Abhandlung von Erzeugung der Menschen.

Venette, Nicolai

Publication Date: 1738

About this Item

Reprint 1979. - Königsberg und Leipzig, Verglegts Christoph Goffried Eckart, 1738, 8°, (36), 546 pp., Portrait des Verfassers, 8 Tafeln, orig. Leinenband. Famous baroque authority on sex! "The medieval inheritance of early modern medicine in no way denied the woman's sexual desire or pleasure, but the supposed analogous quality of her sex organs and her colder humors created an unacknowledged linkage between men and sexual activity. We see this linkage at work even in the writing of the famous baroque authority on sex, Dr. Nicolas Venette (1602-1698), Chirurg, Professor u. Dekan am Collegii zu Rochelle), whose awareness and indeed awe of female sexual capacity was both beyond questions and emblematic of medieval and early modern opinion. Venette's immense, learned and but also sprightly volume of generation (1696) spread throughout Europe in translation, retranslation, and pirated copy. It appeared in German in 1711 and remained the most popular compendium of sexual knowledge of the entire century. Venette provided detailed information on sexual physiology, but more important from our perspective, on sexual desire and pleasure. Although he acknowledged woman's greater sexual capacity, he could not believe that woman experienced greater desire or pleasure than men. He ended his long discussions of this subject with a qualitative assertion: "Because mature made our (men's) lust (Wollust) of shorter duration, nature also ordained that it be greater, and since women's enjoyment is less, nature made it longer." The peril in such argumentation was that men's putatively stronger sexual pleasure/ desire might harm their elevated image relative to woman by connecting them with negative association of sex as animalistic rather than rational-human. Venette closed off this possibility with an old piece of sophistry that found new life on the eighteenth century. Although men were indeed hotter than woman and went about their sexual business with more energy, still, "because the man has a much stronger mind (Geist) than woman has, he is not subject to haste and disorderly (sexual) impulse. It appears that his passion is somewhat moderated by reason, whereas the desire (Neigung) of a woman is without order and moderation". ." Isabel v. Hull, Sexuality, state and civil society in Germany, 1700-1815, pp.246-247. Seller Inventory # 44078

Bibliographic Details

Title: Abhandlung von Erzeugung der Menschen.

Publication Date: 1738

Binding: Hardcover