzing Michel Foucault’s famous intervention: “As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life”.4 In Foucault’s wake, historians became absorbed in whether acts might accumulate to a functional, if unstable, notion of identity. Accordingly, some scholars maintain that early modern sodomy points toward nascent notions of homosexual orientation that began to coalesce in urban contexts in associa- tion with group or subculture behavior.5 More broadly, Foucault’s description 4 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 43. 5 The classic account here is Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982). On homosexual subculture in Renaissance France, see Maurice Lever, Les Buchersˆ de Sodome (Paris: Fayard, 1985), 67. See also Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford University Press, 1996)and Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex, Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (Oxford University Press, 1985) for early modern Italian examples. On emergent subcultures in eighteenth-century Europe, see Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution,vol.I, Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (University of Chicago Press, 1998); Theo van der Meer, “Sodom’s Seed in the Netherlands: The Emergence of Homosexuality © in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-76989-1 - The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance Katherine Crawford Excerpt More information 4 The Sexual Culture of the French Renaissance of sodomy as an “utterly confused category” prompted investigation into the meanings attached to sex in the past.