Its size is commonly small; it lies hid for the most part under the Nymphs (labia) in its beginning, and afterwards sticks out a little. For in Lasses that begin to be amorous, the Clitoris does first discover itself. It is in several persons greater or lesser: in some it hangs out like a man’s yard, namely when young wenches do frequently and continually handle and rub the same, as examples testify. But that it should grow as big as a goose’s neck, as Platerus relates of one, is altogether preternatural and monstrous. Tulpius hath a like story of one that had it as long as half a man’s finger, and as thick as a boy’s prick, which made her willing to have to do with women in a carnal way. But the more this part increases, the more does it hinder a man in his business. For in the time of copulation it swells like a man’s yard, and being erected, provokes to lust.{27}
It would be nice to think that Bartholin was a lone, crank voice, but this was far from the case. In his enduring popular sex manual, Conjugal Love; or, the Pleasures of the Marriage Bed (1686), Nicolas Venette warns of some clitorises that swell ‘to such a bigness, as to prevent entrance to the yard’ and of labia that are ‘so long and flouting that there is a necessity in cutting them in maids before they marry’.{28} In ‘A Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies’ (1688), the Earl of Dorset attacks Lady Harvey as a predatory lesbian, writing that her ‘clitoris will mount in open day’ – meaning it was so big she could use it as a penis.{29}
Even women got in on the act. Jane Sharp was a seventeenth-century midwife who published a landmark text on pregnancy and childbirth in 1671: The Midwives Book. Here, Sharp gives detailed anatomical descriptions of the vulva and the function of the clitoris. She writes that the clitoris ‘makes women lustfull [sic] and take delight in copulation, and were it not for this they would have no desire nor delight, nor would they ever conceive’.{30} While this might seem like something of a win for the ‘love-nub’ (2008), Sharp also warns about large clitorises that ‘shew like a man’s yard’. She goes on to compound this with a hefty dollop of racism, writing that ‘lewd women’ in India and Egypt frequently use their large clitorises ‘as men do theirs’, though she has never heard of a single English woman behaving like this.{31} She continues:
In some countries they [clitorises] grow so long that the chirurgion [surgeon] cuts them off to avoid trouble and shame, chiefly in Egypt; they bleed much when they are cut… Some sea-men say that they have seen negro women go stark naked, and these wings hanging out.{32}
This marks the beginning of a Western obsession with the genitals and sexuality of women of colour that persists to this very day.
We don’t know if any of this medical ‘advice’ around clitorectomy was actually followed, or what your everyday women on the street made of all of this because (sadly) their voices are lost to us. We know that some doctors fretted about big clitorises, but how much of this filtered down to the consciousness of the general populace is anyone’s guess.
But there may be one controversial body of evidence available for us to examine just how medical theories of hypertrophied clitorises impacted outside the medical community in the early modern period: the witch trial records. It has long been hinted at by various historians that the fabled ‘witch’s teat’ may have in fact been the clitoris.{33} Various online articles have got a bit carried away with this idea and claimed that the clitoris was referred to as ‘the witch’s teat’ in the early modern period, but this isn’t true. The witch’s mark was left by Satan to symbolise his ownership of the witch (think the ‘dark mark’ in Harry Potter), whereas the witch’s teat was a kind of nipple where the witch suckled Satan in the guise of a familiar. The difference between the two is academic, as both were used to condemn a witch to death. Absolutely anything could be identified as a teat or mark: boils, burns, warts, moles, scars, haemorrhoids, or any kind of lump or bump. Although this mark could be found anywhere on the body, it was regularly found on the genitals.
When James VI of Scotland (later James I of England) published his witch-hunting guide Daemonologie in 1597, he advised people where to look for this secret mark and why.
The Devil doth generally mark them with a private mark, by reason the Witches have confessed themselves, that the Devil doth lick them with his tongue in some privy part of their body, before he doth receive them to be his servants, which mark commonly is given them under the hair in some part of their body, whereby it may not easily be found out or scene, although they be searched.{34}
There are recorded incidents of the teat turning up in the throat, on the belly, the breast, and on men, so it is clear in these cases the teat is not the clitoris. But there is no denying the similarity between the hypertrophied clitorises fretted over in medical texts and sexualised descriptions of the witch’s teat, raising the possibility that the clitoris itself was interpreted as the witch’s teat by overzealous witch hunters.
After seventy-six-year-old Alice Samuel was executed as a witch in 1593, the gaoler examined her body and found irrefutable proof she was guilty.
[H]e found upon the body of the old woman Alice Samuel a little lump of flesh, in manner sticking out as if it had been a teat, to the length of half an inch; which both he and his wife perceiving, at the first sight thereof meant not to disclose because it was adjoining so secret a place which was not decent to be seen.{35}
In a final act of indignity, poor Alice’s body was put on display for the public to inspect her genitals for themselves. In 1619, Margaret Flowers confessed to having a black rat that sucked upon the teat on her ‘inward parts of her secrets’.{36} In 1645, Margaret Moone was interrogated by the self-styled ‘Witch-Finder General’, Matthew Hopkins. Poor Margaret was one of several victims that Hopkins found to have ‘long teats or bigges in her secret parts, which seemed to have been lately sucked’.{37} In Bury St Edmunds, 1665, elderly widow Rose Cullender was found to have three teats in her vulva. One ‘it appeared unto them as if it had lately been sucked, and upon the straining of it there issued out white milkie matter’.{38} All the women were executed for witchcraft. We will never know precisely what these teats were, but the descriptions of them as long, fleshy protrusions from the vulva that were sucked by demons to pleasure the witch certainly has echoes of the irrational fears over long clitorises we have seen.
By the end of the sixteenth century, the clitoris was well and truly out of the bag (so to speak), and not just in medical texts, or the ravings of witch hunters. It was recognised as an organ and one that provided pleasure. It was even a source of humour. Our favourite potty-mouthed aristocrat, John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, names one of the characters in his The Farce of Sodom, or The Quintessence of Debauchery (1689) ‘Clitoris’. Clitoris is a maid of honour and she regularly brings her queen, Cuntigratia, to orgasm. And the notoriously naughty libertine Sir Francis Fane made jokes about ‘cunt bay’ and ‘pier clitoris’ in the city of Bath.