Edward Behrend-Martínez

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

Impotency ... can exist on the part of the woman because of enclosure, which usually occurs in three places; namely, the first in the interior orifice of the uterus, another in the cervix of the uterus, another in the initial orifice called the vulva.

—Dr. Juan Muñoz, Vitoria, 1682^*

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.

In this foray into litigation at the lowest levels my conclusions support those of Renato Barahona, who has argued that for Spaniards of limited pecuniary means sexual values were moderated more by economic realities than the impracticable strictures of the "honor code."³ And though it may surprise readers accustomed to descriptions of church courts as agents of sexual oppression, the local church court, at least in matrimonial issues, responded to the demands and concerns of the individuals who approached the judge seeking solutions to their sexual troubles.⁴ That a church court would be responsive to its social context should not be astonishing. Joanne Ferraro has described a similar ecclesiastical court in the "Serene Republic" of Venice. Like the tribunal of Calahorra, she shows that Venice's ecclesiastical court judge was oriented to the concerns and values of the community rather than those of Rome.⁵ In Venice's case, the judge was a locally appointed lay official, not an ecclesiastical figure appointed directly by the Papacy. The situation in Calahorra was similar. The bishop of Calahorra was, indeed, usually appointed from outside the diocese, not by the Pope, but by the king. However, the judge in Calahorra's church court was the vicar general, who was always a prominent local member of one of the diocese's cathedral chapters.⁶

Impotence has long been described as an exclusively male affliction, a loss of sexual power that was directly connected to the loss of political power and status. The Spanish Diccionario de Autoridades of 1734, for instance, cites the infamous example of Enrique "the impotent," king of Castile and brother of the future Queen Isabel.⁷ His political weakness and the war of succession that followed his death were both indirectly and directly linked to allegations of male sexual impotence.⁸ The initial goal of this study, then, was to answer why women would be described as "impotent" or, even more curiously, "castrated" in an early modern church court. Such language clearly resulted from typical early modern concepts of the female sex.⁹ Courts determined women could be sexually impotent because they considered their sexual organs to be potent. Early modern concepts of female sexuality imbued women with considerable power in their sex. More interesting are the variety of discourses on the female sex that lawyers and litigants used to make their cases. Three separate rhetorics described women's sexual "potency" in these cases: the uterus's economic power to create legitimate future generations, the vagina's importance in maintaining the socio-sexual order, and both organs' unique connection to unseen supernatural and physiological powers.

A more mundane reason women were charged with impotence was that early modern medical experts often described female biology using terminology associated with the male anatomy. Inadequate anatomical vocabulary relegated female sexual anatomy to a subordinate subset of the human (male) sex. Spanish doctors' concepts of female sexual anatomy were supported by ancient authors like Galen, as well as modern ones, such as the theologian Tomas Sánchez or the medical jurist Paulo Zacchia. Women who could not participate in penetrative sex were as "impotent" as men were; women's ovaries were called "testicles"; female secretions during coitus were thought to be a generative "seed" like male sperm; and the clitoris, if it was recognized at all, was understood as equivalent to the male penis.¹⁰ Rather than describing female sexuality in terms of its own particular construct, then, Spanish medical experts and lawyers understood women's sex using a male vocabulary. In the sense that these Spaniards described female sexuality in male terms, they had much in common with Galen and Aristotle, who centuries earlier saw the male body as the ideal and the female body as a lesser form.¹¹ According to the scholastic view of the sexes, female genitalia were inverted permutations of the ideal: fully formed male sexual organs. The cervix, uterus, and ovaries were not so much the same as the male penis, scrotum, and testicles as they were distorted forms of those male organs. Therefore, male nomenclature as part of the scholastic sexual paradigm was inadequate when applied to women.

Taken altogether then, early modern Spaniards did not comprehend the female sex organs in any single way. They could make use of a variety of discourses to praise daughters, denigrate wives, persuade judges, and conceptualize for themselves women's sexual role in society. The many arguments and voices found in female impotence case documents demonstrate what Nicolas Abercrombie and Bryan Turner have argued concerning dominant discourses and social control. Rarely, they claim, has a single dominant ideology proved successful over equally persistent competing discourses that emanate from subaltern sectors of society:

At the very least, the [dominant ideology] theory must assume that there is a common culture in which all classes share and that the content and themes of that common culture are dictated by the dominant class. In fact it is typically the case that subordinate classes do not believe (share, accept) the dominant ideology....¹²

Abercrombie and Turner question Marx and Foucault's emphases on the authority that the producers of knowledge (initially the medieval Church, later, institutions of modern medicine) have on shaping the worldview of subordinate classes. Regarding the extreme religiosity supposedly inculcated among Catholics after the Council of Trent, they assert that the subordinate orders of society actually escaped participating in the orthodoxy of their supposed social superiors. Counter-Reformation ideology, they argue, primarily dominated the lives of élite members of society.¹³ The rhetorics employed in the cases considered here fit into Abercrombie and Turner's critique.

Ambiguity and contradiction in medical literature concerning female sexual physiology was commonplace in the seventeenth century. Rudolph Bell, for instance, has found in his research of Italian medical advice manuals that a single author might argue in favor of Aristotle's theory that only men supplied the seed for procreation in one section of a work and then, in a later section of the text, support Galen's duogenesis view that both male and female seeds are required for conception.¹⁴ Similarly, lawyers, medical experts, and witnesses drew on a variety of discourses regarding women and their sexuality to make their cases in court. When the purposes of court rhetoric demanded it, medical experts referred to traditions that described women's sex as unique and separate from men's. Doctors also often imbued the female body with powers men did not have. If a lawyer's legal goals could better benefit from medical conventions that equated the wife's sex with that of her husband, then he would set that argument to paper. Naturally, lawyers and doctors employed arguments that best suited their legal purposes: either that women, sexually, were cold moist males, or that women were unique creatures, completely different from men.¹⁵ What is written in court documents, and the rhetoric employed, of course, often depended on the identity of the speaker, where the testimony was taken, and who was within earshot. Sex as reproduction emerges as the primary issue in the testimony of husbands, while social order was generally the primary concern of court functionaries. Elsewhere, speakers use the magical or magnetic powers of the female genitalia to win a case. But, whatever argument became central to a particular case, all arguments treated women's sex as a potent force in society that men had to contain and control.

The cases of female impotence in this study come from northern Spain; beginning at the bite of the Bay of Bizcay east of Bilbao, the diocese continues far inland covering the Ebro river valley. Gustav Henningsen made this area famous in his acclaimed study of the Inquisition's trials of Basque witches, The Witches' Advocate.¹⁶ However, it must be emphasized that these marital disputes were fought in an ordinary church court and not Henningsen's extraordinary tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition. Spaniards were served by a convoluted system of courts in the early modern period that consisted of overlapping, and often blurred, jurisdictions. Although there were dozens of special jurisdictions, such as those of the military orders, most Spaniards were served by three main court systems: the system of royal and municipal courts, the Inquisition, and the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. First there were the royal courts with the municipal courts as their lowest level and the king at their highest. In this secular judicial system, the Crown's two highest courts of appeal resided in Valladolid for the northern half of its dominions, and Granada for the southern half. The royal jurisdiction included most criminal cases and civil disputes. Second, the Inquisition had a system of regional courts, headed by the Supreme Council of the Inquisition in Madrid. While its nominal head as a Catholic tribunal was still the Pope, the Spanish Inquisition was actually controlled by the king. Its main concern, of course, was heresy. The definition of heresy, however, had widened over the decades since the Spanish Inquisition's creation in 1478 and included many crimes, from simple fornication to smuggling horses across the French border to aid the Huguenots. The effectiveness and operations of the Inquisition were actually much more sporadic than its infamous reputation would suggest.¹⁷ Ordinary church courts perhaps better represent how religious justice interacted with Spaniards on a daily basis.

It was this third and extensive system of church courts that handled female impotence cases. Church courts were organized by diocese and judged cases involving anyone from the clerical estate, all church offices and property, and most issues concerning the sacraments (i.e., marriage). Church courts in Spain functioned much as they did in other parts of Catholic Europe. Appeals from the bishop's court were first made to the Metropolitan See, then the papal nuncio in Madrid, and then, theoretically, the Papal Rota in Rome.¹⁸ The "impotent" women of this study were all litigants in the ordinary church court of the Diocese of Calahorra. None of their cases were appealed to its Metropolitan See in Burgos.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Diocese of Calahorra included all of what are today the Spanish provinces of La Rioja, Álava, and Vizcaya. It also held jurisdiction over parts of western Burgos, eastern Guipúzcoa and Navarra, and Northern Soria (see map). In the early modern period the diocese was culturally divided. The Basque culture and peoples predominated in the half of the diocese north of the Ebro River, while the Castilian language and culture dominated the area south of the Ebro. The three administrative centers, however, were in Old Castile. As the documents of these trials show, the majority of litigation took place in Logroño; although not the seat of the diocese, it was its largest city and was centrally located on the Ebro River.

There were no truly large cities in the diocese; important urban centers in the diocese included the port of Bilbao, the inland provincial capital of Logroño, Vitoria, and Nájera. For the three seats of the bishopric one historian has estimated the population of Logroño to have been no more than 7,000 at the end of the seventeenth century. The total of Calahorra's residents hovered around 3,600, and Santo Domingo de La Calzada boasted of no more than 3,000 citizens.¹⁹ However, the majority of the diocese's population lived in the thousand small towns scattered throughout mountain valleys.²⁰ Very small villages and single homesteads characterized the mountainous Basque-speaking areas of the north of the diocese. Eighty percent of the bishopric's citizens, 200,000 people, lived in the largely Basque area north of the Ebro.²¹ Only 50,000, or a fifth of the people in this study, lived south of the Ebro in Old Castile. Yet these Castilian subjects of the diocese appeared before its court much more frequently than those living in Álava or the Basque Provinces to the north. The greater litigiousness in the Castilian area of the diocese might hint that the bishop's court appealed to, and served, Castilians better than it did the Basques.²² After all, all three centers of the bishopric's administration were south of the Ebro. But whatever the court's relationship to the Basques, six of the eight women charged with impotence came from rural villages in what is today the province of La Rioja, and only two women came from the Basque area north of the Ebro River (see map).

Figure 1. Female impotency cases in the Diocese of Calahorra and La Calzada, 1673–1735.

Impotence trials resulted from canon law, which had not considered a marriage legitimate unless it had been sexually consummated since Gratian's Decretum became the norm in the high medieval period.²³ Eight wives defended themselves against charges of impotence before the bishop's court of Calahorra between 1650 and 1750 (see map). These eight women joined eighty men accused by their spouses of impotence in order to win annulments, de facto divorces, from the church court. Annulments based on impotence, when they were used as pretexts for divorce, were rarely mutual attempts by both spouses to dissolve their marriages. Instead, the allegedly impotent person used desperate measures to convince the court and public that he or she was sexually potent. The prosecuting spouse sought to expose her husband or his wife as a sexual fraud. Ultimately, these accusations turned to medical experts to give their opinions.²⁴ Medical examinations that purported to prove whether an individual was impotent or not then became the focus of court rhetoric. Much was at stake.

A women accused of impotence had as much to lose, if not more, than a man charged with impotence; the loss of married status meant she would lose her marital property (house, goods acquired during marriage—though not her dowry) as well as her ability to participate fully as a respected member in her community.²⁵ She would forfeit having a family and household of her own. In the Basque country a woman's standing, and thus marital status, could be crucial because a Basque woman could become head of the household estate, the Basque baserri, over her brothers.²⁶ Perhaps most important, annulment could mean a decline in a woman's standard of living. She would not have a husband to support her and, after the court deemed her impotent, she was forbidden to remarry. Because impotence would bar her from marrying again, if the allegedly impotent woman did not have a family, brother, or father to support her, she could be reduced to a life far below the station she had expected.

A clear difference in the rhetoric of male and female potency in these cases was the expression of active and passive sexual roles for men and women, penetrator and penetrated. How could the penetrated woman be sexually potent since she obviously played a passive role during sex? As in cases of male impotence, the Catholic Church considered the impotence of a woman as a physical abnormality that rendered her unable to have sex and therefore unmarriageable.²⁷ She had to be able to share in the act of sexual intercourse to make a marriage legitimate. Female participation in intercourse consisted of those actions corresponding to, not duplicating, the legal requirements of male potency: erection, penetration, and emission. A woman's sexual potency, therefore, did not simply consist of the passive role during intercourse uniformly prescribed by Church theologians. Rather, female potency was her capacity to receive and house the husband's verum semen. An obstructed, or absent, uterus, for instance, would also cause female impotence. Just as penetration was only the first of three requirements for male potency, being penetrated was only the most obvious aspect of female potency. Male impotence was a failure of the penis to erect, penetrate the vagina, and ejaculate the verum semen required by ecclesiastical definitions of sexual virility.²⁸ Female impotence was an inability to be penetrated and accept the man's semen into the uterus. Because of this definition, hysterectomies in the nineteenth century produced thousands of "impotent" women, subsequently causing a reevaluation of Church doctrine on the subject.²⁹

Female impotence first appeared formally in Church legislation in the elaboration of canon law by the Catalan Raimundo de Peynafort during the papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216) in the early thirteenth century.³⁰ According to Gratian's Decretals, "De Frigidis," female impotence could be caused by an extreme narrowness of the vagina, a membrane that closed the vagina, or a tumor that covered the uterus.³¹ Clearly, as in cases of castration, instances of female impotence tread the line of sterility. And yet, sterility was not an impediment to marriage and could not justify annulment.³² Canonists had early on decided, for instance, that elderly men and women past menopause could marry, even though they were groups assumed to be sterile.³³

The eight female impotence cases of the Diocese of Calahorra were not culturally, jurisdictionally, or geographically unique and are likely representative of female impotence trials in other parts of the Catholic world. Since the twelfth century, canon law permitted annulments specifically for female impotence, demonstrating that some women were charged with impotence at least since the high middle ages. The existence of papal legislation dealing with impotent and castrated women demonstrates that the condition was not simply a Spanish phenomenon. One of the more famous attributions of possible female impotence, in fact, is a French case: the wife of Natalie Z. Davis's Martin Guerre, Bertrande de Rols, was suspected of being impotent.³⁴ Impotence was an indictment used primarily against husbands, which explains why Martin Guerre himself was also accused with impotence. Male impotence trials abound in the church courts of early modern Europe. Though perhaps an exaggeration, Pierre Darmon even claims that there was an epidemic of impotence cases in courts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. "Impotent" women were a small, but consistent, fraction of this epidemic; Darmon calculated that female impotence cases constituted 5 percent of all impotence charges.³⁵ His estimation is confirmed in the Diocese of Calahorra where more than 8 percent of all impotence accusations in the court were against women. In the Diocese of Pamplona—just northeast of the Diocese of Calahorra—María del Juncal Campo Guinea discovered twenty-two impotence trials between 1584 and 1694. Of this small number one involved an impotent woman, suggesting that roughly 5 percent of such charges were filed against women.³⁶ Most studies of local church courts in Spain for the period have uncovered impotence trials.³⁷ Other historians have documented impotence trials in many areas of Europe, and it is likely that a small percentage of these included impotent women. Impotence trials figure prominently in Joanne Ferraro's study of marital cases before Venice's ecclesiastical court.³⁸ In his study of the Diocese of Constance, Thomas Max Safley counted 133 impotence trial cases between 1551 and 1620.³⁹ These last two studies do not mention cases of female impotence, but they do demonstrate the prevalence, in general, of the impotence allegation in courts throughout Europe. On females, Monique Cuilleron discovered three allegedly impotent women accused before the metropolitan ecclesiastical tribunal in Paris between 1726–1789, making up 9 percent of all impotence cases.⁴⁰ Add to these studies the hundreds of witches charged by the Inquisition and other tribunals with causing impotence, and it becomes clear that impotence, male and female, caused real and widespread anxiety in European society.⁴¹ After the end of the Old Regime women continued to be subject to such trials. The canonical debate surrounding female impotence intensified in the modern age with the advent of new surgical techniques like hysterectomy and ovariectomy.⁴²

The legal process of female impotence trials treated women much like men in cases of impotence due to the prevalence of male impotence in both the theory and practice of annulment cases. In the Diocese of Calahorra Spanish husbands and their lawyers applied laws and legal procedures that were more often used against men to prosecute impotent wives. In order to cast doubt on a woman's sexual capacity, for instance, the prosecution demanded a wife demonstrate her sexual ability vis-à-vis male potency. Like men, medical experts stripped women, undoubtedly causing some degree of humiliation. Whereas surgeons often had to arouse men to determine the potency, to establish female potency, midwives and/or surgeons probed vaginal cavities to assess their capacities. Women were forced to prove themselves capable of having sex and therefore worthy of participation in the marriage sacrament and contract.

Three types of circumstances brought ostensibly impotent women before the church court (see Table 1). First, a husband could seek an end to a marriage by initiating an annulment from his wife using the charge of impotence. This occurred in three cases. A second, and more common, circumstance was when a woman accused her husband with impotence and he countered by accusing her of the same. Third, in one case a community imputed that a woman hoping to marry was castrated—something discussed in depth below—and she had to apply to the church court for a marriage license.

In all female impotence cases, women faced many of the problems that allegedly impotent men encountered. The public interest, gossip, and personal humiliation that resulted from such litigation was as devastating for accused women as for men. Like men, the future of these women was usually left to the findings of prying medical experts. They were compelled to visit a doctor, surgeon, and often a midwife within six days from the day the formal accusation was made against them. These medical examinations themselves must have been shameful experiences. Whereas allegedly impotent men had to demonstrate an erection and perhaps even ejaculate in the presence of witnesses, women thought to be impotent had to submit to physical prodding, and if possible, vaginal penetration by fingers, candles, and other instruments. Furthermore, the court often ordered second and third opinions by several other medical experts, which meant that individuals underwent several genital examinations. As in male impotence trials, despite all these tests, the opinions of doctors, surgeons, and midwives were usually quite unreliable. As demonstrated below, the diagnoses of female impotence were often wrong.

Table 1 Cases of female impotence, 1676–1735

Year of initial plea	Cause	Place	Decision	Age M	Age F	Profession	Defendant	Plaintiff

1676	annulment (countercharge is impotence)	Santa Cruz de Campezo	cohabit for three years	?	?	?	husband	father of wife
1681	annulment (countercharge is impotence)	Castillo	annulled	?	?	porter of goods	husband	wife
1687	annulment (countercharge is impotence)	San Roman de Cameros	annulled	29	22	?	husband	wife
1691	annulment/separation	Calahorra	cohabit	?	?	?	wife	husband
1697	annulment	El Rasillo	annulled	?	16	?	wife	husband
1704	enforce cohabitation/annulment	Prejano	separate	25	?	claims poverty/day-laborer	wife	husband
1711	marriage license denied to "female castrate"	Gardelegui	license given	?	24	?	married couple	court ex officio
1716	annulment (countercharge is impotence)	Munilla	annulled	28	?	?	husband	wife
1735	annulment (countercharge is impotence)	Arnedo	annulled	26	26	cowherd	husband	wife

The application of artful persuasion is decisive in almost every courtroom. But compelling legal rhetoric was especially crucial in these cases because, like male impotence, female impotence was difficult to prove. So much doubt swirled around spouses' claims and doctors' opinions that ecclesiastical lawyers had many opportunities to move the court's opinion. Petitions to the ecclesiastical judge often attempted to reassign the blame over who failed to effect sexual consummation from husband to wife and wife to husband. Lawyers regularly attacked the competency of medical experts and the motivations of the litigating spouses. They also employed whatever rhetoric of female sexuality—that women were sexual like men, or alternately, unlike men—that could help them achieve their practical goal in the courtroom.

The easiest solution for court officials when they were confronted with the rare cases of female sexual inability was to employ the legal rubric that they used to deal with male sexual incapacity; lawyers accustomed to the legal formulae for annulments for impotent men simply replaced "he" with "she" in the petitions. The initial charge against Josepha Diaz de Durana in 1681, for example, stated that she "has not been able to consummate the marriage because she suffers from visible, physical impotence...."⁴³ More important, Josepha here is accused as an active sexual participant, not simply an inadequate passive sexual vessel: she "has not been able to consummate ..." the union (italics added). Josepha allegedly suffered from the same "natural impotence" that afflicted male defendant Antonio Francisco de Ydiaquez in 1678.⁴⁴ That lawyers reversed the gender of legal vocabulary is probable considering that these same lawyers had already prosecuted many husbands for impotence. The attorney Thomas Pérez de Baños, for instance, worked to prove husbands were impotent in 1687, 1693, 1694, 1694, and 1696 before charging Magdalena Fernandez with impotence in 1697. Given that canon law, which made little distinction between men and women in respect to sexual incapacity in marriage, allowed an annulment for a couple regardless of who was to blame, a lawyer had little reason to take the time to create a separate female language for impotence. Therefore pleas to the court described women as impotent and potent, just as men were.

Women could even be castrated like men. There were precedents in canon law and European folklore for the female "castrate." Canon law referred to the mulier eunuchissa, the woman eunuch, to mean a women who was or had been made sterile.⁴⁵ Legal theorists consequently encountered problems with Pope Sixtus V's proclamation Cum Frequenter of 1587 that prohibited eunuchs from marrying.⁴⁶ Did this mean sterile women, female "eunuchs," were also prohibited from marrying? Though it took several centuries to answer this question definitively, in practice sterility did not bar any person from matrimony. Because non-procreative sex served matrimony's second purpose, satisfying and containing lust, only impotentia coeundi, sexual impotence, rather than impotentia generandi, sterility, was an impediment to marriage.⁴⁷

The "castrated" woman can also be found in European misogynist folklore explored by Louise Vasvári in which "taming" a wife was sometimes likened to "castrating" her.⁴⁸ One version of the female castration tale is told in the French De la dame que fur escouille. This account depicts the "castration" of a domineering mother-in-law. After getting hold of a pair of bull testicles, a new son-in-law forces his mother-in-law onto a table, makes incisions in her abdomen, and, through surgical slight of hand, removes the testicles. The mother-in-law, thinking she has been castrated, thus readily accepts her son-in-law's authority. Such terminology that imparted "balls" to women reveals the constant misogynist anxiety about women who dominated, or might dominate, men. According to ethnographer Stanley Brandes, to this day in Spain an assertive, active, and successful woman is said to be cojonuda, or a "big-balled" woman.⁴⁹ Writing in 1556 Spanish anatomist Juan Valverde worried: "On my honor I would have preferred to leave out this chapter so that women would not become even more vain than they already are once they learn that they have testicles just like men."⁵⁰ In the early modern period men desired to "castrate" overbearing women so they could reestablish what they understood to be the natural patriarchal social order. The important characteristic, though, of these "ballsy" women was that, though their husbands may have been emasculated, as women they were anything but lacking.⁵¹ But all of this language applied to women—castration, "balls"—uses a male anatomical vocabulary that reveals the instability of gender boundaries during the Old Regime.

As mentioned above, equivocation regarding gender was not limited to the court's legal language. If we consider that many testimonies came from villagers and parish priests, it is clear that gender ambiguity was also a part of the language of sex outside the court. The single case of a "castrated" woman in the Diocese of Calahorra illuminates the inadequacy of gendered vocabulary in the early modern period especially well. In the parish church of the town of the Gardelegui, a village close to and ruled by the provincial capital of Vitoria, three banns announced the approaching marriage in the spring of 1711 of Thomas de Yabala to María Ana de Harana. Before the couple legally wed, however, the town priest discovered that María Ana "[was] impotent because the gelder had cured her on both sides [of her groin]...."⁵² Apparently, as an infant María Ana had undergone an operation to cure an illness. A hernia surgeon, usually referred to as a castrator or gelder, had operated on her groin. In boys, these hernia operations often involved the removal of one or both testicles as part of the closing, by sutures or cauterization, of the inguinal canal to prevent the intestines from descending through it.⁵³ In discussing these groin surgeries, ambiguous language in court documents show that Spaniards, like most early modern Europeans, primarily used a male sexual idiom to discuss female sexuality. Because they used male terminology, clerics, lawyers, and other people involved in these cases often conflated several sexual distinctions that might be made in our own age between women and men. The community of Gardelegui imagined that María Ana was, in fact, a castrated woman. The priest who brought the couple to court, and undoubtedly others of the parish community, suspected that María was sterile rather than impotent, impotentia generandi rather than impotentia coeundi. The confusion between sterility and impotence was one of many errors in terminology that litigants made in this case. The case first reached the court when María Ana's fiancé, Thomas, sought permission from the bishop's court for María Ana to marry. In the development of canon law, after centuries of theological debate, the Catholic Church had resolved that the sterile—as the parish of Gardelegui supposed María Ana was—were permitted to marry.⁵⁴ However, the ecclesiastical court in Logroño, rather than granting María Ana license to marry as canon law dictated, chose to recognize the concerns of the community by beginning an investigation regarding whether she was or was not castrated.

Fortunately for Thomas and María Ana, her surgeon, Martín de Burgos, was still alive to set things straight. The rather prolific castration surgeon had operated on María Ana as well as on many boys who, years later, came before the church court asking for marriage licenses. On March 29, 1711, the vicar and ecclesiastical judge of the town of Arnedillo took Martín de Burgos's testimony about the operation that he had performed on María Ana decades earlier. Martín explained that roughly twenty-three years earlier he had "cured and castrated" ("curo y castro") María Ana of two intestinal hernias. She was only about seven months old at the time. According to Martín the "castrations" he performed on girls had nothing to do with actual sexual castration: "the said cure does not prevent the use of marriage nor ability to procreate in [María Ana] nor in other women castrated on both sides, because in females the testicles are not castrated...."⁵⁵ Immediately after receiving Martín's testimony, the church court gave María Ana permission to marry Thomas.

Martín, and everyone else involved, used many ambiguous terms. For example, the misapplication of the word "to castrate" ("castrar") by Martín de Burgos was, in large part, the reason María Ana had to appeal to the court in the first place. The surgeon applied "castrate" to any cutting or tying of intestinal ligaments in an operation rather than the sexual neutering that most people understood the word to mean. María Ana suffered from popular and medical concepts that confused any "ectomy" with castration and female sexual anatomy with male genitalia. Equating female with male genitalia did not occur because of any inherent ignorance of rural Spaniards; instead, such imprecision had a long tradition in European medicine that stemmed, in part, from Aristotle's opinion that women were, ultimately, imperfectly formed men.⁵⁶ The seventeenth-century surgeon Paulo Zacchia, whom many Northern Spanish doctors cited in their medical reports to the court, also used male vocabulary when describing female sexual anatomy.⁵⁷ Even in Martín's informed and professional testimony, he referred to María Ana's organs by male terms, calling ovaries "testicles."

Several other ambiguous terms confused people in this case. Impotente, potrero, and castrar, castrada were all thought by different people to mean different things. The most persistent confusion surrounded castration. As we have seen, Martín's use of the term "to castrate" could include any operation that apparently manipulated ligaments in the groin, regardless of dictionary definitions that defined castration exclusively as sexual emasculation. Most people assumed that nearly every operation performed on a child's groin resulted in castration. Witnesses often called the hernia surgeons who performed these cures "gelders." Thus it is not surprising that, because Martín had operated on María Ana's groin, her neighbors and family thought that he "castrated" her in the same way that surgeons "gelded" many boys suffering from hernias.⁵⁸ And, following this assumption, if she was "castrated" she must be impotent just as castrated boys were, allegedly, impotent. This confusion in the use of the term "castration" led to many boys, who had not been completely castrated, being called "castrates."⁵⁹

Curiously, perhaps by confusing female with male sexual anatomy, the language of the court reflected a respect for an inherent potency of women's sex vis-à-vis men's sex. Vaginae, vulvae, and clitorides, after all, were not treated as the "other" in this language, but were understood by all concerned as lesser, inverted versions of the ideal: male genitalia. And it should be emphasized here that documents occasionally referred to women as sexually "potent" in the same sense as the word applied to men. In Arnedo in 1735, for example, after examining Juachina Cordon, doctor Adrián de Muro argued that "if it were possible to find a competent man with a member as narrow as the cervix or vagina of the said Juachina she would be potent...."⁶⁰ Here, doctor de Muro suggests that women are sexually "potent" when they are able to engage in the carnal act. Furthermore, men who were not impotent, rather than simply being called "potent" were often referred to as "viripotent," a term that combines the Latin word for man, vir, with power, potente. The use of this term suggests that early modern Spaniards also understood women to be what we could neologistically call "gynecpotent."

In the popular mind, part of a woman's sexual potency was her ability to bear children, and as we see in the court cases below, the rhetoric used in court undoubtedly responded to this common concern. There was a crucial connection between marital sex, reproduction, and the creation of a legitimate human future.⁶¹ This added a further dimension to female impotence cases, because, as in María Ana's case, jurists often began to examine fertility. In many of the female impotence cases, after beginning with the problem of impotence, the court and its lawyers tended to drift into questions of sterility. Although the court, from the standpoint of law, was supposed to focus on a woman's ability to have sex, medical and legal documents occasionally considered questions about a woman's capacity to become pregnant. Clearly, even though Catholic law did not allow marital annulment in cases of sterility, or prevent barren individuals from marrying, the ability to bear children was a priority when individuals and their families chose mates. These court cases show that church courts could serve community interests rather than simply applying dogmatic canon law to personal domestic situations.

Although female impotence was not sterility, generative capacity emerged several times as an issue in the case of Pedro Martínez against his wife, Magdalena Fernández de Valasco Sáenz. Theirs was one of three instances in which husbands initiated suits for annulment from women they charged with impotence. Of the three, Magdalena's case was perhaps the most tragic. In November of 1697, Pedro entered a plea for an annulment from his newlywed wife Magdalena. He claimed that she was impotent. Pedro's lawyer complained that Magdalena was "very narrow in her vulva to the effect that its penetration is impossible as well as [for] the reception of the material that serves for the preservation of the species...."⁶² To prove that the husband was not at fault, Pedro's lawyer made certain to include the fact that his client had fathered three children in a previous marriage. He also stated that Pedro had made every attempt to effect consummation. In one effort to enable his wife to have sex, Pedro claimed that he had allowed Magdalena to visit her family so her mother could attempt to remove the physical obstruction.

After agreeing to take up the case, the court ordered medical experts to examine Magdalena. The medical testimony taken in Logroño described Magdalena as very small in stature and about sixteen years old. She had not yet begun to menstruate. Furthermore, the doctor described her vulva as closed, and there was evidence that some instrument had been used to try to open it by force, allegedly leaving Magdalena mutilated and sterile. Magdalena claimed that her husband was responsible for the damage, but Pedro's petition placed any responsibility on his mother-in-law's attempts to open the vagina.

In response to Pedro's allegations, Magdalena's lawyer attacked the husband for attempting to have sex with a girl of "such a tender age...."⁶³ Indeed, it seems that Magadalena may have been even younger than the litigants declared. In a later medical examination doctor, surgeon, and midwife agreed that she did not appear to be more than twelve.⁶⁴ Magdalena's lawyer fought to defend her right to the marriage and her status as a wife. He argued that, given time, she would mature naturally and be able to bear children and offered as proof the similar circumstances of a woman in his own family.

Two separate teams of three medical experts each examined Magdalena over the four months that the case lasted. Both teams agreed that she suffered from some type of malformation of the vagina: "her parts [are] very closed because having inserted a finger into the orifice [the midwife] could not insert it very far inside and [the midwife] recognized that [Magdalena] had solid tissue and that it seemed to her, for that reason, that [Magdalena] had not had sex...."⁶⁵ With further probing by the midwife Magdalena began to bleed. The description of Magdalena's condition fits those that occur to women with an imperforate hymen. This abnormality causes blood to accumulate in the vaginal cavity and uterus and, if untreated, can lead to sterility.⁶⁶ The court was persuaded by the testimony of the medical experts and sided with Pedro's demand for an annulment. It proclaimed Magdalena impotent. The tribunal decreed the marriage annulled and also prohibited young Magdalena from ever contracting marriage again due to her physical impediment. Her husband was free to contract another marriage at his discretion.

In several aspects, the case fought between Pedro and Magdalena is typical of all impotence trials, both male and female. As with most impotence trials, Magdalena's case resembles a complaint over breach of contract. Magdalena could not live up to the sexual expectations of matrimony. Pedro was certainly an older, more financially established, if not wealthy husband. In an effort to protect the family's interests in the marriage—financial support for a daughter and perhaps the family—Magdalena's mother even operated on her daughter to remove the obstruction. Second, like nearly all defendants, Magdalena fought to remain married, submitting her own explanation and evidence for lack of consummation: she was young and would eventually be able to have sex. Third, even though medical witnesses for the prosecution and defense were often contradictory and confusing, judges generally relied on a preponderance of often doubtful medical evidence rather than make decisions based on other issues related to the marriage or the case, such as Magdalena's youth.

Regardless of canon law, however, which did not allow for annulments based on sterility, one of the rhetorical concerns that the prosecution expressed in this case was that Magdalena was useless for the propagation of the species. Again, court rhetoric conflated female potency with fertility. Her vagina "could [not] permit the introduction of the material that serves for reproduction."⁶⁷ After being mutilated by either her mother or husband, Magdalena's defect was probably no longer whether she could have sex or not but whether she could bear children. Therefore, the concern for the lack of sexual "potency" was specifically anxiety over reproductive capacity: she could not give Pedro any more children than he already had. The ability of an individual to reproduce was an issue in impotence cases, even though sterility was not an allowable cause for annulment under the law. The fact that sterility could not be directly considered was clear to the court and prosecutors; there were no annulment cases in which sterility was the central plea and very few mentioned it at all, but this did not prevent sterility from becoming a fundamental trial issue.

Female sexual potency in the cases considered here, however, was not simply a concept derived from the archetype of male sexual potency or the life-giving power of reproduction. In courtroom documents individuals used language that conveyed an appreciation for the unique powers and functions of women's genitalia. In the minds of theologians especially, sex, and the female genitalia in particular, though it polluted by its very nature, had an obvious and important role in the creation and maintenance of social harmony. Marital sex was integral to the preservation of social order; like their husbands, women were expected to be able to pay their half of the conjugal debt.⁶⁸ Sex in marriage prevented husbands and wives from seeking sexual satisfaction outside their marriages and/or with other married people, preventing further social disorder. "Impotent persons cannot yield due benevolence ...," explains contemporary Englishman William Gouge, implying that sexual intercourse was an expression of marital affection. Gouge goes on to assert that "though procreation of children be one end of marriage yet it is not the only end ...," because for him and many others in early modern Europe, sex in marriage existed to satiate sexual appetites that otherwise proved to be socially destructive.⁶⁹

Yet, how could an impotent woman possibly threaten social order and lead a community into sexual scandal? From the communal and ecclesiastical point of view, marital sex was important to social order because it contained lust to the marital bed. This was the reason for the "conjugal debt" that, according to canon law, at least since Gratian, spouses owed one another.⁷⁰ A constant threat to social harmony, according to this mentality, stemmed from a sexual appetite unrestrained or unfulfilled by matrimony. The threat of adultery, and the scandals that adulterous affairs invariably caused, were common backdrops to many impotence trials. The court assumed that a person married to an impotent individual would be particularly susceptible to the temptations of extramarital sex. These extramarital sexual affairs would, in turn, lead to a succession of social horrors: scandalous pregnancies, dishonored husbands, sexually tempted clerics, illegitimate children, disordered patrimonies, and violence. In impotence trials, the court usually feared the adulterous consequences of women married to impotent men. But impotent women also disrupted social order. Adulterous husbands, after all, might satisfy their carnal appetites in affairs with married women.

In the diocese of this study, the female sex was not only important to reproduction and the containment of lust. Women and their sexuality were often thought to be susceptible to unseen magical forces; this was partly because sex was thought to be women's weapon against mankind ever since Eve gave Adam forbidden fruit. Ethnographer Stanley Brandes provides us with a modern Spaniard's perspective on women and sex, which echoes the traditional misogynist belief that "... woman is of the Devil": "She was that way from the very beginning, and she has been trying to tempt and dominate man ever since."⁷¹ This quote repeats the typical early modern sentiment that women were closer and more susceptible to sex and magic than men. In the early modern period the power that genitalia held over the human mind was often expressed in terms of magic. For example, genitalia were the focus of magical spells and thus jealous third parties or anyone else could use incantations to make individuals potent or impotent.⁷² Witches allegedly used their own genitalia to commune with the devil by having sex with demons.⁷³ Early modern individuals clearly believed that supernatural powers physically resided in the sex organs, just as such power was within toads and other manifestations of the natural world.

Early modern conceptions of the female sex held that it contained unique natural and supernatural powers. Medical and ecclesiastical authorities viewed much of this sexual power as negative.⁷⁴ Women were traditionally described as dangerous and polluting, especially during menstruation.⁷⁵ In his study of advice manuals Rudolph Bell provides this warning from Innocent III: "It [menstrual blood] is said to be so detestable and impure, that, from contact therewith, fruits and grains are blighted, bushes dry up, grasses die, trees lose their fruits, and if dogs chance to eat of it they go mad."⁷⁶ Even more dangerous were women who no longer menstruated. Because they could no longer purge themselves of bad humors through menstruation, according to Pseudo-Albertus Magnus writing in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, post-menopausal women developed the power of the "evil eye." The power of the aged woman's "evil eye" was widely feared in Spain as it was in other parts of Europe, prompting two Castilian writers to dedicate whole books to the question: Diego Alvarez Chanca's Tractatus de fascinatione in 1499 and Antonio de Cartagena's Libellus de fascinatione in 1530.⁷⁷ Apart from the "evil eye," other products of the female genitalia—menses and pubic hair—were often used in casting magical spells to control men.⁷⁸

But women's sex could be affected by magic as much as it was a source of it. It is a commonplace to assume that a psychological phenomenon actually caused the cases of male impotence that early modern Spaniards attributed to evil spells. A curse on a man's potency would cause him to be extremely anxious, resulting in the impotence that he feared so much. According to this scheme, it would seem that female potency, because it did not depend, of course, on an erection, would be immune to evil curses. Yet at least one wife and her lawyer tried to convince the court that she had been made impotent by an evil spell.

In 1691, Antonia Garrido, a citizen of Calahorra, was accused by her husband of four years, Joseph de Arostegui, of being impotent. He demanded an annulment of their marriage. The husband's lawyer claimed that "my [client] has never been able to consummate the matrimony because [the wife's] vagina is narrow and she does not have her parts like other women...."⁷⁹ The court summarily sent Antonia to a medical examination by a team of experts who had been recommended by the husband and his legal counsel. The doctor, surgeon, and midwife all submitted statements to the court in which they agreed that Antonia had physically deformed genitalia. The medical team declared her absolutely impotent.

But Antonia fought her husband's attempt to escape their marriage and label her impotent. In response to the first medical determination (there were to be others), Antonia's lawyer, Thomas Perez de Baños, suggested that her vagina might have been bewitched, that she had been made impotent by an evil spell: "my [client] has fervent suspicions that in the doubtful case that [she] has some [type of] impotency, it is by evil spells and witchcraft...."⁸⁰ Perez argued that, because the impotence was caused by a curse, it was not permanent, and therefore could not justify an annulment. He reminded the court that the Catholic Church had spiritual remedies and exorcists to rescue and help people affected by such magic spells.⁸¹

That a woman's potency and genitalia could be cursed as easily as those of a man provides an insight into how early modern Spaniards conceived of impotence spells. Witchcraft was not simply an early modern explanation for what would later be described as psychological phenomena. According to witchcraft manuals, magic was also a power that physically transformed people and things. The Malleus Maleficarum described impotence spells as castrations by which men lost their penises or, more often, the offending witch or demon kept the stolen penises in a jar or a nest.⁸² Supposedly, such magic could physically transform people into animals or allow them to fly on broomsticks. Considering that early modern books described curses and spells as causing real physical transformations, then, we can understand how Antonia's lawyers could argue that malicious spells had deformed her vagina.⁸³ Women, therefore, could not only use and control magic with their genitalia, but magic could also affect women's sex. Eventually, Antonia was able to win a second vaginal examination by a medical team that she and her lawyer considered to be less biased: "... the said [surgeon] Francisco Velez inserted into the said parts of the said Antonia Garriado a stem of cabbage in a shape similar to a virile member ... and seeing that it entered with liberty...."⁸⁴ The medical team did not stop at a cabbage stalk, going on to insert a pessary and then a large wax phallus to test Antonia's sexual capacity. They determined that she was completely potent. Still seeking an annulment, however, her husband then claimed that he was impotent. The church court did not acquiesce to Joseph's machinations; they eventually ordered him to return to "a married life" with Antonia. We do not know if this judgment, however, actually resulted in Joseph accepting life with Antonia as his wife.

Antonia Garrido and her lawyer had appealed to the rhetoric of sexual magic. But even outside the spiritual and magical realms, early modern Spaniards believed that the vagina held hidden powers. Doctors ascribed to women's sexual organs great physical powers, such as a peculiar spermatic magnetism. The purported ability of a woman's uterus to draw a man's semen into itself without having sex is an important example of how even medical doctors, using quasi-scientific explanations, imparted extraordinary powers to the feminine sex. The idea that vaginas had this ability originated in the great traditional European medical authorities, most principally Averroes. One example is this description of the magnetic, and voracious, uterus from De Secretis Mulierum (On the Secrets of Women) attributed to the Pseudo-Albertus Magnus and published widely throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:

Averroes said ... [II Colliget] that a girl from his neighborhood once confided to him, swearing that she was telling the truth, that she had never been impregnated by any man, and nevertheless she was pregnant; and she asked him to help her. Averroes carefully examined the case to determine the cause, and he found that she had been bathing in tepid water in a bath and suddenly was impregnated by attracting male semen, for a man had ejaculated in this bath and the female member on its own power extracted as much semen from the bath as it could.⁸⁵

Later in the same work we also find a description of the uterus as a magnet: "... when the woman conceives, her womb attracts the male sperm with all its power, just like a lodestone attracts iron, ..."⁸⁶ The idea that vaginas had this hunger and ability to obtain the male seed was popular throughout Europe (more than seventy editions of De Secretis Mulierum appeared in Europe during the sixteenth century).⁸⁷ A Spanish manifestation of this concept appeared in the trial of Ana María Sáenz against her husband Juan Garcia in San Roman de Cameros in 1687. Their complicated drama would result in Ana María Sáenz pairing off with one Francisco Sáenz, while Juan Garcia married a second Ana Sáenz. This case demonstrates the currency of the notion of the "magnetic uterus," in addition to proving how the courts used casuist reasoning to make canon law better speak to convoluted domestic disputes.

Ana María and Juan had been married for eight years before suing for an annulment. They both claimed that during the entire span of their marriage they had never been able to have sex. Although Ana María had initiated the litigation by filing an impotence charge against her husband, the court took Juan's counter-accusation that his wife was the impotent partner as the more credible indictment. After examining them both and finding Juan to be entirely potent, medical experts unanimously agreed that Ana María was impotent, adding that any attempt to open her vagina surgically would pose a threat to her life. The court decreed the marriage annulled; it allowed Juan to remarry at his leisure. The judge found Ana María was absolutely impotent and for that reason he barred her from any future marriage. The case had taken less than two months from beginning to end and its conclusion would have been rather simple if it had not been followed by two pregnancies.

Not only was Ana María inexplicably pregnant six months after the court's verdict that had deemed her completely impotent, but her ex-husband, Juan, had successfully impregnated his new wife. When Ana María sought to marry Francisco Sáenz, the man whom she claimed had impregnated her, the ecclesiastical court was forced to review its previous decision. While Ana María had had nothing to show after eight years of marriage, and had allegedly never had sex with her husband, a few months as a single woman had resulted in her pregnancy. More perplexing for the court was the fact that her first husband had already proven his virility in his new marriage to Ana Sáenz. Apparently, he was not impotent either. The tribunal's most pressing question was how a medically certified impotent woman had become pregnant.

To answer this question and explain how they could have made such a mistaken diagnosis, doctor Gregorio Fernandez de Villemayor and surgeon Juan Baptista Martínez Garifo cited the magnetic powers of the uterus. They speculated that Ana María's vagina, which they believed was definitely too narrow to accept a penis, had magnetically attracted Francisco's semen "as is clear from many reports and incidents, women become pregnant without the penetration of the vagina, only by the actual magnetism of the uterus: ..."⁸⁸ Here doctor Fernández de Villemayor and surgeon Martínez Garifo used the theory of the magnetic powers of the uterus to maintain Ana María's impotence diagnosis while explain her pregnancy. It was important to defend the court's first decision, that Ana María was impotent, because if she was not impotent, then her first marriage was still valid. Ana María would have to return to Juan Garcia and he, in turn, would have to abandon his second, pregnant wife, and return to the first.

But despite the fantastic magnetic ability that these medical experts rhetorically attributed to Ana María's vagina in their declarations, her own explanation for her pregnancy was less extravagant. According to Ana María and Francisco Sáenz, one night he slinked into Ana María's house after dark overcome with a resolution to enjoy her sexually. After secretly watching Ana María undress he made himself and his intentions known to her. Ana María claimed that she acquiesced to his demands, but only after he swore to marry her (part of another rhetorical and legal formula, one of seduction).⁸⁹ After two nights of sexual attempts their determination resulted in successful, and then successive, copulation. Ana María found herself pregnant, and single, several months later. According to his lawyer Francisco Sáenz then approached the church court for permission to marry Ana María "to ... restore her honesty and reputation...."⁹⁰

The court's final solution was pragmatic and inventive, disproving stereotypes of canon law as inflexible and church courts as oppressive. Rather, the court used Jesuitical reasoning to appease the parties and find a verdict that suited the communal demands for social order and legitimacy. The ecclesiastical court reviewed its earlier ruling and found that Juan had been impotent, but only in respect to his first wife, Ana María. According to the medical team doctor Fernández de Villemayor and surgeon Martínez Garifo "Juan García, in respect to Francisco Sáenz, is not as potent because [he] has one testicle and has a virile member with a fatter head than the said Francisco Sáenz...."⁹¹ This curious medical opinion helped the tribunal justify the annulment of Ana María and Juan's marriage and their remarriages to two other people.⁹² After her encounter with Francisco Sáenz, Ana María was no longer impotent and, according to canon law, should have been returned to her first marriage with Juan García. An affirmation of the first marriage would not only have returned two individuals to an unhappy union, but would have resulted in the creation of two illegitimate children because the two women had become pregnant. Instead, the tribunal invoked the explanation of respective impotence, using it not only to annul the first marriage, but also to order that the pregnant Ana María Sáenz marry Francisco Sáenz, and Juan García marry the pregnant Ana Sáenz.

Considering the importance and many forms of vaginal potency in early modern Spain, then, the fact that women were charged with "female impotence" hardly seems surprising. In Spain, genitalia were thought to contain many real, not merely symbolic, sorts of power: material, social, and magical. Women were not devoid of a sex or simply the object of sexual desire as in mentalities more reminiscent of Victorian England; early modern texts spoke of female "parts" and "members," often in a male vocabulary, that were just as integral to sex and reproduction as penile potency.

The decisive factors of female sexual power were the elemental ability to reproduce and the capability to maintain the socio-sexual order. In early modern Europe the sex organs in and of themselves, of course, held the key to the creation of a legitimate human legacy. Without this generative aptitude, every other aspect of the replication of everyday life from decade to decade—familial, economic, political—would have failed. Impotence trials reveal widespread anxiety about the ability to have children. But this concern over human reproduction was not only an everyday worry for peasants, for whom it was, partly, a matter of economic survival; reproduction became a serious concern for state ministers in Spain and France bothered by the depopulation of their respective kingdoms.⁹³ Don Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, for instance, propounding solutions to Spain's problems, explained in 1631 that:

... the Roman censors used to formulate penalties, so that, sterility being reviled, they encouraged men toward matrimony, privileging as well the propagation and multiplying of children. Spain needs even more this attentiveness [to propagation] because of the expulsions that it has made of peoples, because of those that have been consumed in its sundry wars, and because of those who have left to populate the Indies and other kingdoms, ...⁹⁴

The central role of the sexual organs in the creation of the human future connected them to several types of unseen powers. As we have witnessed in these impotence trials, women's genitalia were the sources of invisible magical and magnetic forces; they offered people a next generation, the continuation of the family name, and, ultimately, the kind of immortality that even peasants could achieve.

Rather than simply repress and/or channel sexuality, as the Catholic Church recommended, the rhetoric used in female impotence trials reveals that people in small communities linked social harmony with the correct use—or exploitation—of female sexuality. Although it was rarely obtained, small European communities prized amity and harmony above all else in daily life. Court documents, for instance, constantly complained about the public "scandals" caused by sexual misconduct and marital strife. They tried to prevent the majority of sexual disorder by containing men's, rather than women's, lust to the marital bed: avoiding scandals like fornication, adultery, masturbation, male sodomy, and bestiality, as well as the social evils of illegitimate children. As these female impotence trials make clear, wives were expected to be sexually able. A wife's sexuality was important because it allowed her to fulfill the conjugal debt and maintain social order, containing her spouse's sexual lust. The early modern community's ideal of marriage, then, could not include wives who were impotent, or, more accurately, women who did not fulfill the sexual role prescribed by marriage.

Of course, part of the power of women's sex was that it could clearly provoke conflict as well. Misogynist clichés that linked women's sex to human destruction abounded: Helen was blamed for the deaths of thousands in the Trojan War; Delilah's sexual appetite consumed and destroyed Sampson; and Eve's obvious sexual dalliance in the Garden of Eden caused the "Fall of Man." Into the twentieth century rural men in Andalusia still believed that too much sex with one's wife progressively debilitated a husband; while, through the same act, a wife would gain vitality, sapping her husband's strength: "Well water and a naked woman/Lead men to the grave."⁹⁵ Monogamy, as a strategy for sexual regulation and social harmony, was often expressed as the solution to the female appetite. More than the need for men's lust to be satisfied in marriage, it was women's dangerous and destructive sexual covetousness that had to be gratified and controlled by marriage. When early modern writers described women as the lust driven gender, then, they hypocritically foisted on the female sex the sexual hunger with which they grappled themselves.⁹⁶

Drawing on many different rationales—medical, magical, and economic—rural women in early modern Spain derived a great deal of power from their sexuality. These were powers, however, that would be forgotten, lost, or taken away in the cities and towns of the nineteenth and the twentieth-century Western world. Female magical powers were eventually debunked, even among Europe's peasants. Midwives lost their monopoly to know and treat the female body to male medical experts.⁹⁷ As Thomas Laqueur has explained, male scientists discovered that the female orgasm was superfluous to reproduction. Consequently, female sexuality was robbed of an important aspect of its potency. Although now a cliché, the sexually inert, frigid Victorian woman became a clear bourgeois idealization of womanhood. Middle class women had lost their sexual powers, leading to their symbolic "castration" by Freud at the end of the century.⁹⁸ Two centuries before Freud, local church courts reflected the popular belief that women had considerable potency in their "parts": generative, magical, and social. They did not lack sexual organs in any sense; instead texts described women as having sexual "members." Because women had inherent—and sometimes unique—sexual powers, they could therefore lose them, be found impotent in court, and legally deserted by their husbands.

Edward Behrend-Martínez is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Appalachian State University. This article would not have been possible without a grant to do archival research in Calahorra (La Rioja), Spain in 2000 and 2001 from the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board and the Commission for Cultural, Educational, and Scientific Exchange between the Kingdom of Spain and the United States of America. Additional financial support was provided by a University Research Grant from Appalachian State University. The author thanks Renato Barahona and Merry Wiesner-Hanks for their encouragement as well as their advice on versions of this manuscript. He also thanks the four anonymous LHR referees who devoted a great deal of time offering crucial criticisms of an early draft of this article. David Reid and Mary Valante in the History Department of Appalachian State University also provided invaluable suggestions for the improvement of this work. All translations from Spanish to English are the author's own unless noted otherwise.

Notes

^* The epigraph is taken from the medical testimony of doctor Juan Muñoz, Archivo Catedralicio y Diocesano de Calahorra (hereafter abbreviated as ACDC), Legajo 27/222/2, fs. 26–33: "Inpotencia ... se puede hauer de parte de la muger por raçon de la clausura la qual se suele hacer en tres lugares: es a saber la una en el osculo interna del utero, la otra en la ceruiz del utero, la otra en el osculo anterior que dice vulva."

^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 Richard L. Kagan, Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 126. 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 Francisco Javier Lorenzo Pinar, "La mujer y el Tribunal Diocesano en Zamora durante el siglo XVI: divorcios y nulidades matrimoniales," Studia Zamorensia 3 (1996): 77–88, 81.

^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), 32.

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

^5. Joanne M. Ferraro, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 26.

^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 ò 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), 230.

^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 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990).

^10. Ibid., 64. On the commonly held belief that women's "seed," and therefore the female orgasm, was required for conception, see Joseph Bajada, Sexual Impotence: The Contribution of Paolo Zacchia, 1584–1659 (Rome: Editrice Pontifica Università Gregoriana, 1988), 52–53, and Rudolph M. Bell, How to Do It: Guides to Good Living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 25–26, 34. 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, 60–61.

^11. On Galenic and Aristotelean views of the female sex, see Laqueur, Making Sex, 26–32.

^12. Nicolas Abercrombie and Bryan Turner, "The Dominant Ideology Thesis," British Journal of Sociology 29, no. 2 (June 1978): 149–70, 153.

^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 James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 551–75. 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 Henry Kamen, The Phoenix and the Flame: Catalonia and the Counter Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), Allyson M. Poska, Regulating the People: The Catholic Reformation in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Cultures, Beliefs, and Traditions (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 1998).

^14. "Such eclecticism and self-contradiction are just part and parcel of the advice manual...." Bell, How to Do It, 69.

^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 Joan Cadden, "Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy," Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996), 59. For a description of the Galenic humors and the female life cycle, see Silviana Seidel Menchi, "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. Anne Shutte et al. (Kirksville, Mo: Truman State University, 2001), 43.

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

^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." Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: An Historical Revision (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997), 315. 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 Antonio Bombín Pérez, La Inquisición en el país vasco: el tribunal de Logroño 1570–1610 (Bilbao: Servicio Editorial, Universidad del País Vasco, 1997).

^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 Richard Kagan's Lawsuits and Litigants in Castile, 1500–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981).

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

^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. Pascual Madoz, Diccionario Geográfico-Estadístico-Histórico de España y sus Posesiones de Ultramar (Madrid: Est. Literario-Tipográfico P. Mudoz, 1846), 5:241–42.

^21. Sáinz Ripa, Sedes Episcopales, 22.

^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 Fernando J. Bouza Alvarez, Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 12.

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

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

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

^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 Juan Javier Pescador, The New World Inside a Basque Village: The Oiartzun Valley and Its Atlantic Emigrants, 1550–1800 (Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2004), xxii, and also Roslyn M. Frank, Nancy Laxalt, and Nancy Vosburg, "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): 22–31. On matriarchy in the Basque country, see Andrés Ortiz-Osés and Franz-Karl Mayr, El matriarcalismo vasco (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 1998).

^27. Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade: Masculinity, Paternity, and Castration in the Italian Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 270. See also John McCarthy, "The Marriage Capacity of the 'mulier excisa,'" Ephemerides Iuris Canonici 2, no. 2 (1947): 261–85.

^28. Bajada, Paolo Zacchia, 87.

^29. See McCarthy, "The Marriage Capacity of the 'mulier excisa.'"

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

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

^35. Darmon, Impotence, 36.

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

^37. See, for instance, studies on the Diocese of Zamora and the Diocese of Barcelona, Francisco Javier Lorenzo Pinar, "La mujer y el Tribunal Diocesano en Zamora durante el siglo XVI: divorcios y nulidades matrimonials," Studia Zamorensia 3 (1996): 77–88 and A. Gil Ambrona "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).

^38. Ferraro, Marriage Wars.

^39. Thomas Max Safley, "Marital Litigation in the Diocese of Constance, 1551–1620," Sixteenth Century Journal 12 (1981): 61–77, 72.

^40. Monique Cuillieron, "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, 530.

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

^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,'" 265.

^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,'" 266.

^46. Bajada, Paolo Zacchia, 15.

^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, 37.

^48. Louise Vasvári, "Intimate Violence: Shrew Taming as Wedding Ritual in the Conde Lucanor," Marriage and Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, ed. Eukene Lacarra Lanz (New York: Routledge, 2002).

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

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

^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. Michael R. McVaugh, "Treatment of Hernia in the Later Middle Ages: Surgical Correction and Social Construction," Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease, ed. Roger French et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).

^54. Bajada, Paolo Zacchia, 77.

^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, 28–29.

^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 Edward Behrend-Martínez, "Manhood and the Neutered Body in Early Modern Spain," Journal of Social History 38 (Summer 2005): 1073–93.

^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 Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 13–15.

^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, f. 1.

^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 Gonzalo de Alba, "Libro sinodal," Salamanca, April 6, 1410, Synodicon Hispanum, ed. Antonio García y García (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1987), 4:275. 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," 43.

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

^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 Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (New York: Routledge, 2000), 31–32.

^69. Quoted in N. H. Keeble, ed., The Cultural Identity of Seventeenth-Century Woman: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1994), 126. 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 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 146. See also Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 572.

^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. Gonzalo de Alba, "Libro sinodal," Salamanca, April 6, 1410, Synodicon Hispanum, ed. Antonio García y García (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1987), 4:278–79. 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 Jesuit Tomás Sánchez in his De Sancto Matrimonii Sacramento Disputationum of 1621. 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, 37.

^71. As translated by Brandes in Brandes, Metaphors of Masculinity, 76.

^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 Arturo Morgado García, Demonios, magos y brujas en la España moderna (Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz, 1999), 99–103. 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, 28–34. María Helena Sánchez Ortega asserts that love-magic was well known to many ordinary Europeans in the early modern period. See María Helena Sánchez Ortega, "Women as a Source of 'Evil' in Counter-Reformation Spain," Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 199. 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. Campo Guinea, Comportamientos, 244. See also Thomas Kranmer's influential and infamous Malleus Maleficarum (1486; New York: Dover Publications, 1971).

^73. See, for instance, "Concerning Witches who Copulate with Devils," in Kranmer, Malleus Maleficarum, 41. See also Bell, How to Do It, 52–53.

^74. Sánchez Ortega, "Women as a Source of 'Evil.'"

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

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

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

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

^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.

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

^86. Ibid. 121.

^87. Helen Rodnite Lemay, "Introduction," Magnus, Women's Secrets, 1. 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, 37.

^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, 41–59. For a wider discussion of seduction and abduction in Europe, see Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 530–33.

^90. "para ... restaurar su onesta y fama...." ACDC, Legajo 27/650/4, f. 17.

^91. "Ju^o Garcia respecto de Franco Saenz no es tan viripotente por quanto el dho Ju^o Garcia es castrado de un lado y tiene el miembro viril mas grueso de punta que el dho Fran^co 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, 50.

^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 David Sven Reher, Town and Country in Pre-Industrial Spain: Cuenca, 1550–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18, n. 5.

^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, ..." Don Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, 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), 25:426.

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

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

^97. Ornella Moscucci, "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), 43–74.

^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 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, ed., Freud on Women: A Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), and, for a more contentious refutation of Freud's views, see Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).

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