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Female Sexual Potency in a Spanish Church Court, 1673–1735

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Edward Behrend-Martínez
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Between 1650 and 1750, the Northern Spanish bishopric of Calahorra and La Calzada adjudicated eight suits against allegedly impotent wives and one case against a castrated woman.1 These suits were marital, not criminal, and usually entailed a husband accusing his wife of being impotent. They are particularly valuable for the historian of sex and gender because these cases occurred at the local level, among rural Spaniards, and in an ordinary bishop's court. These local church court trials allow us to avoid the rarified cultural world of political and religious élites.2 They offer, instead, a glimpse of the sexual concerns of ordinary wives and husbands and demonstrate the daily practices of local surgeons, doctors, and lawyers. These professionals were, I argue, primarily influenced by the pragmatic day-to-day worries of the communities they lived in. The influences of cultural and intellectual centers in Madrid or rome, Valladolid or Salamanca were negligible when compared to the issues at hand in court. These court documents reveal sexual interests related to reproduction rather than salvation, magic rather than honor, and social order rather than the strictures of canon law.

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Law and History Review , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , Summer 2006 , pp. 297 - 330
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2006

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References

1. The official name of the diocese was “Calahorra y La Calzada” because both Calahorra and Santo domingo de La Calzada were recognized as the official seats of the diocese. hereafter, however, for purposes of brevity and style, I will simply use the phrase “the diocese of Calahorra.”

2. richard Kagan's conclusion that litigation was affordable for a large portion of society in Castile is borne out by the litigants that came before the church court of this study. Shepherds, tailors, and day laborers all litigated in the court and outnumbered the very wealthy. See Kagan, Richard L., Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500-1700 (Chapel hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 126Google Scholar. In a separate study focusing on church court litigation in the diocese of zamora, Francisco Javier Lorenzo Pinar also finds that litigants came from the “medio rural.” See Pinar, Francisco Javier Lorenzo, “La mujer y el Tribunal diocesano en zamora durante el siglo XVI: divorcios y nulidades matrimoniales,” Studia Zamorensia 3 (1996): 77-88, 81Google Scholar.

3. Barahona, asks, rhetorically, “is it possible that Spain's alleged obsession with parental and family honour has been grossly overstated by an over-reliance on literary texts?” in renato Barahona, , Sex Crimes, Honour, and the Law in Early Modern Spain: Vizcaya, 1528-1735 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Two recent examples of histories that argue that church courts were mainly institutions of sexual oppression are Boyer, Richard E., Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico, Abridged, ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001)Google Scholar, and Carvajal, Federico Garza, Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

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6. The diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada had two cathedral chapters, one for each of its two cathedrals, in Calahorra and Santo domingo de La Calzada respectively.

7. “Impotencia. Privativamente se dice de la incapacidad de engendrar o concebir. Lat. Impotentia. Nebrix. Chron. part. 1. cap. I. Porque segun la impoténtia del rey … creían que lo concebido por la réina era de otro y no del rey.” Diccionario de Autoridades: Diccionario de la lengua castellana, en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces, su naturaleza y calidad, con las phrases o modos de hablar, los proverbios o refranes, y otras cosas convenientes al uso de la lengua [ … ]. Compuesto por la Real Academia Española. Tomo quarto. Que contiene las letras G.H.I.J.K.L.M.N. (Madrid: Real academia Española, 1734), 230Google Scholar.

8. His opponents could and did claim that the legitimate successor to the throne, his daughter Juana, was not actually his because he was impotent. Isabel's supporters therefore dubbed him “the impotent” and Juana “the Beltraneja” to insinuate that she was actually the daughter of the court favorite, Beltrán de la Cueva.

9. I follow here in the vein of Thomas Laqueur's interest in the construction of sex rather than gender. I use the term “sex” here to refer to how early modern people perceived and defined the female genitalia: the vagina, uterus, ovaries, etc. See Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

10. Ibid., 64. On the commonly held belief that women's “seed,” and therefore the female orgasm, was required for conception, see Bajada, Joseph, Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia, 1584-1659 (Rome: Editrice Pontifica Università Gregoriana, 1988), 52–53Google Scholar, and Bell, Rudolph M., How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 25-26, 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Bell's discussion of sixteenth-century Italian medical advice manuals that describe female as analogous to male genitalia: Bell, How to Do It, 60–61Google Scholar.

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13. Ibid., 154. James Brundage recognizes the very late impact that the Council of Trent had on much of Catholic Europe, especially in practice. See Brundage, James A., Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 551–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. henry Kamen and allyson Poska provide two recent studies demonstrating that the Council of Trent had less impact on the daily lives of Spaniards than was assumed by an earlier generation of historians. See Kamen, Henry, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, Poska, Allyson M., Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Cultures, Beliefs, and Traditions (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 1998)Google Scholar.

14. “Such eclecticism and self-contradiction are just part and parcel of the advice manual….” Bell, How to Do It, 69Google Scholar.

15. Joan Cadden, in her description of medieval cures for overactive adolescent libidos, explains that medieval doctors believed that heat was a cause for, and product of, sexual stimulation. The doctors in the seventeenth-century diocese of Calahorra, like many of their medieval predecessors, resorted to Galenic humors to diagnose sexual afflictions. In the case of impotency there was a lack of heat, a condition associated with melancholia (cold and dry). The expulsion of such heat was needed to maintain physiological balance. See Cadden, Joan, “western Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), 59Google Scholar. For a description of the Galenic humors and the female life cycle, see Menchi, Silviana Seidel, “The Girl and the hourglass: Periodization of women's Lives in western Preindustrial Societies,” Time, Space and Women's Lives in Early Modern Europe, ed. Shutte, Anne et al. (Kirksville, Mo: Truman State University, 2001), 43Google Scholar.

16. Henningsen, Gustav, The Witches' Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (Reno: University of Nevada, 1980)Google Scholar.

17. Henry Kamen, for instance, argues that the vast majority of Spaniards likely never had to deal with or feared the Inquisition over the three hundred years of its existence: “From what we have seen of the often flimsy network of familiars and comisarios, the financial difficulties of the inquisitors and the perennial conflicts with all other jurisdictions (especially in the fuero realms), we can conclude that the real impact of the Inquisition was, after the first crisis decades, so marginal to the daily lives of Spaniards that over broad areas of Spain-principally in the rural districts-it was little more than an irrelevance.” Kamen, Henry, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997), 315Google Scholar. This is not to say, however, that when and where it was present, the Inquisition did not make its jurisdiction and power felt. In the diocese of Calahorra the Inquisition originally held its tribunal in the town of Calahorra itself. however, it soon relocated to Logroño, where it conducted most of its business. See Pérez, Antonio Bombín, La Inquisición en el país vasco: el tribunal de Logroño 1570-1610 (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial, Universidad del País Vasco, 1997)Google Scholar.

18. Generally, in the Spanish legal system, the nature of the matter or crime, where it occurred, and who it involved, determined what court would handle the case. For example, only ordinary church courts could decide if a marriage was actually valid or not, while the Inquisition had succeeded in monopolizing the prosecution of bigamy cases. however, as richard Kagan has argued, in some circumstances the cities of early modern Castile provided litigants with a judicial marketplace, allowing them to move a case to the most favorable court. The standard overview of the Castilian legal system remains Kagan's, RichardLawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500-1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

19. Ripa, Eliseo Sáinz, Sedes Episcopales de La Rioja: [Siglos 16-17] (Logroño: Diócesis de Calahorra y la Calzada-Logroño, 1996), 22–25Google Scholar.

20. The diocese of Calahorra had widespread authority, spanning parts of the provinces of Vizcaya, Burgos, Navarra, and alava. A description of the diocese in 1846 in the Diccionario Geográfico-Estadístico-Histórico de España y sus Posesiones de Ultramar gives the number of towns under its jurisdiction at 954, with 747 parishes. although this source is rather late for the period in question, all the main towns that are described as being part of the diocese in the nineteenth century (Bilbao, Logroño, alfaro, Nájera, etc.) litigated in its tribunal in the seventeenth century. Madoz, Pascual, Diccionario Geográfico-Estadístico- Histórico de España y sus Posesiones de Ultramar (Madrid: Est. Literario-Tipográfico P. Mudoz, 1846), 5:241–42Google Scholar.

21. Ripa, Sáinz, Sedes Episcopales, 22Google Scholar.

22. Fernando Bouza has demonstrated that, at least during the late sixteenth century, missionaries found it difficult to minister to Basques in the diocese of Calahorra due, in part, to the prevalence of the Basque language. See Alvarez, Fernando J. Bouza, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 12Google Scholar.

23. Brundage, , Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 235–42Google Scholar.

24. On the use of medical experts in Spanish courts, see Keitt, Andrew, “The Miraculous Body of Evidence: Visionary Experience, Medical discourse, and the Inquisition in Seventeenth-Century Spain,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 36, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 77–96Google Scholar.

25. For an excellent example of the status of the dowry in an early modern Spanish annulment, see Cook, Alexandra Parma and Cook, Noble David, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

26. Transmission of baserri from one generation to the next was decided by elders: it could often be a woman, but always was the person seen as best fit to govern the baserri. See Pescador, Juan Javier, The New World Inside a Basque Village: The Oiartzun Valley and Its Atlantic Emigrants, 1550-1800 (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2004), xxiiGoogle Scholar, and also Frank, Roslyn M., Laxalt, Nancy, and Vosburg, Nancy, “Inheritance, Marriage, and dowry rights in the Navarresse and French Basque Law Codes,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 4 (1976): 22–31Google Scholar. On matriarchy in the Basque country, see Ortiz-Osés, Andrés and Mayr, Franz-Karl, El matriarcalismo vasco (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 1998)Google Scholar.

27. Finucci, Valeria, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 270CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Mc-Carthy, John, “The Marriage Capacity of the ‘mulier excisa,’” Ephemerides Iuris Canonici 2, no. 2 (1947): 261–85Google Scholar.

28. Bajada, , Paolo Zacchia, 87Google Scholar.

29. See McCarthy, , “The Marriage Capacity of the ‘mulier excisa.’”Google Scholar

30. Darmon, Pierre, Trial by Impotence: Virility and Marriage in pre-Revolutionary France (London: The Hogarth Press, 1985), 36Google Scholar.

31. Ibid.

32. After all, Joseph and Mary's holy marriage, according to the Catholic view, was valid even though they never had had any children together. Ibid., 56-57.

33. Ibid., 56-57.

34. Davis, Natalie Z., The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 28Google Scholar.

35. Darmon, , Impotence, 36Google Scholar.

36. Guinea, María del Juncal Campo, Comportamientos matrimoniales en Navarra (siglos XVI-XVII) (Pamplona: Govierno de Navarra, 1998), 237Google Scholar.

37. See, for instance, studies on the diocese of zamora and the diocese of Barcelona, Pinar, Francisco Javier Lorenzo, “La mujer y el Tribunal diocesano en zamora durante el siglo XVI: divorcios y nulidades matrimonials,” Studia Zamorensia 3 (1996): 77–88Google Scholar and Ambrona, A. Gil “Las mujeres bajo la jurisdicción eclesiástica: pleitos matrimoniales in la Barcelona de los siglos XVI y XVII,” Nuevas preguntas, nuevas miradas. Fuentes y documentación para la historia de las mujeres (siglos XIII-XVIII) (Granada: Universidad de Granada, Instituto de la Educación, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1992)Google Scholar.

38. Ferraro, , Marriage Wars.Google Scholar

39. Safley, Thomas Max, “Marital Litigation in the diocese of Constance, 1551-1620,” Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981): 61–77, 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40. Cuillieron, Monique, “Les causes matrimoniales des officialités de Paris au Siècle des Lumières, 1726-1789,” Revue Historique de Droit Français et etranger 66, no. 4 (1988): 527-59, 530Google Scholar.

41. For examples of the connection between witchcraft and impotence, see Stephens, Walter, “witches who Steal Penises: Impotence and Illusion in Malleus Maleficarum,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998): 495–529Google Scholar; Cotton, Nancy, “Castrating (w)itches: Impotence and Magic in The Merry Wives of Windsor,” Shakespeare Quarterly, Autumn 38 (1987): 320–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and on Mexico, Behar, Ruth, “Sexual witchcraft, Colonialism, and women's Powers,” Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lavrin, Asunción (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

42. With the introduction of modern surgery, allowing the relatively safe removal of ovaries and/or uterus, the Papacy had to reconsider definitions of female potency in the nineteenth century. Yet, the debate over whether a woman who had undergone a hysterectomy could marry or not continued well into the twentieth century. according to John McCarthy, today all that is required for female potency in Catholic doctrine “is a penetrable vagina capable of receiving the penis and the semen.” McCarthy, , “The Marriage Capacity of the ‘mulier excisa,’” 265Google Scholar.

43. “no ha podido consumar el matrimonio por la impotencia natural visible que padeze … “ACDC, Legajo 27/222/2, Castillo, 1681, f. 1.

44. ACDC, Legajo 27/345/31, f. 96.

45. “Seminationem autem femineam habere potest mulier eunuchissa, quemadmodum et sana acintegra” from the Synopsis rerum moralium et juris pontificii, Benedetto Ojetti, Ed., n. 1399. Quoted in McCarthy, , “The Marriage Capacity of the ‘mulier excisa,’” 266Google Scholar.

46. Bajada, , Paolo Zacchia, 15Google Scholar.

47. See Bell's discussion of the conjugal debt as a cure for lust in Italian advice literature: Bell, , How to Do It, 29-30, 37Google Scholar.

48. Vasvári, Louise, “Intimate Violence: Shrew Taming as wedding ritual in the Conde Lucanor,” Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Lanz, Eukene Lacarra (New York: Routledge, 2002)Google Scholar.

49. Brandes, Stanley, Metaphors of Masculinity: Sex and Status in Andalusian Folklore (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), 93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Though Brandes identifies cojonuda as a sexual reference, the word today has become a simple superlative that means “fantastic” or “excellent.”

50. Amusco, Juan Valverde de, Historia De La Composicion Del Cuerpo Humano (Rome: Impressa por Antonio Salamanca y antonio Lafrerij, 1556)Google Scholar. Quoted in and translated by Bell, , How to Do It, 60–61Google Scholar.

51. The vocabulary of the female castrate changed considerably, However, once it was appropriated by Freud to describe an inherent absence in the female sex. he was fixated, of course, on the phallus rather than the testicles.

52. “es impotente por hauer la curado de los dos lados el potrero,” ACDC, Legajo 27/370/71, f. 1. The petition here uses the word potrero, which usually refers to the individual whose job it is to castrate, or geld, livestock. however, potrero can also apply to a hernia surgeon. In this passage I leave the ambiguity because the more specific word hernista, hernia surgeon, is not used here as it is later in the trial and in other cases.

53. McVaugh, Michael R., “Treatment of hernia in the Later Middle ages: Surgical Correction and Social Construction,” Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. French, Roger et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998)Google Scholar.

54. Bajada, , Paolo Zacchia, 77Google Scholar.

55. “la cual curacion no ympide en ella ni en las demas castradas de los dos lados el uso del matrimonio ni abtitud a la generacion por que en las embras no se castran los testiculos….” ACDC, Legajo 27/370/71, f. 2.

56. See Laqueur, , Making Sex, 28–29Google Scholar.

57. Ibid., 140-41.

58. The typical operation to cure a hernia at this time in Northern Spain involved the removal of, usually, one of a boy's testicles, and the relocation of the second testicle inside the inguinal canal. The boy would therefore not exhibit any testicles in his scrotum, causing many community members to question whether he was or was not a full castrate. Several male impotence cases were fought over this very question in the diocese; most were resolved with an explanation of the procedure by a hernia surgeon. See Behrend-Martínez, Edward, “Manhood and the Neutered Body in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): 1073–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. This occurred, for instance, in the impotence case of Juan de aleson and María de Lagaria in 1685. he was commonly known in his village as “el capon” because it was thought that he had been castrated as a child during a hernia operation. See aCdC, Legajo 27/566/40. Of more than 250 marital litigation cases in the church court of the diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada between 1650 and 1750 that I have studied there were about twenty of castrated men; see Ibid.

60. “si posible fuera encontrarse baron de mienbro competente a lo angosto de la zerbiz o bajina de la dha Juachina seria esta potente….” ACDC, Legajo 20/164/5, f. 31 verso.

61. On questions linking sex and capitalism, see Turner, Bryan S., The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 13–15Google Scholar.

62. “mucha estrechez en el basso de calidad que es impossible su penetración y la recepción de la materia que sirue parala conservación de la especíe….” ACDC, Legajo 27/309/3,

63. “tan tierna edad….” Ibid., f. 16.

64. According to fifteenth-century bishop Gonzalo de alba, individuals should not consummate their marriages until the girl reached at least twelve and the boy at least fourteen. See Alba, Gonzalo de, “Libro sinodal,” Salamanca, April 6, 1410Google Scholar, Synodicon Hispanum, ed. García, Antonio García y (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores Cristianos, 1987), 4:275Google Scholar. Studying the female life cycle in Italy, Silviana Menichi has found fourteen to be the ideal age that a girl would enter womanhood. See Menichi, , “The Girl and the hourglass,” 43Google Scholar.

65. “en sus partes muy zerada porque auia entrado un dedo por el orificio y que no pudo entrarle sino muy poco adentro y que reconocio tenía una carnosidad y que le parecia por dha racon no auer tenido acto carnal….” This section of the declaration was underlined and bracketed in the documentation. although the judge or his secretary were the likely highlighters of the passage, we cannot be sure who actually underlined it. ACDC, Legajo 27/309/3, f. 47.

66. O'dowd, Michael J. and Philipp, Elliot E., The History of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (New York: The Parthenon Publishing Group, 1994), 309–10Google Scholar. According to Kathleen Coyne Kelly, an imperforate hymen was a danger to a woman's health in the Middle ages. See Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 2000), 10Google Scholar.

67. “ni puede permitir la introduccion de la materia que sirue pa la generacion.” ACDC, Legajo 27/309/3, f. 14.

68. A succinct overview of the position of Saint augustine, Saint Jerome, and the Catholic Church on women and sex in marriage can be found in Wiesner-Hanks, Merry, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 31–32Google Scholar.

69. Quoted in Keeble, N. H., ed., The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), 126CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I recognize that the English Church at this time (1622), of course, was not part of the roman Catholic Church. Yet the English Church during the early modern period changed little of the Catholic canon law on marriage that it had inherited. Its conditions for separation and annulment were not appreciably different from Catholic legal practice. See Ingram, Martin, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 146Google Scholar. See also Brundage, , Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 572Google Scholar.

70. The Salamancan Libro sinodal of 1410, for instance, listed four reasons for sex during marriage: for reproduction, to fulfill the conjugal debt, to prevent one's wife from seeking sexual gratification elsewhere, and to “carry out evil” (“conplir maliçia”), meaning sex for pleasure. Sex done for pleasure flatly constituted a sin. Alba, Gonzalo de, “Libro sinodal,” Salamanca, April 6, 1410Google Scholar, Synodicon Hispanum, ed. García, Antonio García y (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores Cristianos, 1987), 4:278–79Google Scholar. See also Ibid., 564-65. The main contemporary to explain, in lurid detail, all the ramifications of Tametsi on sex and marriage was the Spanish Sánchez, Jesuit Tomás in his De Sancto Matrimonii Sacramento Disputationum of 1621Google Scholar. Bell also discusses advice given to women on how to keep their husbands from committing adultery by satisfying them sexually, part of the conjugal debt. See Bell, , How to Do It, 37Google Scholar.

71. as translated by Brandes in Brandes, , Metaphors of Masculinity, 76Google Scholar.

72. Arturo Morgado García's study of witchcraft in early modern Spain cites many spells used to render men impotent or reverse such curses. See García, Arturo Morgado, Demonios, magos y brujas en la España moderna (Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz, 1999), 99–103Google Scholar. Darmon also gives an overview of much of the early modern literature and folklore regarding impotence spells and he believes that, on the whole, people feared and used such practical magic. See Darmon, , Impotence, 28–34Google Scholar. María helena Sánchez Ortega asserts that love-magic was well known to many ordinary Europeans in the early modern period. See Ortega, María Helena Sánchez, “women as a Source of ‘Evil’ in Counterreformation Spain,” Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Cruz, Anne J. and Perry, Mary Elizabeth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 199Google Scholar. In her study of the kingdom of Navarra, María Juncal Campos found three impotence cases out of twenty-two (1612, 1643, and 1651) allegedly caused by some type of maleficio, presumably witchcraft. Guinea, Campo, Comportamientos, 244Google Scholar. See also Kranmer's, Thomas influential and infamous Malleus Maleficarum (1486; New York: Dover Publications, 1971)Google Scholar.

73. See, for instance, “Concerning witches who Copulate with devils,” in Kranmer, , Malleus Maleficarum, 41Google Scholar. See also Bell, , How to Do It, 52–53Google Scholar.

74. Ortega, Sánchez, “women as a Source of ‘Evil.’”Google Scholar

75. On the taboo surrounding menstruation, see, for example, Niccoli, Ottavia, “‘Menstruum Quasi Monstruum’: Monstrous Births and Menstrual Taboo in the Sixteenth Century,” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Muir, Edward and Ruggiero, Guido (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

76. Quoted in and translated by Bell, , How to Do It, 66Google Scholar.

77. Salmón, Fernando and Cabré, Montserrat, “Fascinating women: The Evil Eye in Medical Scholasticism,” Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. French, Roger et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998)Google Scholar.

78. See Ortega, María Helena Sánchez, “Sorcery and Eroticism in Love Magic,” Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Cruz, Anne and Perry, Mary Elizabeth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991)Google Scholar. For Italian examples, see Bell, , How to Do It.Google Scholar

79. “jamas aya podido mi parte consumar el matrimonio por ser prieta de Basso y no tener sus partes como las demas mugeres….” ACDC, Legajo 27/187/38, f. 1.

80. “mi parte tiene sospechas beemente de que en cosa que alguna ynpotencia aya de parte de la dicha antonia Garrido es por echicerias y maleficio….” Ibid., f. 9.

81. Ibid.

82. For many of the descriptions of various spells, see the fifteenth-century Kranmer, , Malleus Maleficarum.Google Scholar

83. ACDC, Legajo 27/187/38.

84. “… metio el dho Franco Velez en las dhas partes de la dha antonia Garrido un troncho de Berça en aquella forma con que tiene siminiltud a un mienbro viril … viendo que entraba con toda liuertad….” Ibid., fs. 13-14.

85. Magnus, Pseudo-Albertus, Women's Secrets: A Translation of Pseudo-Albertus Magnus's De Secretis Mulierum with Commentaries, trans. Lemay, Helen Rodnite (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 66–67Google Scholar.

86. Ibid. 121.

87. Lemay, Helen rodnite, “;Introduction,” Magnus, , Women's Secrets, 1Google Scholar. But Paolo zacchia, rome's expert on canon law and medicine who was often cited by doctors in these cases, asserted that sperm could not survive outside the penis, vagina, or uterus, and therefore women could not conceive in this manner. See Bajada, , Paolo Zacchia, 37Google Scholar.

88. “por quanto consta de muchas ystorias y cada dia se experimenta quedar preñadas las mugeres sin penetracion del vasso, solo con la verd magnetica del utero,” ACDC, Legajo 27/650/4, f. 22.

89. On the language of seduction in this area of early modern Spain, see Barahona, , Sex Crimes, 41–59Google Scholar. For a wider discussion of seduction and abduction in Europe, see Brundage, , Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 530–33Google Scholar.

90. “para … restaurar su onesta y fama….” ACDC, Legajo 27/650/4, f. 17.

91. “Juo Garcia respecto de Franco Saenz no es tan viripotente por quanto el dho Juo Garcia es castrado de un lado y tiene el miembro viril mas grueso de punta que el dho Franco Saenz….” Ibid., f. 22.

92. The medical consensus often used moderation as the key to all things, even when it came to the best size of the phallus for reproduction. On the sixteenth-century medical opinion, mainly based on Italian sources, of the importance of penis size in reproduction see Bell, , How to Do It, 50Google Scholar.

93. For many Spanish arbitristas, the political and economic pundits who attempted to solve Spain's vast problems through published opinions, depopulation was a key factor that caused Spain's perceived decline in the seventeenth century. See Reher, David Sven, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain: Cuenca, 1550-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18, n. 5.Google Scholar

94. “…era cuidado de los censores de roma el penallos, para que, disfamada la esterilidad, se aplicasen los hombres al matrimonio, privilegiando por otra parte la propagacion y multiplidad de hijos. España, que nescesita mas de esta atencion por las expulsions que ha hecho de gente, por la que han consumido las guerras en differentes partes y por la que ha pasado á poblar las colonias de las Indias y otros reinos, …” Fajardo, Don Diego de Saavedra, Obras de Don Diego de Saavedra Fajardo y del licenciado Pedro Fernandez Navarrete, Biblioteca Autores Españoles desde la formación del lenguaje hasta nuestors dias (Madrid: Ediciones Atlas, 1945), 25:426Google Scholar.

95. Spanish refrain quoted in and translated by Brandes, , Metaphors of Masculinity, 86Google Scholar.

96. On the early modern view that women were sexually insatiable, see Wiesnerhanks, Merry, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57–58Google Scholar. regarding the idea that male lust was also a concern during the early modern period, see Wiesner-Hanks, Merry, “Lustful Luther: Male Libido in Luther's Lectures on Genesis,” Festschrift honoring James Brundage, ed. Hoeflich, M. H., The history of Medieval Canon Law (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

97. Moscucci, Ornella, “Men-Midwives and Medicine: The Origins of a Profession,” The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 43–74Google Scholar.

98. A general discussion and refutation of Freud's concept of women's “castration complex” appears in Luce Irigaray's 1974 essay “another ‘Cause’-Castration,” reprinted in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. robyn r. warhol and diane Price herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: rutgers University Press, 1997), 430-37. See also Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, ed., Freud on Women: A Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990)Google Scholar, and, for a more contentious refutation of Freud's views, see Greer, Germaine, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971)Google Scholar.