Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Tudor Sex

Episode Date: May 6, 2022

WARNING: This episode includes adult themes and explicit words.Why did Henry VIII want everyone to know about his wet dreams? What animal product were condoms made from? And was coffee really ruining the sex lives of wives?Suzannah Lipscomb from our sister podcast, Not Just the Tudors, joins Kate Betwixt the Sheets to talk all things sex in the 16th century.Find out whether sex back then really was just to reproduce, the ‘discovery’ of the clitoris, and the truth about royal syphilis.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Seyi Adaobi.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.This podcast includes music from Epidemic Sounds and an archive clip from The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. It will come as no surprise that there are adult themes and explicit language in this episode. Let's be honest, you'd be disappointed with me if there wasn't. Madam all that stuff about children being found under goose with bushes. That's not true. Oh no, he first a stalk, huh? When a hen.

Raise an egg. It's not entirely all of her own doing. In the most champion act of mansplaining in the whole of human history, two Italian anatomists discovered the clitoris in 1559. But what were the Tudors really up to in the bedroom? Thanks to Hollywood, you'd be forgiven for assuming that Tudor sex was passionate bodice ripping between two gorgeous A-listers with a set of full white teeth and what we can assume is wonderful body odour. But sex back then was a lot grimeier, involving dodgy contraception, codpillar, codpill, pieces and ugly sty eyes. So join me, Kate Lister, betwixt the sheets

as we romp through sex and sexuality in the Tudor and Elizabethan periods. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it. After watching movies like the other Berlin Girl and TV shows like the Tudors, we seem to have come to the conclusion that Henry VIII was fit and that sex back then was hot. I mean, Jonathan Reese Myers isn't a codpiece, anyone. But what if I told you that Tudor condoms were reusable? That mouthwash hadn't been invented yet and that they thought coffee made you impotent.

I wanted to find out whether our perception of Tudor sex has really been influenced by Hollywood. So yep, I sent my producers, Charlotte and Sophie, back out onto the street to ask strangers what Henry VIII got up to in the bedroom. You're a dirty bastard. You probably had a whole room, does it, like, out the back of his bedroom? Yeah. Purely for that. Well, I think when he was a young man, he was a bit of a lad and probably got up to quite a whole. And then, as he got older and gouty, less than.

Less happened. I always thought his sole purpose was to reproduce. So if you're interested in finding out what the Tudors were really getting up to in the bedroom, then you are in luck. I have Professor Susanna Lipscomb joining me today to chat all things sex in the 16th century. Susanna is the host of our sister podcast, not just the Tudors, which covers everything from that time period, from the Aztecs to witches to Shakespeare. So if you're interested in that, do check it out.

it is wonderful. Susanna and I chat all things Tudor and Elizabethan sex and sexuality in this episode, including witches, contraception, same-sex relationships and Tudor porn. Or as they just call it, porn. I do hope that you enjoy. Kate, it's lovely to talk to you today. I am really pleased that you are doing a podcast for history hit. It's going to be fascinating.

I can't wait to listen to it. I'm so excited to be here. And it's just lovely to finally. Talk to you. Yeah, thanks for letting me in your world. Why are you a historian of sex? Is that a really obvious question? No, I get asked that a lot and I'm not sure that there's an easy answer to that one. Probably the simplest answer is because I'm quite fascinated by sex. And I think that maybe it's some deep-rooted psychological issue that a mental health care professional could help us with.

But the thing that I really like about, the study of it, is that there's a few universal levelers in life things that we all experience. Eating would be like one of them, eating, sleeping, shitting, sex, sex desire, those things. And they kind of bind us all together no matter where we are in what time or space. And I just find that endlessly fascinating, I think, because we can all relate to sex or food or something like that in a way that has a very immediate meaning for us that allows us to relate to what we're reading about the past and a different way. So yeah, and I think that's what fascinates me about it is something that we've got in common with like Henry the 8th, you know, might not have much in common with him, but we know what it's like to have a crush on someone and have them not fancy you back. Yes, absolutely. So I suppose there's a kind of tension between the fact that there's a

wide, but in the end, limited range of things that can be done when it comes to sex. Yes. but the culture around it, the attitudes to it, how people feel about it, all of that stuff has a history. Yeah, the actual sex acts themselves have changed very little. Like, you know, occasionally we come up with some new form of technology to do something that we think is new, but it's not really that new. But what's been allowed, what's been taboo, what's been illegal, what's been encouraged, what's been controlled, it changes so vastly. And kind of what you see is when you're looking all throughout history is the cycles of it, that it's very cyclical. There's kind of waves of permissiveness of certain things and then there's a real clamp down and oh, let's not do that.

And I think that I'm always fascinated about what is it about sex that makes us so anxious and so in need to control it? Because no other animal on the planet does that. No other animal has that level of anxiety and hang up. And they've got their mating rituals and everything, but they don't have hyenas trying to stop other hyenas having sex. with that particular hyena because that's not how you're supposed to do it. It's a really human thing that we're really hung up about it. I always want to know why. What is it, you know?

It's really interesting, though, that this is a period when there's just a real clampdown on ways of people having sex. I mean, this is a period in which we get the first laws against sodomy. Yeah. See, that fascinates me as well, is that how did people understand their sexuality in times all throughout history? Like now we have different language, registered vocabulary. You can say you are gay.

You might come out as gay. I am gay. And that wasn't something that would have happened before about the 19th century when those kind of words were coming out. But making sodomy illegal is a strong reaction to something that makes me wonder, what was going on at the time? How did people understand that? What I've learned over the course of the last year and speaking to people is that the crime of

sodomy. I talked to Tom Hamilton about sodomy in France and I've talked about same-sex marriages in Italy quite recently with Dr. Marcochi. And one thing I learned is that sodomy as a crime is directed just as much at men and women as it's directed at men with men. So it's about, once again, sex that doesn't produce children. That's the problem. And that was the definition of sodomy, wasn't it? It was just, anything that's unnatural. Yeah, so it includes animals, of course, as well. I'd stand by that one, though.

I'm happy for that one to stay illegal. That's fine with me that bit. Don't try and make me into some sort of bestiality defender here, Kate. That's interesting then. That kind of ties into this. We've got this like rise of the witch trials, which is targeted largely at older people who can't reproduce, combined with sodomy laws,

which are again tacking people that can't produce. I mean, what was going on there? Why this sudden emphasis on, you must have babies, have babies, have a baby right now. It's not sudden at all. It's been a tendency throughout history. I mean, I think you can see it through the middle ages. You can see it stretching back into thinking about the early church fathers. There's a sense in which sex is linked completely to producing children and sex that doesn't do that is a problem. So masturbation is a problem. Sex for sale. Yeah, all of these things.

Well, actually, sex for sale was very interesting. The other thing in this period that we got sort of clamping down on civic prostitution in the late Middle Ages, it's perfectly common to have a licensed brothel and it's sort of accepted that men are going to go to it. But one thing I find really interesting is that that disappears at the same sort of time as the Reformation, but they do seem to have parallel tracks. One is not causing the other.

And there's a sense that they thought that men needed that expression of their desires and there are a lot of men who can't marry until they've got to a certain status of their career. You know, you can't marry as a journeyman, you have to be a master. And so that's provided for them. But at the time that this change happens, we've got people saying on the sort of religious end of things

with the Reformation that this is immoral, but it seems to start of its own accord, and I haven't quite fathomed that. So it's a fascinating period. And I suppose one thing I wanted to ask you about was something that I learned from your book, which was about the 15 Sodomites burnt in the Netherlands, 1,400 to 1550, because that's really rare. I see loads of examples of

people being criminalised who are men for having sex with men. And that's, by the way, to go to your earlier question, not because they are thought of as gay. It's about the activity, not the identity in this period. But I've never really come across evidence of women being criminalised for their desire for other women. For some reason, the Dutch really found their niche with that. I haven't seen it anywhere else either, but they executed a number of people as female sodomites for the crime of female sodomy with lesbianism. I can't remember the full names, but one was called Gian, and she had been caught having sex with a younger woman. And yeah, so I'm not sure what was going on in Holland at the time, because lesbianism doesn't seem to have been punished to the

same degree elsewhere at all. In fact, it's very much, we'll just pretend that's not happening in the legal states, it seems to be. Yes, it's not made into law. No, not made into law. I mean, if you look at the pornography, it's most definitely there. People knew about it. It was sort of eroticised, and the School of Venus pornography book, the erotica book, that features lesbian sex, and Samuel Pepys was desperately ashamed of himself, having

bought and read it. They're not burning lesbians in the UK. That seems to have been a uniquely Dutch fan. It's also such a strange punishment because burning is normally something that's handed out for heresy. So it's suggesting that in some way, I suppose it's suggesting that it's contrary to the law of God. But it's one thing that doesn't really feature very much in the church's understandings of these things at this time either. And I don't think we were burning men for sodomy either. They weren't burnt. I mean, not that that makes it any better, but they were hanged, I think. That's right. It was a crime in England at least.

Waterlord Hungerford being the first person to be executed for it. Although I think there are other causes in his particular case. So I think there's more going on than that one thing. But yes, it's hanging. It's a crime like theft or something. Yeah. And so I can't say very much about lesbianism is a fascinating history. It's one of the more hidden histories.

And it's because, well, where do you look for for the evidence? And in the law courts, it doesn't show up very much until you get to somewhere like Holland, where they are prepared to execute women for the same crime. And I think that it's kind of like a trespassing into gender roles, really, that's doing it, that's making it. They're basically pretending to be men. That's the viewpoint and that they need to be punished for that. But over here we weren't doing that, but we were getting very anxious about things like coffee. That's what I can understand.

But one of my favourite things about this period is it was probably a satirical pamphlet in, I think it was 1674. And it was supposed to be written by women in London, the wives of London, because they were devastated that their husbands were now in these newfangled coffee shops. And that coffee was supposed to wither your sexual desire and your potency and that it was rendering them useless and no life and no virility whatsoever. This is fascinating. So do we know anything about who produced it? So it was called the Women's Petition Against Coffee. And we don't know who wrote it. I would put money on saying that it's satirical because it's too funny to not be.

satirical but it calls coffee base black thick nasty, nasty, bitter, stinking nauseous puddle water. Wow. Yeah. Starbucks could not come fast enough. They should put that actually on the outside of their shops that could not Starbucks in particular. This is not a libel.

No, no. Other puddle water establishments are available. And then it sort of said that this awful berry dried their husband's vital seed up and that they were no good to them in bed and made them impotent. So the pamphlet was satirical, but it taps into something. There must have been some kind of anxiety.

Yes, because even if you're concerned about your husband spending time talking with his mate at the coffee shop, you know, the latest alternative to the pub, why does that manifest itself in that particular concern or that particular satire? I don't know the answer to that. For a while I wondered if it's because coffee's imported, that there was a certain amount of like it's a foreign influence,

something that they should. should just be on good old-fashioned ale. But I don't know why it is. I mean, there's this theory that coffee dried the body up, so it reduced sexual potency. But maybe they just drank too much coffee and couldn't get it up. Maybe I don't know if that's a thing that happened. Is that a medical thing?

That's not a medical thing. I spoke to Matthew Green, actually, Dr. Matthew Green about coffee some time ago. So maybe you should ask him about it at some point. You know, coffee and sex. Coffee and sex, what was going on? I suspect it's because, as you said, that their husbands were spending a lot of time in these newfangled coffee shops, which was the threat, really, and they weren't spending time with them. And I know that the coffee shops were becoming hotspots for sex workers who were looking for clients.

So there's a certain, sort of an air of kind of naughtiness about them, and maybe it's that that's doing it. Can I talk to you about language, actually, you're saying sex worker, because obviously that's the expression we would use now. And when you use the word lesbian earlier as well, you know, we've got people who write, do you as Beneth, for example, writing and saying we can talk about lesbian-like activities in history or people. But lesbian is such a sort of loaded term. Even in the early 20th century, you might have women who desire other women but wouldn't call themselves lesbian because it's kind of political. And I suppose sex worker is a term that has its own recent history as well.

How do you think about using language? What's your kind of rationale with regard to words to do with sex? I think that history is always going to be offensive. You can't pretend that it's not and would be. doing people a disservice is the language used and the kind of the attitudes and the things you've got to try and capture. But you're bringing out the nuance and you're trying to understand where we've arrived at today when you're using that. But I think especially if you're talking about something like sex work where sex workers are very much around today, have community,

have rights and are fighting for those rights. And when you're talking about the history of sex work, it does impact them today. So you've got a duty of concern and care for how. how you're talking about it. And it's all about kind of exploding the nuance, isn't it? It's like when 10 years ago, 15 years ago, people would have just said prostitute, not thought very much of it. It would have just been just absolutely fine. But when you actually try and unpick that a little bit,

it's like, well, what do you mean by that? Because it's a really densely layered, do you mean somebody that's selling sex full-time, and that's their full-time occupation? Or do you mean somebody that is selling sex to top up a wage? Or do you mean someone that does it from time to time? Or do you mean somebody that dances erotic dancing? Or because there's such a wide spectrum. of people selling erotic services, that if you just label it as prostitute, it can be quite

limiting. So the problem with prostitute is that it has become too capacious a term, or that it's judgmental? It does carry a lot of judgment. It does. It's quite a judgmental word. If I say the word prostitute you, I don't think it brings up much positive imagery. And there's a lot of stigma that needs to be unpicked because it's the stigma that is really dangerous to people. It dehumanizes people, it allows violence against them to be enabled because they've already been dehumanised. And the word is, it's a part of that. I mean, it's a legal word. You can use the word. So it does carry weight of stigma, but also I think that it's quite a blunt tool. You know, like, for example, I was talking to somebody who researched sailors in the 18th century and she discovered, like,

this term, sailors' wives. They wouldn't have called themselves prostitutes or haws or anything like that, but they're in that kind of market because they have clients that go away on ships and then come back. And so if you're trying to capture something with that word, you're missing the nuance. Like, would the girls working in the cancan holes in 19th century front? Would they have called themselves prostitutes? You know, so there's a lot of nuance that's not being called. So we need to get at the words that they might have used about themselves. Yes. Because if we replicate the words that people are used in judgment of them in the past, then all we're doing is rehearsing that kind of violence towards them.

Yeah, and when we use our own words, they're always tangled up with our own sense of judgment. So a good example that I've found of that is that when the Spanish conquistadors came and took over the Aztec community, there was a practice among the Aztecs, and I'm going to pronounce it terribly now. The Aluiawen, sorry to anyone who speaks Spanish. And they were translated by Spanish as being hores or prostitutes,

But the word itself in the Aztec means bringer of joy. So something's lost in translation there. You suddenly have labelled them with that quite judgmental word when this practice clearly isn't how the Aztecs themselves saw it. It's so difficult, though, isn't it? I mean, I've done some work on women in France in the late 16th, 30, 17th centuries, and many of those were people who one might call sex workers or prostitutes. It's hard to know what to say because the words used about them at the time are even more judgmental.

They're called Pitao, which is like whore, but pretty extreme version of that. And it's definitely a word of insult. But one thing we don't have is huge amounts of testimony from these women. So occasionally I can follow the life of one particular woman and see her journey into the trade. And there's one in particular who comes to mind called Catherine Formantine, who became, someone who ran a brothel herself as she got older and seems to have inducted lots of other girls and women into the business and perhaps got there because she wanted to marry somebody who she wasn't allowed to marry and the person her father had set her up to marry

she didn't want to marry anyway so the marriage options fall away I can't absolutely do a sort of path here of causality but that's what I know about her before and then she turns up working in sex. And we see so little testimony from her and she features quite a lot in the sources, whereas the vast majority of these women just disappear from the historic record. Yeah, we've got no real way of knowing

how they understood themselves, how they navigated their place in the world. But you've got like a few voices here and there. So if you talk about like the famous Venetian courtesans who were also poets and playwrights, but, I mean, they were exceptionally rare, and they're amazing, but they don't capture the voices of working class women, of regular women. And because it was so shame and stigmatized, people just didn't talk about it. So the sources you have available to try and understand it always skew

the data slightly because it's a court record or it's a medical report or it's, we just don't have the unbiased testimony of somebody who was selling sex in whatever period it is. And if you talk to sex workers today and sex worker rights activists, you can understand why it's only just now really with the advent of social media that sex workers have been allowed to form communities and have a voice for the first time in this dialogue all throughout history they've been spoken over and about and for i think they definitely had a community in previous periods i think it's just that we don't have records yeah we don't have we don't we can't look into that secret world it was there and it's so for strength it's like it's just

out of sight you know it was there There will have been communities. There will have been groups. They would have supported them because they lived on the margins. It would have reinforced this sense of identity. And I spoke to someone once, he said that the two places of entirely women refuge almost were the nunneries and the brothels.

And I thought that was so interesting. They said that the nunneries, women would go and just live together, but also they'd live together in brothels. And it was effectively like a matriarchal society run by women with women working there. That is interesting. It seems to me that the, The 16th century must have been a pretty dangerous time to be doing this, though, because you've

got the sort of onset of new diseases like syphilis or the pox, and there's a complete lack of reliable contraception in this period, as far as I can tell. Yeah, there was. It's a very dangerous profession as far as health goes for that exact reason. And these new diseases are absolutely terrifying. Ciphylus is scary now, but we don't even see the full effects of it. Usually people walk around without any noses. It was a horrendous disease and really dangerous. And when syphilis arrived, there was suddenly a fight amongst the medical profession to find out what we can do to cure it. And you do see the first early condoms around this time, not condoms that worked. It was Gabrielle Philopio who came up with what we recognised as being the first condom. And it was this kind of

wrap that went around the penis that was infused with wine and mercury and all these spices. And you kind of think, well, maybe that would. And then you get sort of the end of the end of the descriptive passage and you're supposed to put it on after you've had sex, that's completely useless. So that must be mid-16th century for Opio, yes? Right. Because I had only ever come across the sort of sheep's guts ones, which must be 17th century, I guess.

Yes, you start to get those being refined and used, and they were designed to be reused as well. So you would have this sheep gut, animal gut, sometimes fish gut, condom, that would be kind of dried out and you'd have to rehydrate it somehow before it. putting it over the penis and then tying it around the end with like a little bow or pieces of string or something. And it would offer some limited protection, but not enough. Not enough. You can still get animal gut condoms today, not ones that are tied on with bits of string.

Wait a second. Wait a second. You could still get them today. You can still get them today. Lamb gut condoms. They don't protect against venereal disease, but they will protect against pregnancy. Do you have any insight, Dr. Lister, into why someone would choose? that over something else? They're supposed to feel better, which is the eternal battle when it

comes to condoms, is that the animal gut membrane feels more skin-like, less like latex, but they don't protect against venereal diseases. So I don't have to kind of like a novelty thing now. They're certainly not reusable. They're one use, single use, and you don't tie them on the end, but they're not the best method of contraception out there. But in the 16th and 17th century, that's probably all that you had. That and look. And the pull. out method, time-honoured, if wholly ineffective method. Failing Catholics were centuries. Yes, absolutely. But it was a scary time for anyone to be having sex, really, I think. And the vast majority of women who were married would not have ever

experienced any form of contraception. So the ways of trying to limit the family size were limited. I often wonder that, like, and again, with that we don't have access to those conversations and what was going on. Who told who, what? Like, do people sit down with each other and sort of, presumably they did, like they passed on little tips and tricks and try this and try that and don't do this and don't do that and, you know, jumping after sex to try and dislodge sperm was recommended by some ancient Greek writer or something, but wives know that. Like, was it passed on or was it just no idea? Last was. Yeah, the key question, I suppose, is whether they knew when they were more likely to be fertile in any given months. Did they know that?

because they didn't know they were pregnant as early as people might today because they don't, you know, have any urine tests. They roll over and have a cigarette and a pregnancy test and you could find out. So pregnancy was only really acknowledged from the moment that the child moved. So the quickening, that's when the soul was thought to enter the baby. So before that point, you've got the unreliable categories of, you know, your period stop, but they might stop for all manner of reasons. I mean, breast swelling, perhaps, but so many things they point to as being possible signs of pregnancy.

So it feels that there's a sense of real uncertainty about it. And, you know, for good reason, you know, there's a lot of potential for miscarriage. Oh, God, yeah. You're listening to Betwixt the Sheets. More dirty Tudor chat after this short break. And it would have been really difficult to get any kind of information anyway, because censorship was becoming increasingly prevalent at this time. We get increasing laws around what is.

and isn't okay to say and do and publish. And so a sex ed manual is definitely out. That's right. I mean, so you can't have sorts of sexually obscene books. But from what you've already said, I think that most women are going to be learning their knowledge from other women anyway. They're probably not going to be reading it.

Female rates of literacy are much lower than men anyway. So perhaps those seem to be much more written by men for men anyway, I think. Apart from when we get into the 17th century things change, you get sort of works on midwifery and stuff. But don't you think women must be? be talking to each other? They must be talking to each other, mustn't they? And like, you know, cluing each other in and giving each other tips and tricks. And I mean, and I suppose as well, it's like to a certain extent if you'd got married and like, I suppose you want to have the baby,

don't you? Especially if you're in privileged positions, Armée, Ambellin, knew all about that. So it was just, let's go at it, hammer and tongue. Well, you do, but after a certain number, perhaps what? I mean, I've read Susan Broomhole's work on The Poor, and she talks about how they, quite often, looking for poor relief, they say things like, you know, their overburden with small children. This is 16th century France. And you can imagine that. If you don't have any form of contraception, if you're not breastfeeding as well, because quite a lot of women are sending their children to be breastfed by wet nurses. So they've got no natural kind of protection against getting pregnant. And in fact, even an exaggerated sense, if you don't breastfeed immediately after,

and if the baby is away from the mother, it actually increases the chances of a woman falling pregnant again quite quickly because the body thinks the baby's died and so tries to replace it quickly. So you can imagine that you've got pregnancy after pregnancy, all of which is very dangerous and then potentially lots and lots of children to look after. You could think you might want to stop that.

I wonder as well as like how were fertility rates, and again we just don't have this kind of data available. Well, what were the fertility rates like given that diet wasn't as good as it is today and that diseases were right? Maybe people were they blessed first. I suppose you're just not. have sex, wouldn't you? After about maybe the 18th child, you just say no. Well, people are having

a lot of children and the population is increasing during this period, I think, and that's despite the fact that lots of children die in the first year of life or in the first 10 years of life. So, I think they must have been quite high. And I think that's given that people are marrying in sort of their mid-20s. And you're fertile for a good, like 20 years after that, possibly? A baby a year? potentially. Or at least every two. Yeah, they're pregnant on average every other year. They must have been able to practice, not everybody,

but some rudimentary family birth control because not all the families were this big. So whether it was like they weren't having sex, that much wherever it was that people weren't fertile. Maybe there was rudimentary knowledge around, you know, the pull-out method. Maybe they were doing that. It's difficult to say, isn't it? It could equally be that the couple aren't getting on.

aren't getting on. Yes. The husband is away with work or that the children are dying. Or that they're not necessarily having penetrative sex. I think that we get very hung up today on that the only sex that counts is penetrative sex. Put that in there and then that's sex. Maybe there wasn't as big an emphasis on that. And as you said, you know, we discovered the clitoris in the early modern period.

So maybe sex for pleasure. We often don't think that they were doing that, not historians, But just like in general, we often don't conceive of people in the past having sex for fun. But they will have been doing, and there will have been sex for pleasure and foreplay. I think there's so many interesting things in that. Certainly that female desire was thought necessary up until the 18th century to conceive. So a woman needs to climax in order to have a baby, which is great, on the one hand, not so great if a woman is raped and then is pregnant afterwards,

because it seems like she's been complicit. There we go. But I think you're absolutely right on the preoccupation with penetrative sex, because it is clear that in the context of what we've been talking about, a lack of really reliable or appealing contraception, the vast majority of people are owing having sex in the context of marriage or about to be married. They're planning on it, so it's allowed.

And when I say sex, I mean penitence to sex. So they're probably doing other things and doing all manner of other things in order to stave off the sort of sex that produces children. I think that that would make sense. If you're not married, is the reaper. of having a baby outside redlock, especially if you're a woman, especially if you're a poor women, they're not good. It's not a nice ending most of the time for this. And it's like, well,

then what do you do? I think it's why you see that story showing up again and again and again in accounts written by women who are in sex work is that they get seduced and then they get abandoned. And then, well, where'd you go? Where'd you go? You can't really work. You can't have career women at that time. So you need to make your money, I suppose. But yeah, what would you do if you're a shewed a woman to increase conception. It's like just going back to Ambelin, because she was desperate to have a baby, wasn't she? Do you know of any sources that they would

increase fertility? I don't know. There might well be research out there on it. Actually, I mean, one thing that's sad and I think happened to Anne, certainly happened to Mary the First and other women, is that they were so desperate to have a child that they would have these phantom pregnancies

or pseudosiasis where the mind so desires. to be pregnant, that the body produces the symptoms of that, which is a fascinating insight into the power of the mind, but really a belly swelling up and even producing milk with there being no baby. Wow. I think that's what happened around in 1534, but who knows?

We could understand the pressure, can you? My God. And when they dragged her in front of the court and all these trumped up charges of treason and everything, it was very interesting to me that, a lot of them were sexual in nature. Yes, she was accused of adultery with five men and incest with her brother. The one that was treasonous was conspiring the king's death.

But yeah, a lot of the charges against her were sexual. Because I suppose, given that they believed that women were totally infatiable, you can make a case for, of course, Henry couldn't satisfy her because she could only be satisfied by five men. In fact, he goes around afterwards saying that she slept with upwards of 100 men. to make his case for it in not being his fault. The other thing is also that sexual about it is that Anne's brother tells the court

or reads out loud charges against him that he and Anne have laughed at the king's manner of dressing at his terrible poetry and this is originally given in French but that Anne has said that Henry is not skillful in copulating with a woman and has neither vigour nor potency. Oh.

And that's said in front of 2,000 people in the Great Hall at the Tower London. Wow. that is, yeah, it just all comes back to the penis, wasn't it? And the following year, there's a huge picture of Henry painted in a mural at Whitehall Palace that shows him full length with a really massive codpiece. Just, really waving. Could these things be connected in any way?

Could they possibly be connected? And who was it that he had to have his court physician make a declaration that he was still having nocturnal emissions? Oh, that's Anne of Cleves, yes. So because he didn't want to consummate the marriage with Anne of Cleaves, because he thought that she wasn't a virgin, he looked at her. I mean, essentially, she seems to have been fairly big-breasted, and he looked at her breasts and her waist

and said he didn't think that she was a virgin, and said he didn't desire her and that she smelt. But it wasn't because he was having any problems in any way. He was saying that he was having, as you say, his nocturnal emissions, his wet dreams, so therefore it was not about him. It was all about her. Wow. And as I always say, there was someone in that bedchamber who was fat, smelly and not a virgin,

and it wasn't Anne of course. It's, oh my God. I mean, he's just terrified of him, wouldn't you? What on earth was he doing? I read some, those occasionally comes around, doesn't it, that maybe Anne did sleep with some of these men. Maybe there was some truth in it. What's your thoughts on that?

Is it just complete cobblers? I don't think there's any good evidence for it at all. The only evidence that suggests that is something called the Spanish Chronicle, which is a really gossipy 16th century account that has so many things in it that are clearly false and clearly sort of based on rumour and just brilliantly imaginative hearsay that I don't think that's very any good evidence for it. I think there's a sense of Anne is one of those women who's really been punished in the historical imagination because she's kind of condemned for being a whore, using the language of the time, and yet also for being

a kind of vixen, you know, what people might call cock tease, that she's not sleeping with him. So the problem is she's not sleeping with him and then she's sleeping with him and sleeping with lots of people. So she's punished for both her innocence and her guilt. It's a classic kind of bind that a woman finds herself in, I think. And I think that judgments on Ambelin for centuries have been caught up with male ideas about women who they find too alluring.

Yeah, like it's a real projection, isn't it? That we're projecting onto Anne this kind of like femme for town. She was one of many, many women that gets called a whore when we don't know anything about their sex life at all. I find that fascinating as well, that that's the go-to insult in the same way that, you know, slut and slag might be today

to try and attack that. And in Tudor court records, you've got like working class women taking each other to court for calling each other a whore. It was considered that damaging at the time. That's right. That's right. Yeah, Laura Gowang has done some brilliant work on the kind of slander. Or to my husband's whore, strangely. It's a big insult. That sounds like a good thing to me. It sounds like, yeah. No, but you would say that to your female neighbour saying you'd say you're my husband's whore. Yeah, all right, that's not as good.

Which is, you know, why would you want to say that about yourself? But the fundamental thing for Henry, I suppose, is that this idea that Anne is having sex with other people is deeply problematic for his honour in the same way as to call a woman a whore as to totally impugn her honour. To say that you can't satisfy your wife is to say that you're not a man. And if you can't rule your household, how can you rule a realm? It really is deeply problematic for him. Yeah, if she needs five other men to do the job you're supposed to be doing, then yeah, yeah, I see how that one. works. It's, oh. Which is why he says, she slept with a hundred men. There was no way. It was all her fault. It was absolutely all her fault and not his fault at all. Do you think he had syphilis? I know it's

quite trendy to retrospectively diagnose people. Yeah, and it's really hard to do. But the thing is about syphilis, of course, as you know, is that the treatment for it is mercury. And whilst we don't have four medical records for Henry, we know that he wasn't treated with that at any point in time. or indeed the sort of Gaia come, the sort of new miraculous cure that was coming in from the West Indies at this point in time. And so it seems unlikely. We do know that the King of France,

Francoir I first did have it, but I don't think Henry did. He had an ulcer that was caused by a jousting accident, but syphilitic ulcers heel, and this one didn't. So again, that doesn't work. So, no, I don't think so. He wouldn't have made my top five list of shags anyway. That's for dumb show.

I'm sure he'd be very disappointed to hear that. He'd have no interest in me whatsoever. I'd definitely not a virgin and not of good stock. Absolutely. No, but you're blonde, and that went down well in the 16th century. Ambelin is notably not the kind of trendy look in that she has. Slightly dark skin and dark hair, and that's considered not fashionable. Whereas light blonde hair like you, might be in there.

Yeah, I could have had a king all to myself and hopefully avoided it. acts. My God. Should we talk about the clitor? We can talk about the clitor. Is it ever a bad idea? Is it ever a bad idea? It never gets enough press. You were saying about the discovery of the clitoris, doesn't that seem funny that suddenly men discover it?

It's possibly the most champion actor mansplaining in the whole of human history. It was in 1559, two Italian anatomists, separately, claimed. claimed to have discovered the clitoris. And it was even better, one of them was called Columbo. No, I promise. Not Colombo, the man in the Mac, Colombo.

And the other one was Flopio again. So he turns up again. And they both get very cross with each other saying that they discovered it first. And there's this, like, proper little slagging match in their texts about how, you must have been spying on me when I discovered.

And it's complete covers, because of course people have known about it for a very long time. time, but in their defence, what they discovered was that it was an organ, whereas it wasn't just like a place to rub that felt nice, and they kind of discovered through anatomy, dissecting things, they discovered the makeup of it. But no, they both claim to have discovered it. They both make these really big claims about how I can't believe nobody's ever written about this before. And they completely had, like you can find records going right back to the ancient world. None of them

are very positive, by the way. The clit has not had a good press throughout most of its history. it's largely associated with lesbianism throughout most of its history there's a real palpable anxiety right from the ancient texts that if a clitoris gets too big it'll turn into a penis so we've again got that fear of gender roles

and I think that's where this fear of lesbianism comes from and it gets so outrageous that Bartholin, Dr. Barthorne who gave his name to the Bartholing glands in 17th century he claimed that he'd treated a woman with a clitoris as big as a goose's neck that did not happen. And you kind of get these weird descriptions

when they do turn up about clitoris growing to enormous sizes, creating really lusty women, that they turn them into lesbians. You get this kind of nonsense. And then, so when they discovered the clitoris in the 16th century, really what they mean is they kind of discovered

the anatomy of it. And then it was re-rediscovered 50 years later by a Dutch anatomist who again said, I can't believe no one's ever found this before. But even before that, Thomas Vickory, who was one of Henry the eight surgeons, actually, one of the ones who treated him for his ulcers, he's writing about the Tentigo, which was the Latin kind of phrase for the clitoris.

And that must have been, I think it's the late 1540s. So clearly this discovery, even in the midst of elite men writing about it is not the case. They're so proud of themselves as well. And you just see this, it keeps like cropping up and like, oh my God, we found this thing. And then someone else would be like, I found a thing. And then, yeah, tend to go. In Latin, it was Landico, which was a really obscene word. That was, like, it was such a rude word to say it.

And I think that, you know what you were saying about Henry the 8th? It's emasculating his idea that he couldn't satisfy a woman. I think the clitoris plays into that somewhere, and I think that's why it was attacked as this obscene thing because it doesn't need a penis to pleasure it. You can remove the penis. You don't need a man for that. And I think there's something slightly emasculate.

about that. And it's really interesting what you were saying about the mutability of sex, as well as gender, I suppose, at this time. In that there are real fears, there's a story that goes around about a girl leaping over a fence and, you know, because they consider the interiority of a woman's genitator to be an inside-out penis. Yes, they do, don't know.

And someone just got a willy and test. Yes. There's not been enough heat in the process of conception to force it out of their bodies. They're imperfect men. But it is possible for them to have a moment where they become male, where they become a man. So there's a story of this girl who leaps over a fence and her vagina falls out and then they realise that actually she's been a boy all along. And the terrifying possibility of reversal that men might somehow become women.

Become a woman. The number of times I've jumped over a fence and my penis has fallen out, When you look at these medical drawings, the early ones, there's loads in the welcome trust. And you think you're looking at a sketch of a penis, but it's actually supposed to be a sketch of a vagina. And it's just like someone's just got a penis and just turned it inside out. And they've gone, there you go, that's yours. But that kind of viewing the vulva and the vagina as being either a penis or just as a nothing. That's still with us.

Like when Freud was talking about, he couldn't conceive of women having genitals. it was an absence of something. Like they had penis envy. You know, you must envy that. Not that you're actually really quite stoked that you've got a vagina because they're awesome. Yeah, and again, I picked up from your book, that vagina, I didn't know this, the etymology of it,

that it just means sheath, that it is just a place to put a penis. It does. It's not great, is it? Is that, yeah, it just, that's something to hold a sword. So, yeah, understanding the vulva in terms of, it's for a penis. That has a really, really long history.

and I think the clitoris is a threat to that. And you still have this idea. And I think now, thankfully it's being challenged. Thanks Harry Stiles. But this idea that Cunnelingus is somehow emasculating. I'll just say that that's not personally me with Harry Stiles, but him singing his song about watermelon. Yeah, go and have a look at the video.

You'll know what I'm talking about. But for a long time, this idea that given promenoral sex on a woman is somehow weak and emasculating and not something real men do. And I think that you can trace that all throughout history. In the ancient world, in the Roman world, it was regarded as something disgusting and abysculating. scene. And I think that, again, is because the narrative around that was only weak men would do that, weak men whose penises didn't work. Long live the clip. Well, it feels like a perfect place to

leave the chat. I don't know about it. It's been so nice talking to you. It's been really fun. Thank you so much for taking the time. Anytime. Thanks for listening to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This episode was produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie G. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.