Meaning that even by the late Middle Ages, the most up-to-date research Chaucer’s physician is reading is over two hundred years old. Imagine your surgeon looming over you with a meat cleaver and a medical manual from the eighteenth century and you start to get a sense of just how bizarre that is. So, it’s little wonder that medieval understanding of the clitoris circled the same conclusions drawn in the Ancient World: namely, big ones are bad, and lesbians like them. However, new Arabic medical texts were also published and translated throughout the Middle Ages and proved highly influential. The work of Islamic physicians such as Avicenna (AD 980–1037) and Albucasis (AD 936–1013) were translated into Latin by Gerard of Cremona (AD 1114–1187) and were still in use across the West until the seventeenth century.
Medieval Arabic texts continued to fret about large clitorises, recommending they be trimmed back to curb all manner of naughty behaviour, including promiscuity and lesbianism. Albucasis, often called ‘the father of surgery’, wrote:
The clitoris may grow in size above the order of nature so that it gets a horrible deformed appearance; in some women it becomes erect like the male organ and attains to coitus… this too you should cut away.{16}
Avicenna threw his hat in the ring and claimed that a large clitoris ‘occurs to [a woman] to perform with women a coitus similar to what is done to them with men’.{17} But at least Avicenna recognised the clitoris’s function in pleasure and advises men to the rub ‘area between the anus and the vulva. For this is the seat of pleasure.’{18} Thankfully, Avicenna’s work was highly influential throughout medieval Europe and advice on stimulating ‘the seat of pleasure’ is found in a number of later texts, such as William of Saliceto’s Summa Conservationis et Curationis (1285) and Arnold of Villanova’s De Regimen Santitatis (c. 1311).{19}
The Middle Ages may not have significantly advanced the field of gynaecology, but the translation of Arabic texts into Latin led to several new terms for the love button. ‘Nymph’, ‘myrtle’ and ‘landīca’ were still popular, but ‘tentigo’ and ‘virga’ (both alluding to an erection) came into medical parlance. ‘Bobrelle’ pops up in fifteenth-century Britain, which sounds delightfully like ‘bobble’ and probably means something that’s raised (to ‘bob’ up and down).{20} ‘Kekir’ is another fifteenth-century term that is cited alongside bobrelle in Wright’s Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies as meaning ‘tentigo’ (or erection).{21} But despite all this medieval bobbling, the clitoris was not widely discussed in surviving medieval sources. Even when it was, most medieval physicians were simply repeating much earlier medical opinion and threatening to cut the poor thing out. But things really start to get going when we hit the Renaissance.
In possibly the most champion act of mansplaining in the whole of human history, two Renaissance anatomists proudly claimed to have ‘discovered’ the clitoris in 1559. (Cue slow-clapping.) Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo (1515–1559) was Chair of Anatomy at the University of Pisa and claimed the ‘quimberry’ (2008) was his discovery in De re Anatomica (1559).[10] (Note this discovery belongs to Colombo, and not Columbo, the man in the mac.) The runner-up in this gynaecological game of ‘Where’s Wally’ is Gabriele Falloppio (1523–1562), of Fallopian tube fame. Falloppio published Observations Anatomicae in 1561, but maintained he wrote it in 1550. He claimed that he was the first to plant his flag in Mount Clit and that ‘if others have spoken of it, know that they have taken it from me or my students’.{22} Of course, both men are talking utter nonsense as not only had doctors been aware of the clit for some time, but women had long had an inkling of its whereabouts as well.
Colombo and Falloppio ‘discovered’ the clitoris in much the same way Columbus ‘discovered’ America to the bemusement of the natives some sixty-nine years previously. But they were both so proud of their discovery! Colombo wrote excitedly:
Since no one else has discerned these processes and their working; if it is permissible to give a name to things discovered by me, it should be called the love or sweetness of Venus. It cannot be said how much I am astonished by so many remarkable anatomists, that they not even have detected [it] on account of so great advantage this so beautiful thing formed by so great art.{23}
Falloppio was adamant that ‘it is so hidden that I was the first to discover it’.{24} To be fair, their claim that this was new terrain speaks more to the lack of medical information available than to arrogance on their part. And as Colombo and Falloppio based their work on extensive cadaver dissections, they did finally provide new anatomical information about this ‘sweetness of Venus’. True, Colombo thought that the mighty ‘bean’ (1997) produced a kind of lady sperm he called ‘Amor Veneris’, but at least he wasn’t trying to cut it off. They also understood the clitoris was an organ and not just a sweet spot to be rubbed, and this was brand new information. And more than this, the Renaissance anatomists emphasised the clitoris’s role in sex and pleasure. Colombo wrote that his discovery ‘is the principal seat of women’s enjoyment in intercourse; so that if you not only rub it with your penis, but even touch it with your little finger, the pleasure causes their seed to flow forth in all directions, swifter than the wind’.{25} Swipe right, ladies.
To confuse things even more, in 1672 Dutch anatomist Regnier De Graaf re-rediscovered the clitoris in his landmark Treatise on the Generative Organs of Women, where he chastised his fellow physicians for ignoring it: ‘We are extremely surprised that some anatomists make no more mention of this part than if it did not exist at all in the universe of nature… In every cadaver we have so far dissected we have found it quite perceptible to sight and touch.’{26} But crucially De Graaf did away with all this ‘tentigo’, ‘sweetness of Venus’, ‘bobrelle’ and ‘nymph’ nonsense and insisted on using ‘clitoris’ throughout his work. The word itself is something of an etymological mystery, but most likely derives from the Greek ‘kleiein’, meaning ‘to shut’, which may be a reference to its being covered by the labia minora, or possibly to much earlier theories that the clitoris was a kind of door for keeping the womb warm. The first recorded use of the word ‘clitoris’ is in Helkiah Crooke’s Mikrokosmographia (1615), an encyclopaedia of human anatomy where he correctly identifies the location, structure and muscle make-up of the clitoris.[11] From here on out, ‘clitoris’ was on the rise.
Despite the giant medical leaps forward in sixteenth-century lady-lump appreciation, the obsession with the hypertrophied clitoris continued. In 1653, Dutch anatomist Thomas Bartholin called the clitoris ‘contemptus viorum’, or ‘the contempt of mankind’ because he believed women who overused theirs would become ‘confricatrices’ (‘rubsters’) or lesbians. He even claimed that he knew of one woman who had so abused her ‘contempt of mankind’ that it had grown the length ‘of a goose’s neck’. (Repeat: a GOOSE’S NECK.) Bartholin wrote:
10
For further reading, see Mark D. Stringer and Ines Becker, ‘Colombo and the Clitoris’,
11
Antecedents to ‘clitoris’ had been in circulation in Latin and Greek since Rufus of Ephesus (first century AD) used both κλειτορίς (clitoris) and κλειτοριάζειν (clitorising) in his anatomical works. Rufus uses ‘clitorising’ as a verb to mean stimulating the clitoris. See Carolyn J. Gersh, ‘Naming the Body: A Translation with Commentary and Interpretive Essays of Three Anatomical Works Attributed to Rufus of Ephesus’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2012); Helkiah Crooke,