Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society The Strangest Tudor & Stuart Aphrodisiacs About this episode Forget oysters, have you tried eating sparrows with a side of phallic vegetables to stir your lust?!
Getting in the mood isn’t just a modern preoccupation, but the reasons behind it have definitely changed throughout the centuries.
What aphrodisiacs were people using in the Early Modern period? Who were the authorities on this? And how was witch craft involved?!
Joining Kate today is author and historian Dr. Jennifer Evans https://earlymodernmedicine.com/ to help us find out.
This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
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Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Kate Lister? 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? Well, 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/subscribe.
0:35 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters! It's me, Kate Lister, and you are you, and I am me, and this is Betwixt the Sheets. And before I can let you listen to this, I have to tell you in all seriousness, this is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering age-old subjects, and you should be an adult too. And if you can't tick all of those boxes, [__] off. Don't want you around here, holding everybody else up, getting overly sensitive, and making everyone cry. Have they gone? Right, okay, fabulous, on with the show!
1:07 Kate Lister? Why, thank you for joining me in the kitchen as I rustle up an aphrodisiac, 17th century style. Yeah, there's no popping down the petrol station for Viagra now. You can forget your oysters and your strawberries dipped in chocolate as well, because we have got, let me just consult John Gerard's A General History of Plants from 1597, rockets! Not the one that goes up to the sky, the kind of lettuce-y one. We've got some garlic and some onions to quote-unquote "increase seed and provoke lust." Really? Okay, all right, 16th century, you do you. Well, what else have they got? Sparrows, writes Sparrows. Why wouldn't they have sparrows? Apparently, they're quite a lusty animal. I mean, who knew that? I mean, the sparrows did, I guess, but nobody else.
1:52 Kate Lister? Want to know what else is on the menu? Not sure I do, but listen anyway, and we'll find out together.
2:05 Speaker 01 What do you call a man?
2:06 Speaker 02 Oh, money, of course.
2:08 Speaker 03 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
2:10 Speaker 02 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning the knob and pushing the button.
2:23 Speaker 03 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
2:25 Speaker 04 Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Darren.
2:33 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. Provoking lust and sexual desire is something that we have been quite keen to work out throughout history. And while it's very interesting, and let's be honest, hilarious, to explore what the various remedies for this were, it's also fascinating to explore why people wanted to use aphrodisiacs? Who wanted to get the horn? Why did they want to get the horn? And what could be done about it if they didn't? Joining me to get into the early modern mindset of a 16th century dirtbag is Dr. Jennifer Evans, author and professor of history at the University of Hertfordshire. Also, and I'm going to get this in early in this episode, we have been nominated again for the Listener's Choice Awards at the British Podcast Awards.
3:18 Kate Lister? And that means that you fabulous people have been voting and we've made it to the top 20. But I need more of you to vote. Apparently, you can actually vote twice. But I don't want you to do that because that might be regarded as slightly cheaty. So don't do that if you've already voted. Don't go and vote again from a different email address. That would be a terrible thing to do. And if you haven't voted, frankly, you're letting the rest of us down. So crack on. Right, hot food and sparrows at the ready. Let's do this.
3:49 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Jennifer Evans. How are you doing?
3:55 Speaker 05 I'm very well. Thank you for having me.
3:57 Kate Lister? I'm so excited to have you on. You are the author of, I'll get the full title, Aphrodisiacs: Fertility in Medicine in Early Modern England. Wow.
4:06 Speaker 05 Yes, it's a little bit niche.
4:09 Kate Lister? How did you arrive at that? What, how did you decide that you're going to write a book about aphrodisiacs? And why this period?
4:18 Speaker 05 Well, I was always interested in early modern history and
4:21 Kate Lister? When is that? Just for, I don't know why anyone listening wouldn't know that by now, but just let us know anyway.
4:26 Speaker 05 Well, it depends on which historian you are. For me, it's kind of 1550 through to 1780. Not everybody agrees on that, but roughly the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yeah, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yeah, so I, I was doing that for my undergraduate degree and we were doing our dissertations. I was doing something completely different on medieval history and my housemate was working on ghost stories. And he came across something one day and randomly said to me, oh, did they ever use these foods for like funny purposes? And that was that. That was my PhD, my masters and my first book.
5:01 Kate Lister? Wow.
5:04 Kate Lister? I love that. All right. So let's try and define our terms. What is an aphrodisiac? For the purposes of your book and your research.
5:12 Speaker 05 So this is where I think my research probably will be a bit unfamiliar to people because we tend to think of aphrodisiacs in the modern senses, very much about desire. You go on a nice date. You're looking to make sure things go in the right direction. And you, you would use an aphrodisiac for people in the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. They do mean that and they call them provokers of venery from the word Venus and venereal. But they also very much mean them as fertility remedies. So all of the substances that I found that were aphrodisiacs do something beneficial to make your body more fertile and make it more likely that you will conceive.
5:53 Speaker 05 And in part, that is because they don't really distinguish sex out from reproduction in the way that we do in modern society.
6:03 Kate Lister? So this isn't just like a Viagra or goat's horn or something like that. This is like, this is the whole package. It's that you need to be able to have sex and you need to be able to get pregnant as well.
6:14 Speaker 05 Yes, well, for them reproductive sex is more sexy, it's more pleasurable, it's all tied in together. That's not to say people didn't use them as they're used today. And you have people like John Martin, who's a surgeon, he complains that, quote, old lectures, as he calls them, are using aphrodisiacs, what he says for the wrong purposes, which we can take to mean just for pleasure and just for stimulation and not for procreation or having a child. So they are used in both ways, but when you read medical literature, they're very much bound into this narrative of fertility.
6:48 Kate Lister? Can you help me understand, like, what was the, it's vague, I know, but like, what was the general understanding of sex desire in both men and women at the time? So I know coming out of the medieval period and actually going back even further into the classical period, there's this very strong narrative that women are the horny ones and men, although they do get horny, they can control it, whereas women are just, they're just off the chain, they can't, they can't behave themselves at all.
7:13 Speaker 05 Yes, so that's still very much in place. It's still functioning under the humoral model, which has come through from Hippocrates and Galen. So it's those very longstanding ideas and desire, sexual desire is tied to heat. They use phrases like kindling Cupid's fire when they write about it in in ballads and popular literature. So it's having a body that's warm. And in the humoral model, women's bodies are more innately cold.
7:40 Kate Lister? I was just gonna say, that's like a weird, how do they square that circle then? Because women were supposed to be cold and damp and kind of squidgy.
7:46 Speaker 05 Yes. So it's just thought that it takes longer. You you need more time for a woman to to become fully aroused and to reach climax. But as you were saying, women's coldness means they're less rational, they're less able to control their emotions. So when they have those desires, it's believed that they they're kind of more likely to act on them. Um, whereas men might be innately more sexual beings, but they're supposed to have the restraint and the control to manage themselves a bit better.
8:16 Kate Lister? I see. Right. Okay. It's so interesting the way that these narratives move around and change, isn't it? So like, what kind of things would be, is it all about humoral theory about temperature? Um, this idea of fertility and aphrodisiacs at this period, like something to heat you up, something to cool you down?
8:34 Speaker 05 Yes, predominantly, most of them are understood through the Galenic system. And and one of the key words that gets used a lot for infertile bodies is that they're frigid. And by that, they mean cold.
8:45 Kate Lister? Cold.
8:46 Speaker 05 In the very kind of literal sense of the word. So hot foods, ginger, cinnamon, pepper, rockets, anything that gives that kind of warming feeling is going to increase the heat of your body and is seen therefore as beneficial and is listed in that way. But that has to be in moderation. Too much heat starts to cause a problem, dries out the body. And part of what you need for good sex is seed. Both men and women can produce seed in this era, what we would now kind of think of as sperm or seminal fluid. And obviously, if you dry the body too much, that starts to be damaged. And when you don't have that, then it's not good. But there are other ways of thinking about aphrodisiacs as well within that human model.
9:30 Speaker 05 One of them is nourishing foods. And this is tied to the way in which seed is produced in the body. So you eat food, it gets turned into blood by the stomach. And then blood is refined in the testicles to make seed.
9:47 Kate Lister? Sounds good so far.
9:48 Speaker 05 And the very complicated understanding, men do that better than women because
9:52 Kate Lister? Yeah.
9:52 Speaker 05 they're better than women in every possible way in the medical model.
9:55 Kate Lister? Of course they are. They make sperm exceptionally well.
9:58 Speaker 05 Yes, they do. And that kind of prioritizes their role in reproduction. So any food that gives you kind of nourishment that's seen as really kind of hot and moist and nourishing and similar to the blood in its composition is really good aphrodisiac. And there's all kinds of nourishing foods that are listed. Eggs, hot moist meats, things like pigeons and and things are all in that kind of category. And so they work as well.
10:23 Kate Lister? Women's seed. Now, this is, this is an interesting one because it's known as the two seed theory. Men's seed, that's pretty cut and dried, like, we know what that is. There's actually quite a lot of debate about what is meant by women's seed.
10:37 Speaker 05 Yes.
10:37 Kate Lister? I am of the opinion that what they mean is what we would call like vaginal lubrication during arousal. Like, we don't even have a word for it. It's pathetic. Do the French call it supreme? The French have a word.
10:49 Speaker 05 Coffee.
10:50 Kate Lister? That's nice. It's frims from Cyprus. I think that's what they mean when they're talking about seed. But I might be way off base. There are definitely other theories. What do you think they're talking about when they talk about women's seed?
11:01 Speaker 05 I'm not sure that they're always that consistent and that we can, as you say, pin it down. It's it's quite tricky.
11:07 Kate Lister? Yeah.
11:07 Speaker 05 I think because of the way they conceptualize kind of the creation of mankind, that God has made man and woman. And they can see what they call testicles, i.e. the ovaries. And God wouldn't make anything in vain, so they have to do something.
11:23 Kate Lister? Yes.
11:23 Speaker 05 So they must be producing seeds. So I'm not sure they're they're looking at any specific fluid and saying that is women's seed. They're just seeing the testicles of women.
11:33 Kate Lister? There must be a seed somewhere.
11:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it must be there somewhere. And then, of course, that all changes in the sixteen seventies when they start to discover egg and sperm and start shifting the way they understand things. But yeah, I'm not sure they pinned down exactly what they mean.
11:48 Kate Lister? No, there's there's nothing that I've found that's like, it's definitely this. It's all just supposition and talking about bringing forth seed and it's like, could you give us a bit more than that, please? Just just a little, it'd be really helpful right now.
12:02 Speaker 05 Yes, it would. It would be really nice to find something that told us what they were talking about.
12:06 Kate Lister? So a lot of this is about eat foods to get the seeds going. Heat, temperature. Did they have, like, I think they're called anaphrodisiacs, the ones that stop you being horny. I can see that, you know, they'd want something to get you going for fertility, but they must have had something to, you know, calm you down, you know, don't be so lusty.
12:26 Speaker 05 Yes, they do. So campfire is often spoken about, um, and that makes an appearance in the trial for the dissolution of the marriage of Francis Howard and Robert Deveraux.
12:37 Kate Lister? Wow.
12:38 Speaker 05 They are married when she's very young, she's only about fifteen. He's quite young as well. It's a political marriage, they're brought together. He then goes off travelling for several years and then they come back together and are supposed to live as man and wife. They clearly don't want to, nobody wants to, so they they seek to have their marriage dissolved. She claims that he's impotent and so she's still a virgin and that's all fine. He claims that he's only impotent with her, which is a very unusual claim to make. And then all of these kind of discussions start happening and there's accusations of witchcraft in in part. But one of the things that comes up is that someone's been kind of washing things in Camphor. And that's dulling his abilities to engage with her.
13:22 Speaker 05 You also have Agnus Castus, which is a plant that is supposedly in the medical literature. Something that priests used to use and put in their beds and and sleep near so that they wouldn't feel their lusty desires anymore.
13:35 Kate Lister? Oh, will that work to treat?
13:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, they definitely have things for for both for both sides in terms of kind of raising heat and reducing it. But yeah, cold, moist things are probably not gonna work as an aphrodisiac.
13:49 Kate Lister? No, sometimes you do get, and you can see the the logic, like I can see the humor or thing, heat up, cool down, et cetera. But sometimes it's a bit more obvious than that. Sometimes it's just like, well, that looks like a penis. That must make you horny.
14:02 Speaker 05 Yes, so Galenic theory you treat with opposites. So when it's a cold body, you you heat it up and when it's lacking in nutrition, you provide nutrition. But at the same time, there's this other system called the doctrine of signatures. Where God has given everything that he's created a kind of a sign or a signature of what it's useful for. In aphrodisiacs cases, it's very obvious. It tends to be phallic shaped plants and vegetables, carrots, parsnips appear in that category. And the most famous one is a plant called dogstones, which is a kind of orchis. And when you look at the images of it in medical and botanical literature.
14:43 Speaker 05 It is literally two little bulbous roots with tiny hairs on, an upright fleshy stem and a bulbous tip. And you cannot mistake what it is supposed to look like. And this is supposed to be the one of the most kind of potent aphrodisiacs of the era. And you see that not just in medical literature, but elsewhere as well.
15:03 Kate Lister? Where else do you see that?
15:04 Speaker 05 There's an amazing drawing in a piece of eighteenth century pornography called The Voyage to Leith. The author's listed as Samuel Coak. Make of that what you will. And in the image, there is a maid in a kitchen chair with a bag of carrots and she's using one essentially as a dildo. So that kind of idea about the phallic nature of those vegetables spreads into erotic literature. But you also see them talking about things that are less obviously phallic to a modern audience. So small birds, sparrows, pigeons, swallows. Nicholas Culpepper, who's a famous medical writer from the 17th century, he says
15:45 Speaker 05 that all small birds, poachers, quails and sparrows are exceedingly addicted to venery. Therefore, they work the same in the men and women who eat them. So it's fairly straightforward. If you take something that you see having a lot of sex and you eat it, that will work. But I think sparrow in Latin is also a synonym for penis, isn't it? So there's linguistic.
16:05 Kate Lister? I'll just say yes. I don't know the answer to that.
16:08 Speaker 05 There's linguistic overlap as well.
16:10 Kate Lister? Why sparrows? Are sparrows particularly horny?
16:13 Speaker 05 Not that I've observed, but according to Culpepper, they are. And then he lists those alongside more obvious animal products, say the eating of testicles and the eating of bull's pizzles and goat's pizzles are also recommended. And occasionally, the wombs of hares, which rabbits and hares, I think are more obviously inclined.
16:35 Kate Lister? Yeah, yeah. Actually, you still get some of that today. Still crops up, like bull's testicles are still said to be in aphrodisiac in parts of Italy and things that like look phallic, like goat's horn or rhino horn or this in traditional medicine. So you still get echoes of that, don't you?
16:53 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think you do. And it's the easy connection to make, right? Is everyone can understand how that is supposed to be working.
17:06 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Jennifer after this short break.
17:20 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I am jumping here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
18:02 Kate Lister? Have you found anything in your research that does the same thing but with the vulva? Like, it's easy when it's, you know, like, that looks like a penis. Is there anything that's like, that looks like a vulva, so that must make you horny?
18:13 Speaker 05 Not that I've come across yet. I did look, and strangely, you do get some discussions about things that look like testicles in the 17th century, rather than looking like a penis. So there's one author who writes about mushrooms looking like a wrinkled cod, which is their word for the scrotum. And so that makes sense. And certain beans are supposed to look like the glands of the penis, and so that's why they're listed. So they're looking at different body parts for men, but it's a lot less obvious for women.
18:42 Kate Lister? Always about the penis, isn't it?
18:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, I suppose the obvious one that people talk about in a modern context is oysters. They are listed, but not under the doctrine of signatures. So they are thought to be useful aphrodisiacs because they're salty. And medical writers, again, more so in the 17th century than the 18th century, think that seed needs to be salty for it to be stimulating and titillating, and that the salt is what's doing the kind of tickling action as it moves through the, the kind of tubes
19:14 Kate Lister? Okay.
19:14 Speaker 05 of various places. But they also talk about the fact that Venus is supposedly born of the sea, and therefore salt is a notable aphrodisiac. But by the 18th century, that's all being poo-pooed and dismissed as not true.
19:29 Kate Lister? What understanding did they have about orgasms at the time?
19:32 Speaker 05 So this does depend on if the medical writer is following that two seed model that you were talking about. So if it's the two seed model, both men and women need to orgasm in order for a conception to happen. Their seeds need to meet in the womb and mingle together, and that's what forms the child. And that in some senses makes simultaneous orgasm important
19:54 Kate Lister? Mm hmm.
19:55 Speaker 05 to sexual practices in order to to make it fertile.
19:59 Kate Lister? It's a nice idea.
20:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, and that has some implications for understanding aphrodisiacs. Because you want to ensure that the men last long enough, that the women's colder bodies can catch up and that that happens at the same time.
20:13 Kate Lister? We all want that.
20:14 Speaker 05 Perhaps one of the oddest categories of foods that were aphrodisiacs in this era kind of work in that way, which is windy meats.
20:22 Kate Lister? Pardon? What?
20:23 Speaker 05 Windy meats.
20:24 Kate Lister? Things that make you fart?
20:26 Speaker 05 Yes, they have that nice term for them, windy meats.
20:29 Kate Lister? Okay.
20:29 Speaker 05 The way that they conceptualize the male reproductive organs anatomically is in the earlier part of the the era. They see the the penis as very much being inflated. That's how it works.
20:42 Kate Lister? Like a balloon, like a party balloon.
20:45 Speaker 05 Exactly. So Helke Akrok even calls it a gut filled with wind. That's his description. And so foods that help that process and sustain that process sustain the whole kind of act of reproduction.
21:00 Kate Lister? I think we might have to cut this part out. I don't think that we need any men out there being encouraged to to fart as being sexy time.
21:08 Speaker 05 Well, thankfully, they they do start getting rid of that idea in the eighteenth century as well. And one author famously writes that these things have been accorded this kind of prominence as aphrodisiacs, but it it leads to encounters that are are all thunder and no rain.
21:24 Kate Lister? That's brilliant.
21:25 Speaker 05 So his euphemistic term for there's not enough seed going on in these kind of encounters. So they gradually understand that it's by muscles and blood vessels and the windy meats disappear from medical literature.
21:39 Kate Lister? Shame. From what you're telling me here, like, it sounds like the sources that you're working with are largely medical and by their nature would have been something that was accessible to the richer people, I suppose. Is that the poor people can't afford doctors and their literacy rates aren't going to be great. But I'm also wondering, like, how accessible was this information? And it's really difficult when you're dealing with the lower classes because they just didn't leave those records. But how accessible was this to your everyday person?
22:08 Speaker 05 I think some of these ideas are quite widely known about. Medical texts circulate on the secondhand market amongst kind of artisans. So they're reaching perhaps more people than than we might think. But more than that, you can look at ballad culture and you see examples there of disgruntled wives feeding their husbands various aphrodisiacs in order to to fix their lack of enjoyable sexual encounters. And you do see some slight differences. So where the medical literature talks about bull's testicles, ballads often talk about lamstones and obviously sheep are slightly cheaper, more readily available,
22:50 Speaker 05 perhaps. One of them talks about feeding potato pie. Potatoes gain a reputation pretty quickly.
22:57 Kate Lister? I like a potato. I mean, I think you could probably seduce me with a good roast potato. I'm not sure of the aphrodisiacs, though. But I'm very pleased the potato had that moment.
23:08 Speaker 05 It had it had its moment, its brief moment. But yeah, so you see discussions in ballads of the use of these kinds of foods as well. And you also find it in other places. So Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, which describes the prostitutes working in and around Covent Garden. One of the entries there is for a Miss Bland. She's described as a gay and volatile girl who's very gentle. Teal in her person, but she has an extraordinary titillation in all her members, which she's fond of increasing by making use of provocatives, including pullets, pigs, veal, new-laid eggs, oysters, crabs, prawns, o ringoes and other electuaries.
23:49 Speaker 05 And it goes on to say that she has a kind of savage joy in her embraces and and leaves penetrating teeth marks on her paramours cheeks. Whether that's true or not, no idea, but they expect the readers of this kind of literature to know that these are foods that work in that kind of way. So there are subtle hints here and there that people know that these foods work.
24:10 Kate Lister? So I suppose it'd be kind of like, like old wives tales and just word of mouth and sort of knowledge just permeating that way, wouldn't it?
24:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, a lot of medical historians for the seventeenth century talk about the fact that there's not a huge distinction between kind of elite medical knowledge and popular medical knowledge. There's differences of of kind of detail, but everybody's working on those same frameworks.
24:34 Kate Lister? Yeah.
24:34 Speaker 05 And they understand the humoral model, um, and so they they kind of know how how certain things work.
24:40 Kate Lister? So I can understand why, like, if you knew that potatoes make you horny, they're pretty easy to get hold of, although maybe they wouldn't have been at this period. But you know, you grow them, but like, would you go to a physician for this stuff? Would he just like prescribe you with potatoes? Was there like courses of treatments that you could go to? I'm just trying to like, like, you know, now you can go down to the supermarket and buy Viagra over the counter. Was there anything like that at the time?
25:05 Speaker 05 Well, I mean, it depends how you look at some of these substances. They could classify them that way. There are lots of options for people for accessing medical care. Traditionally, physicians are supposed to do the prescribing, but they're expensive, they're not accessible to everybody. And once you have that prescription, the physician isn't supposed to fulfill that anyway. The the local apothecary is the one who's supposed to make up the medicine.
25:32 Kate Lister? Oh, okay.
25:33 Speaker 05 What you see by the eighteenth century is actually apothecaries are starting to act like GPs because they're they're more accessible. Um, and they're cheaper, so people go straight to them and they skip the physician part. You do see some physicians writing in their medical texts about treating people lower down. It's all very benevolent and they do it for for free or for low cost. But those medical texts are their kind of marketing tools. So they are trying to make themselves look good. So you could go to an apothecary and buy something. You could also potentially forage some of these items. A Ringo, which is sea holly, which is really popular in people's wedding, like boutonnieres and bouquets these days, is described as an aphrodisiac several times in the medical literature and you you could go and forage that one for yourself.
26:17 Speaker 05 And then there's a whole kind of set of medical work going on in households called kitchen physic. And you see recipe books. Again, the recipe books we have are from the slightly wealthier people. You've got the money to keep a book and to write in it. But you see recipes and remedies shared there for all kinds of ailments. And some of those include things to help with conception and to help with problems of a reproductive nature. So you could go to an apothecary, but you could equally probably make something at home as well.
26:49 Kate Lister? Who were like the big blockbuster sellers of this period? If there was like some cookbooks, who was like your Jamie Oliver?
26:56 Speaker 05 There's a book, I think it's attributed to, I think her name's Elizabeth Gray, Duchess of Kent. I might have got the name slightly wrong, but that's a really popular one. Nicholas Culpepper's medical works sell really well. Trained as an apothecary, but he's he's a radical printer as well in the 17th century and he gets a real bee in his bonnet about the Royal College of Physicians hoarding medical knowledge in Latin, only publishing in Latin. And so he starts translating their pharmacopeia Londonensis, which is the list of remedies that they could use. He translates it into English and publishes it. He publishes a midwifery guide. He publishes all kinds of medical texts and he's like the best seller medical author of the 17th century. And he's the one that was saying about, you know, sparrows and small birds.
27:41 Speaker 05 That information is there and is available for people.
27:50 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Jennifer after this short break.
28:07 Speaker 06 Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed: Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. There are new episodes every week.
29:02 Kate Lister? You get like sort of magic creeping into this as well sometimes. I was just thinking, just when you talk about that, I remember reading about cockle bread. Cackle bread was when women baked a dough and then just in the final stages, they had to squat over it and kind of waddle and sing a little song. And they were basically imprinting their vulva on the bread and then it would be baked and given to the person that they fancied to make him...
29:26 Speaker 05 That's amazing.
29:27 Kate Lister? Imagine that on the Great British Bake Off. And it's like referenced really like opaquely in some sources of like something that country women would do.
29:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's... I did look at magic when I was writing the book and it's really interesting because treatises written about magic talk about impotence magic quite a lot.
29:47 Kate Lister? Oh, do they?
29:48 Speaker 05 And infertility magic is normally impotence magic. So there's all these stories about, you know, if you tie knots into a piece of string that's symbolic and will tie the man's organs in a knot and he won't be able to have an erection or ejaculate. There's lots of kind of discussions of how you might break some of those. Peeing through a wedding ring, the things involving church doors.
30:11 Kate Lister? Wow.
30:11 Speaker 05 All kinds of things. But what's interesting is infertility magic, real cases of it is extremely rare in England. It seems to be something that's either happening more commonly on the continent or being talked about more for the continent. So when English writers start writing about it, they tend to revert back to, well, use the natural remedies we've already talked about. Eat the aphrodisiacs, use the natural things to fix that. And I think that's because it's just not really happening
30:40 Kate Lister? Hmm.
30:40 Speaker 05 a lot in England. So it's not something they feel they need to to kind of address with charms or counter charms. They're like, oh, just use the, use the natural things and that'll fix it. And then that gained strength in the eighteenth century when there's more dismissive attitudes towards witchcraft and magic. They're definitely then like, it's not real. Just eat some aphrodisiacs and it'll be fine.
31:01 Kate Lister? Through your research, do you get a sense that most of these treatments and cures and vegetables was directed at men and their lack of ardor? Or is it unisex? Is there any that's particularly directed at women?
31:15 Speaker 05 I think a lot of them are unisex in the sense that they'll talk about men potentially. There's nothing in the literature that says you can't give these to women. The only one where that is not the case is the windy foods. They are dangerous because wind in the womb causes all kinds of problems. And so women are warned against windy, taking windy foods. But the others all seem to be used fairly evenly across the board. I think it predominantly is context specific in that medical writers often write as if their only readers are men, unless they're writing specifically about female reproductive problems. The rest of their
31:57 Speaker 05 books are kind of like the assumed reader is a man, the assumed patient is a man, and women are just there in the background. But predominantly, I think most of these can be taken by men and women. You just have to pay attention to your constitution and what you need and what your temperament is.
32:13 Kate Lister? And you can see why it's very important. I mean, It is like, you know, we like to make fun of it and everything, but being fertile and being able to have sex is very important for people. We shouldn't underplay that. Like when Viagra dropped, it was like an earthquake went off, the demand was huge. But you can understand for them as well, why it was really important, especially in something like royal marriages, because the goal for everyone, I suppose, is to reproduce and have babies. But it's especially important if you're a royal person and there are dynasties and countries and alliances and a lot of money involved in this. In your research, have you found reference to aphrodisiacs just being taken by royalties, a matter of course, or, you know, slipped to them?
32:56 Speaker 05 Not necessarily aphrodisiacs. You get much more commentary on the fertility medicines or actions taken by the queens.
33:06 Kate Lister? Okay.
33:07 Speaker 05 And so I think both Henrietta Maria and Catherine of Braganza both go to the baths to help their fertility problems.
33:16 Kate Lister? Yeah.
33:16 Speaker 05 And then it becomes like a fad and a craze and everybody's going, like they went, so everybody else goes and it becomes fashionable. And then you get this kind of satirical comments from certain quarters about, well, what is the treatment there? Is the treatment the bath or is it the doctor? Who is with the wife while she's at the bath in the absence of her husband? And some people, Robert Pearce writes a whole memoir about bathing and he devotes lots of chapters to female reproductive problems and conception. He really believes that the baths are helping these women and that they're able to have children after a long break of not being able to have them over the course of their marriage or if they've never had them before.
33:58 Speaker 05 But yeah, you get this kind of tie in of what's really going on when they go to the baths, what's happening?
34:03 Kate Lister? Obviously, because women can't be trusted, can they? Have you ever been, have you ever drunk the water at?
34:09 Speaker 05 I have, it's disgusting.
34:11 Kate Lister? It's full of, I think it's iron that it's full of, it tastes, and it's warm, so it tastes like blood, basically.
34:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, it wasn't the most pleasurable thing that I've ever done.
34:22 Kate Lister? No, it's horrible. So as a sort of a final question, because I've got to ask you this, and you've been absolutely fascinating. Did any of this stuff work? Is there anything in the literature that you've found that like, it's a low bar, but it's like, you know?
34:37 Speaker 05 I don't think there's anything in the literature that that will tell us that yes, it worked or no, it didn't. But I do think the kind of nutritious food element is probably quite important. If we're thinking from a modern perspective, one of the things that does really damage your fertility is a lack of food.
34:54 Kate Lister? Yes.
34:54 Speaker 05 As we know, women's bodies will go into a malaria and kind of shut down the reproductive function if they don't have enough calories. So I think eating those kind of nutrient dense or nutrient rich foods, caloric foods might have helped in some ways. I'm not convinced that the beans were helping anyone.
35:11 Kate Lister? But I suppose you might have had like a bit of a placebo effect.
35:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think so. And I think a lot of this is context specific. So many of these foods are just part of the the normal diet anyway. It's when you're taking them as medicine or for a particular purpose, whether they then change your emotional outlook or your kind of perspective on things, that might have helped. But but no, there's nothing in the sources that will give us that kind of answer. There's lots of suggestions that people have been fed things and then had lots of children afterwards, but it's not particularly clear.
35:43 Kate Lister? I've not even asked you about alcohol. Yeah, we should talk about that. Because if there's one thing that actually does probably make you horny, if slightly less able to do the deed, it is alcohol. And they were awash with the stuff. What was their thoughts on that?
35:56 Speaker 05 Well, exactly what you just said was, so wine is considered useful in that it will loosen your inhibitions slightly, and it's warming, and it might have been spiced, so that might work. But that too much is a problem because it causes significant difficulties with doing anything. So they're aware of that kind of fine line and that problem.
36:17 Kate Lister? But one of the things that alcohol does notoriously do is it gives you the beer goggles. It makes somebody more attractive. Did they have any comprehension of that? Or like, did they have something that you could take that might make your partner more attractive to you?
36:32 Speaker 05 I think they definitely recognise that alcohol might be doing that. And they have really interesting ideas about sexual attractiveness in the medical literature. Predominantly, beauty in this era is pale white skin, very clear skin, slightly fleshy. If you're too large or too small, that damages your fertility and so that's seen as unattractive. But when medical writers write about it, we have John Martin, who's writing in the early 18th century. He gets in trouble actually for publishing a book that's corrupting the Queen's subjects.
37:03 Kate Lister? Oh, hello.
37:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, he's a bit naughty. But he says that if you are talking about sexual partners, then ugly old women are a problem because they cause men's parts to slacken rather than stiffen. So he's suggesting you need to pay attention to your partner. And then going even further, John Brown writes a book called The Surgeon's Assistant. And he starts talking about venereal disease. And he says that venereal disease and catching it is associated with the heat of the body. It's more easily caught when your body is hot. Therefore, you might want an ugly partner because you'll feel cooler and less amorous while you're engaged in sex with them and therefore you're less likely to catch the pox.
37:43 Kate Lister? That is some mental gymnastics. You're less likely to catch the pox if you have sex with somebody you're not as attracted to.
37:50 Speaker 05 I mean, it's playing on broader ideas that you see in the medical literature that people should be careful of who they marry. Because if you're not sexually attracted to them, your partnership might be barren. And that that's a problem because barrenness in England isn't a legitimate means for a divorce. So you will be stuck in a barren partnership. And so it's also a warning to parents who are marrying off their daughters all over the place that, you know, she says she's not sexually attracted to him. If she's not interested, they should be careful because they might end up marrying her off into a barren marriage.
38:24 Kate Lister? I mean, I do kind of sign off on that, not for the reasons they were given. But I think that don't force your daughter to marry someone she's not sexually attracted to. That's, it's a low bar, but like, that's, that's a pretty good piece of advice.
38:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, it works well for them, hopefully. And it hopefully gave some younger women an opportunity to say, no, I don't want to marry this person.
38:44 Kate Lister? So let's hope so. Jennifer, you have been absolutely fascinating to talk to. I knew you would be. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
38:52 Speaker 05 I am online. I have a website, so people can just Google my name and I should come up. A Welsh actress will also come up. That is not me.
39:02 Kate Lister? Don't send her information about aphrodisiacs from the 17th century, for goodness sake.
39:07 Speaker 05 I don't think she should appreciate that very much. But yeah, I've also got a website called earlyonmedicine.com, which has lots of blog posts about all kinds of medical stuff from the 17th century.
39:19 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for coming to talk to us. You've been marvelous.
39:22 Speaker 05 Thank you very much for having me. It's been a pleasure.
39:29 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Jennifer for joining us. And if you've got a subject you'd like us to explore, or perhaps you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . Coming up, we have got episodes on just how wild were the last days of Rome and the real Virgin Mary, all coming your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, betwixt the sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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