Durham Research Online Deposited in DRO: 12 May 2015 Version of attached le: Accepted Version Peer-review status of attached le: Peer-reviewed Citation for published item: Schachter, Marc (2015) 'Lesbian philology in early print commentaries on Juvenal and Martial.', in Ancient Rome and the construction of modern homosexual identities. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39-55. Classical presences. Further information on publisher's website: http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199689729.do Publisher's copyright statement: This is a draft of a chapter that was accepted for publication by Oxford University Press in the book 'Ancient Rome and the construction of modern homosexual identities' edited by Jennifer Ingleheart and published in 2015. Additional information: Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Durham University Library, Stockton Road, Durham DH1 3LY, United Kingdom Tel : +44 (0)191 334 3042 | Fax : +44 (0)191 334 2971 https://dro.dur.ac.uk Chapter Two: Lesbian Philology in Early Print Commentaries on Juvenal and Martial Marc D. Schachter DRAFT—not to be cited without the author’s permission Scholars primarily concerned with vernacular traditions have explored the ways in which the reception of classical texts during the Renaissance influenced the representation of sex between women.1 In the pages that follow, I extend this exploration by considering early neo-Latin print commentaries on Martial’s Epigrams and Juvenal’s Satires. These works contain some of the most sustained Roman accounts of erotic relations between women. Early print commentaries on them can help us understand not only how late fifteenth century humanists made sense of representations of female homosexuality but also, given the popularity of a few of the commentaries, how such representation were framed for some subsequent Renaissance authors versed in Latin. Many of the commentaries considered below include three significant elements, of which two have already received critical attention in other contexts: references to Sappho’s same-sex interests, important because there is a debate about when in the post-classical period she became known for her erotic predilections, and discussions of the tribade, a figure from Greek and Roman antiquity who re-emerged in the Renaissance and came to provide the period’s most common way to refer to women who have sex with women.2 (The tribade derives her name from the Greek verb τρίβω, ‘to rub’, because of the sex act with which she was originally associated, namely rubbing her clitoris against or in another woman’s genitals.) 3 The third element, which is particularly intriguing because recent scholarship would not lead us to expect it, is lesbian cunnilingus.4 Woman-on-woman oral sex has gone all but unmentioned in the literature on sex between women in the Renaissance, presumably because of a lack of evidence in the materials considered by scholars.5 And yet it features prominently in some of the humanist commentaries on Martial and Juvenal. Domizio Calderino (1447-1478) offers the most spectacular example in his gloss on Sat. 6.306: i nunc et dubita qua sorbeat aera sanna (‘Go on, ask yourself why she sneers as she sniffs the air’)6 in his influential 1475 Juvenal commentary: Hoc est quo pacto possit expirare dum occupata est in lingendo cunnum, nam dum lingat naso tantum respirat ore occupato, sig. e1v (‘This is how it is possible for her to breathe while engaged in cunnilingus, for while she licks she breathes through her nose alone since her mouth is busy’). While Calderino’s clever explanation appears unprecedented, he was hardly unique among humanists in considering oral sex part of the lesbian sexual repertoire. The only Juvenal commentary printed earlier than that of Calderino, the 1474 Paradoxa in Iuvenalem by Angelo Sabino (fl. 1460s-1470s), did not address Sat. 6.306, but did mention woman-on-woman oral sex in its glosses on adjacent lines. Two of the four subsequent fifteenth century printed Juvenal commentaries also referred to the practice in their discussions of Sat.6.306 or of the surrounding text, if never with quite the same verve. Moreover, many of these commentaries adorned their remarks with a line from Martial about an oversexed tribade named Philaenis with a penchant for cunnilingus: undenas uorat in die puellas, 7.67.3 (‘she devours eleven girls a day’).7 In his 1474 Martial commentary, Calderino also evoked cunnilingus when addressing this line. The materials considered in this 2 chapter thus demonstrate that explicit references to woman-on-woman cunnilingus were indeed available in the Renaissance, at least within a specific set of neo-Latin texts. Intriguingly, all three of these elements—Sappho’s sapphism, the tribade, and woman-on-woman cunnilingus—appear in Juvenal commentaries for the first time in the early 1470s. There are no references to tribades, Sappho, or oral sex between women in the influential medieval Juvenal commentary ascribed to Cornutus or in the mid fifteenth century commentaries by Gaspar Veronensis (c. 1400-1474), Guarinus Veronensis (1374-1460), and Omnibonus Leonicenus (c. 1412-c. 1474).8 Because there does not seem to have been a robust medieval commentary tradition on Martial’s Epigrams, it is not possible to track the same kind of evolution in glosses on them: Hausmann (1980). Nonetheless, his poems are crucial to the story I tell in this chapter. It is likely that three interrelated factors facilitated the sudden transformation in the discourse around sex between women: the recent arrival of print technology in Italy and the concomitant and nearly simultaneous preparation of new editions of Martial, Juvenal, and other classical authors; the exchange of ideas about these authors in Roman academies; and the dissemination of lectures on Martial and Juvenal that were presented at the University of Rome (or studium urbis) where Sabino and Calderino both taught.9 Seeking to prove this hypothesis will, however, have to wait for another time. Instead, in the pages that follow, I track the circulation of the new—or perhaps better, renewed—discourse on sex between women in glosses on Martial 7.67 and on a key passage in Juvenal’s Sat. 6 before concluding with a few remarks on the implications of the materials addressed here for the study of the history of sexuality.10 3 Of Variant Voracity in Martial 7.67 6.67 opens with a hyperbolic claim about the sexual exploits of a tribade named Philaenis and concludes by explaining that she does not perform fellatio because she considers cunnilingus to be more manly. The relevant sections, with the Latin found in the 1993 Loeb edition along with a slightly-modified version of D. R. Shackleton Bailey’s English translation, read as follows: Pedicat pueros tribas Philaenis et tentigine saeuior mariti undenas dolat in die puellas. […] non fellat - putat hoc parum uirile -, sed plane medias uorat puellas. di mentem tibi dent tuam, Philaeni, cunnum lingere quae putas uirile. (1-3; 14-17) Philaenis the tribade sodomizes boys and, more cruel than a husband’s lust, penetrates eleven girls per diem. […] she does not suck men (she thinks that not virile enough), but absolutely devours girls’ middles. May the god give you your present mind, Philaenis, who think it virile to lick a cunt.11 4 By opening with the Latin verb pedico, this vicious and clever poem emphasizes that Philaenis penetrates boys anally. The verb characterizing her activities with girls in the poem’s third line, dolo, is less precise. A common locution for sexual intercourse, the word more properly means ‘to hack into shape’ or ‘to hew’. Its presence in modern editions is the result of an emendation first proposed in 1602.12 All fifteenth and sixteenth century print editions have uorat, ‘she devours’, in the poem’s third line, as in the quotation from the epigram that circulated in the Juvenal mentioned previously. That is, in Renaissance editions, the concluding explicit discussion of cunnilingus (medias uorat puellas, 67.15; cunnum lingere, 67.17) is anticipated in the third line of the poem, and period readers would have encountered a Philaenis who ‘devours’, rather than ‘hacks’ at, eleven girls a day. Even after the emendation was proposed, many seventeenth and eighteenth century editions continued to print uorat rather than dolat.13 While three Martial commentaries were printed in the fifteenth century, the 1478 commentary by Giorgio Merula (1430-1494) did not address the sexual content of 7.67 and the posthumously published 1489 Cornucopiæ by Niccolò Perotti (1429-1480) was limited to the Liber Spectaculorum and Book 1 of the Epigrams. Therefore, only the first of the three, Calderino’s 1474 commentary, need concern us here. Apparently what most interested Calderino about 7.67 was its lesbian content. He opened his analysis of the poem by reproducing the epigram’s first word—paedicat (‘she sodomizes’)—but rather than addressing what Philaenis might do with the boys who are the direct object of the verb, he immediately considered Philaenis’ female partners: Mulieres uirili concubitu uicissim abutebantur, Martial 1474, sig. o2v (‘Women in turn were abused in masculine coupling’). Calderino then explained that Juvenal condemned such women and quoted Sat. 6.320-22: 5 ‘Lenonum ancillas posita Lauseia corona prouocat’ et paulo post ‘Ipsa Medullinæ frictum crissantis adorat.’ (‘“having put aside her garland, Lauseia challenges the maids of the procurers” and a little further on “She herself worships the rubbing of Medullina’s undulating thighs”’).