You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  Classical Western literature is also rich in eroticism, and sometimes it takes a form that gets strangely close to that of a reference book. The Roman poet Ovid wrote an Ars amatoria—usually translated as The Art of Love—an instructional poem that treats courtship and sex as an “art” in the Latin sense of a technique, even a craft. Ovid inspired a series of manuals of various sorts on love, such as Andreas Capellanus’s De arte honeste amandi (The Art of Courtly Love) in the twelfth century. But the East was far ahead of the West in this respect. European literature after the fall of Rome can seem sexually frigid compared to what was going on in India and Persia. Probably the most famous, or infamous, sexy reference book of all time is the Kama Sutra, ancient India’s guide to the erotic arts. Its origins are mysterious. Writer Vatsyayana Mallanaga has long been associated with it, though that attribution poses some chronological problems. The only thing we know about Vatsyayana is that he probably lived sometime between the fourth and sixth centuries C.E. But most scholars date the Kama Sutra between the fourth century B.C.E. and the late second century C.E., too early for Vatsyayana. Still the attribution sticks, for lack of a better candidate.

  The Kama Sutra was probably composed in north or northwest India. It is written mostly in prose, though short bits of verse appear throughout. Although it is known as a sex book, only a small part of it deals directly with sex; it is really a book on virtuous living. A happy and virtuous life, though, included sexual pleasure. The Sanskrit word kāma means sensual desire or pleasure, which includes sexual pleasure. And sutra, one critic says, “means something like a thread or string of aphorisms, little bits of knowledge that are easily passed on… . I … see the sutras as kind of an early form of Wikipedia.”2

  Some of this erotic literature was accorded a position of great dignity in the culture that produced it; some was hidden, passed around in samizdat copies. Reference works, though, bring respectability to everything they touch. For a long time, these two worlds—the erotic and the encyclopedic, the sweaty wantonness and the dusty authority—seemed incompatible, at least in the West. Beginning in the seventeenth century, though, encyclopedias of sex began appearing. Some of them offered genuinely useful medical and scientific information about reproduction; others served no purpose other than titillation.

  Edward Phillips, a minor writer, is remembered by historians for two things: first, he was the nephew of the poet John Milton; second, he published a significant English dictionary, The New World of Words, in 1671. Earlier, in 1658, he wrote a book called The Mysteries of Love & Eloquence, with its preface dedicated to “the Youthful Gentry” and a dedicatory epistle “To those Cruel Fair ones, that triumph over the distresses of their loyal Lovers, the Author wisheth more Clemency; and to their afflicted Servants, more magnanimity and Roman Fortitude.”3 A reader not clued in to seventeenth-century London might find the title comparatively tame, as in the promise to discuss “The Arts of Wooing and Complementing; as They Are Manag’d in the Spring Garden, Hide Park; the New Exchange, and Other Eminent Places.” But Spring Garden (later renamed Vauxhall), Hyde Park (a royal park, open to the public since 1637), and the New Exchange (a bazaar near the stock market on the Strand) were notorious haunts of prostitutes.

  The most notorious seventeenth-century sex manual in the English-speaking world, though, bore the strange title Aristotle’s Master-Piece. The supposed author’s name is bogus—the Greek philosopher had nothing to do with it, and the work was credited to him only to lend it some scrap of respectability. The name game was not original; pseudo-Aristotelian books had been appearing in England since the late sixteenth century. And it didn’t work this time, either: Aristotle’s Master-Piece was banned in Britain until the 1960s. But the prohibition did not keep it from circulating; in fact its popularity makes it difficult to study today. We are not even certain when the first edition was printed; few copies of the early editions survive, since most of them were read (and otherwise used) until they fell apart.

  Much of the information in the book was lifted from Jacob Rüff’s De conceptu et generatione hominis (On Conception and Generation, 1554) and Levinus Lemnius’s Secret Miracles of Nature (1564). Aristotle’s Master-Piece promised to cover a wide range of subjects, and the subtitle insisted the whole thing was “Very Necessary for All Midwives, Nurses, and Young-Married Women.” But the long title page gives little idea of the real contents. The promised “pictures of several monstruous births” did offer a prurient glance at gruesome birth defects, but the book was notorious for other reasons. In real life it was marketed neither to midwives nor to “nurses and young-married women.” Much of the book was pornography, pure and simple.

  To twenty-first-century sensibilities, seventeenth-century pornography does not seem very pornographic.4 Aristotle’s Master-Piece sometimes reads more like a sermon than a sex guide. “It plainly appears in Holy Writ,” the book declared, “that this glorious Vniverse, bespangled with gaudy Fires, and every where adorned with wonderful objects, proclaiming the Wisdom and Omnipotence of the Great Work-Master, who in Six Days Erected all Things for his Pleasure.” Maybe erected is a dirty pun, but the sentiment is wholesome enough, and the point is that God created sex for humanity’s pleasure—no heretical belief, but one embraced by the Puritans themselves in seventeenth-century England. “That Marriage is an Honourable State,” wrote the author, “ordained by God in Paradice, and since Confirmed by our Blessed Saviour, who wrought his first Miracle at a Wedding, I hope none will deny; therefore it is convenient that Parents well take care of their Daughters Chastity.”5 No need to blush there.

  TITLE: Aristoteles Master-Piece; or, The Secrets of Generation Displayed in All the Parts Thereof … to Which Is Added a Word of Advice to Both Sexes in the Act of Copulation: And the Pictures of Several Monsterous Births Drawn to the Life

  COMPILER: Unknown

  PUBLISHED: London: Printed for J. How, and are to be sold next door to the Anchor Tavern in Sweethings Rents in Cornhil, 1684

  PAGES: ii + 190

  TOTAL WORDS: 39,000

  SIZE: 6″ × 3¼″ (15 × 8.5 cm)

  WEIGHT: 5.7 oz. (160 g)

  AREA: 26 ft2 (2.4 m2)

  Once the book gets going, though, there is little doubt that it should be categorized as what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called a “livre à lire d’une seule main,” a book to be read with one hand. It is telling that the description of the female sex organs is far more expansive than that of the male. The gynecological details are exceedingly frank for an age in which such information was usually suppressed in print:

  The parts that offer themselves to view, without any deduction, at the bottom of the Belly, are the Fissura Magna or the Great Chink, with its Labia or Lips, the Mons Veneris and the Hair, These parts are called by the General Name of Pudenda, because when they are bared they bring Pudor or Shame upon a woman… . The Clytoris is a substance in the upper part of the Division, where the two Wings concur and is the Seat of Venereal pleasure.6

  And when, in the first few pages, the author promises “to Vnravel the Mystery of Generation, and divers other Mysteries,”7 we can assume many readers’ pulses raced.

  The book stressed that the reason for sexuality is reproduction: the author knew that “a young likely Couple” may well be “desirous of Mutual Enjoyment,” but he (she?) insisted that it was “for Generation-sake, which is the chief End for which Wedlock was ordain’d.” The book offers no information about contraception, only pragmatic advice for promoting pregnancy—warning, for instance, against withdrawal too soon after “they have done what nature requires,” so that they do not lose “the fruit of the labour.” There is a great deal of advice on promoting fertility: be sure “to Copulate at distance of time, not too often, nor yet too seldom, for both these hurt Fruitfulness alike; for to eject immoderately, weakens a Man, and wastes his Spirits, and too often causes the Seed by long continuance to be ineffectual, and not manly enough.” Sometimes, of course, the advice was distinctly prescientific: “Now the
fittest time (they say) for the Procreation of Male Children, is when the Sun is in Leo, and the Moons Sign is Virgo, Scorpio, or Sagitarius.”8

  Still, even though procreation is the goal, a surprising amount is said in favor of sexual pleasure—and, unusually for the age (or almost any age), in favor of sexual pleasure for both men and women. Men, in the author’s opinion, are more strongly driven by lust—“GOD has firmly impressed [sexual desire] in all Creatures … Male and Female; but more especially on Man”—and this “unruly” energy requires constraint: God “has thought it convenient to prescribe him Bounds, and confine him to the Vse of the Matrimonial Bed; that so they might not defile themselves with wandring Lust.” But women, too, are sexual beings, as the author revealed in the title to chapter 1: “Of Marriage, and at what Age Virgins and Youths are Capable of the Marriage-Bed, and the Reasons that prompts [sic] them to desire it.”9

  When nudged, female desire can be every bit as unruly as men’s, particularly when, “the Spirits being brisk, and in a manner inflam’d when they arrive at this Age, if they eat salt sharp things, Spices, &c. whereby the Body becomes still more heated, then the irritation and proneness to Venereal Embraces, is very great, nay some times almost insuperable.” While male and female desires have different motivations—“The Venereal Appetite … proceeds from different causes for in men it proceeds from a desire of Emission, and in women from a desire of Completion”—at least the author acknowledged female desire. Women needed to have sex, because prolonged virginity was bad for their health: “if a woman do not use Copulation to eject her Seed, she oftentimes falls into strange Diseases.” Thus the grand anatomical analogy: “The Action of the Clytoris in women is like that of the Penis in men… . And as the Glans in man is the Seat of the greatest pleasure in Copulation, so is this in Women.”10 Aristotle’s Master-Piece even suggested that pregnancy is impossible without the female orgasm—though this enlightened regard for women’s pleasure tended to be removed from editions printed in the nineteenth century.11

  Aristotle’s Master-Piece had an astonishingly long afterlife. Bibliographers have counted more than 250 separate editions, but all of them survive only in tiny numbers of copies—libraries did not consider them worthy of preservation. Nonetheless, over the course of a full century, more than half the popular books on reproduction were versions of Aristotle’s Master-Piece: “No other single text or group of texts came anywhere near such renown.”12 It was popular in colonial and republican America: in 1744, the preacher Jonathan Edwards scolded young men in Massachusetts for reading it.13 Early in the nineteenth century it was mentioned in Sir Walter Scott’s novel Woodstock, and it makes several appearances in James Joyce’s Ulysses, where “Mr Bloom turned over idly pages of The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, then of Aristotle’s Masterpiece. Crooked botched print. Plates: infants cuddled in a ball in bloodred wombs like livers of slaughtered cows. Lots of them like that at this moment all over the world. All butting with their skulls to get out of it. Child born every minute somewhere.” Later in the book Molly Bloom gets the name wrong: “should we tell them even if its the truth they dont believe you then tucked up in bed like those babies in the Aristocrats Masterpiece he brought me another time as if we hadnt enough of that in real life without some old Aristocrat or whatever his name is disgusting you more with those rotten pictures children with two heads and no legs thats the kind of villainy theyre always dreaming about.”14 Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies tips its cap to the book as well: a suspicious customs officer sorts through luggage and pulls out a printed list of books containing “Aristotle, Works of (Illustrated).” It could still be found in sex shops in Soho in the 1930s.15

  Jack Harris (real name John Harrison), the “Pimp General of All England,” was a waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head tavern in Covent Garden, and although he held a respectable position as a justice of the peace, he was also a “procurer of lewd women for bawdy purposes.” Harris apparently lent this modified form of his name—willingly or not—to Samuel Derrick, an Irish poet who was apparently responsible for at least the early editions, perhaps with his mistress.16 Together they produced an eminently practical guide to London’s strumpets, trulls, and doxies, along with useful information on their fees and the special services they would provide to those with sufficient funds.

  There were sixteenth-century directories of prostitutes, such as the Tariffa delle puttane di Venegia (Tariffs of Venetian Prostitutes, 1535), and in the eighteenth century, English taverns typically kept handwritten lists of local prostitutes—just one of the services they provided to their customers. Prostitution was illegal, of course, but both the author and the users would have taken comfort in the fact that there was little organized law enforcement to do anything about it. And so the old guides were transformed into a new annual compendium on erotic gratification. The world depicted by Harris’s List is one of hypercharged masculine sexual desire. As critic Elizabeth Denlinger puts it in one of the best accounts of the book, “What do men want? … [Harris’s List says] that men want whores; that men want to read about whores; that men want to read about themselves successfully visiting whores.”17

  The earliest extant edition is from 1761, but an edition was advertised in April 1760, and there may have been a few before that. Annual publication was “timed to the Christmas season, when London was at its most crowded.”18 The 1761 edition contains 113 women in the main series, with 53 more tacked on in an appendix, and over the course of the List’s long history, the volumes were typically under 150 pages, covering somewhere between 120 and 190 prostitutes. It is possible that, at least in some of the later volumes, women paid to be included in the list—craigslist avant la lettre.19

  TITLE: Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, New Atlantis for the Year 1761: To Which Is Annexed, The Ghost of Moll King; or A Night at Derry’s

  COMPILER: Samuel Derrick? (1724–69)

  PUBLISHED: London: Printed for H. Ranger, near Temple-Bar, 1761

  PAGES: xxiv + 187

  ENTRIES: 164

  TOTAL WORDS: 38,000

  SIZE: 6¼″ × 3¾″ (16 × 9.5 cm)

  AREA: 33 ft2 (3 m2)

  PRICE: 2s. 6d. (apparently 1s. 6d. in 1760)

  LATEST EDITION: Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies; or, Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar for the Year 1793 (London, 1793)

  The book was supposedly published by one H. Ranger, operating near Temple Bar on Fleet Street. But ranger was a term at the time for a womanizer, and the name is almost certainly a pseudonym. The early books seem to have actually been produced by a disreputable publisher named Joseph Burd. The prostitutes’ names were technically concealed, but one need not have been a profound cryptographer to determine that “Miss L–w–s” is Miss Lewis, or “Mrs. H–m–lt–n” is Mrs. Hamilton. For each, the reader got a description of her appearance, an account of her prices, and a résumé of her particular charms: one prostitute was known for her “kisses fierce and fervent”; another “will grasp the pointed weapon with genuine female fortitude.” Leering wordplay is common, sometimes verging on the pornographic. As Denlinger explains, the descriptions “combined appeals to the imagination of the sedentary reader and directions to the male walker of the streets … names, addresses, and prices all point to their practical use, while the lush descriptions of women also function as soft-core pornography.”20 Not all the entries, though, were complimentary, as this one from 1773 shows:

  Mrs. F–wl–r. To be found at C–rt–r’s Bagnio, Bow-street.

  “A Gorgon face, and serpent tongue.”

  This lady excels any we have mentioned—in ugliness. Her person coarse, her features the same, pock-marked, rude and uncouth in her behaviour; her skin we cannot say any thing about, as we are no judge of painting; and, notwithstanding, she is always well dressed: she married the son of a butcher in Bedford-street, whom she inveigled, and would have sent to the gallows, but, to his parents comfort, his death saved them from much sorrow.

  She possesses every
thing, in our opinion, that is disgustful; drinks, takes snuff, and swears like a trooper. She kept not long since a bawdy-house, and from that laudable profession turned out again. She is about 36, and the sooner we put an end to her character the better, as it is disagreeable to write, and we are sure must be so to read any more about her.

  Sales of the book were brisk. One visitor to London said Harris’s List sold eight thousand copies a year, though that seems unlikely. Even so, several volumes seem to have gone into second editions, and advertisements point out that copies sometimes sold so quickly as to become scarce. Of the thirty-six or so editions from 1760 to 1795, only seven appear in the standard bibliography of the period, and ten more have been tracked down in private collections.21 This means roughly half the presumed editions are not known to exist anywhere, and most of the others are extremely scarce: a single copy survives of the 1761 edition, two of 1764, two of 1765, one of 1766, and none from 1767 through 1770.

  Harris’s List came to an ignominious ending in spring 1794, when the publishers were busted for releasing a certain “wicked, nasty, filthy, bawdy, and obscene” title.22 They were victims of a new commitment to virtue. George III had issued a proclamation in 1787 “for the encouragement of piety and virtue,” and the authorities responded by cracking down on both prostitution and pornography. In 1795, one of the List’s publishers was sent to Newgate prison for a year and ordered to post £150 security for three years.

  Sex manuals gained a new prominence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in the late nineteenth century, human sexuality began to be the subject of scientific rather than strictly moralistic inquiry. One of the most important results was Psychopathia Sexualis: Eine klinisch-forensische Studie (1886), by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing. It was one of the first modern, scientific surveys of sexual practice, though Krafft-Ebing still worried about appealing to the wrong crowd. “In order that unqualified persons should not become readers,” he wrote, “the author saw himself compelled to choose a title understood only by the learned, and also, where possible, to express himself in terminis techinicis. It seemed necessary also to give particularly revolting portions in Latin rather than in German.”23