Gabriel Jeroschewitz, October 14th, 2025, inspired by The Distant Mirror. Dedicated to Barbara Tushman Abridged
The Illustrated Tudor Dictionary Brings You… Sex!
A comic tragedy observed and annotated by one unwilling scholar of humanity’s friskier follies.
It is a truth universally whispered, if never loudly proclaimed, that the Renaissance was a time of tremendous faith in God and the human body—though not always in that order. As the chronicler of The Illustrated Tudor Dictionary, I had thought my remit limited to words like codpiece, rosary, and flagon. Alas! The public, with its bottomless appetite for scandal and explanation, demanded an entry on that most awkward of topics: sex.
Thus it fell upon me—Thomas Blague, reluctant lexicographer—to observe, investigate, and document the ways of love, lust, and lamentable consequence in the waning years of the fifteenth century. I take no delight in the work, though I admit it produced abundant material: laughter and pustule.
It is remarkable, dear reader, that the Church, while ever warning against fleshly indulgence, also encouraged it—within reason—so that more Christian souls might be born to replace those lost to plague, war, and kitchen accidents. Priests preached that no “seed” should be wasted—a curious doctrine, considering the number of monks who spilled it often in prayerful solitude.
Officially, couples might couple on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays—provided it was dark, they were married, clothed, sober, and not attempting it near a reliquary or the family goat. By these rules, I estimate that few managed to sin at all, though the courtesans of Florence reported no shortage of clients.
It was understood, naturally, that men must arrive at matrimony already experienced—for the good of their wives, you see. On the other hand, women were to remain untouched until the wedding night, the double standard being one of Europe’s most zealously preserved traditions.
The Church disapproved of contraception, which ensured everyone tried it. Some methods were more comedic than adequate. A woman might tie the testicles of a castrated weasel between her breasts—presumably to frighten off conception through sheer absurdity. Others inserted softened beeswax to block unwanted entry, or used the so-called Venus Glove: a sheath made of lambskin, tied with a ribbon, as though modesty could be gift-wrapped.
The most dependable method, by all accounts, remained withdrawal. Yet given the average male’s enthusiasm and the dim candlelight, success was doubtful. I was told by one apothecary that most couples relied on confession after the fact, which, while not medically effective, provided psychological relief.
Of Hair, Hygiene, and Horrors
A lady of means took care with her “gardens of fertility,” as the poets called them. Too little hair implies illness, and too much invites lice. Therefore, a delicate balance existed between health, holiness, and discomfort. At least, one could gauge a woman’s recent medical history from her grooming, though it was ill-mannered to comment.
The courtesans of Rome prided themselves on scented oils. At the same time, those in Naples shaved entirely, partly to display cleanliness, to distract from the sores that suddenly began to bloom across Europe like a new form of divine punishment.
The true trouble began in the year of Our Lord 1495, when the French army occupied Naples. The restless and curious soldiers sampled local entertainments before marching north and carried a most virulent affliction.
At first, the Italians named it the French disease. The French, not to be outdone in slander, called it the Neapolitan disease. The Spaniards insisted it came from Columbus’s sailors, fresh from the New World. And so, in a gesture of collective innocence, all of Europe blamed somebody else.
Within months, men who had boasted of their conquests now hid their faces beneath veils and ointments that stank of mercury. Physicians debated whether the disease was divine retribution or simply a fashionable innovation. Merchants sold “holy salves” that burned like hellfire. Prostitutes wept in the streets, their trade undone. And yet, despite it all, no man swore to abstinence for long.
Dear reader, I would like to introduce Mistress Cecily Hart, my London landlady, and her feckless son, Bartholomew. Cecily was pious and loud, prone to quoting scripture against every sin but gossip. Bartholomew was handsome in the way of men who never work—a complexion maintained by wine and good fortune.
When the French disease reached London, the city physicians were bewildered. Bartholomew, who had spent a suspicious year in Bristol among sailors, returned home lamenting sores “of a most mysterious and continental nature.” His mother blamed Italian cooking; his confessor blamed fornication; and I, as his neighbour, blamed proximity.
The doctor prescribed mercury rubs. The smell filled the staircase. Believing her son cursed rather than contagious, Cecily hung crucifixes over the door. The local priest, meanwhile, whispered that it was all God’s punishment for the Renaissance itself—a time when curiosity had outpaced chastity.
To better record the social vocabulary of this new epidemic, I visited taverns, brothels, and apothecaries across the city. I learned that syphilis was called “the Spanish pox” by some, “the Neapolitan itch” by others, and “Cupid’s revenge” by the poets. The poor mocked it in ballads; the rich hired alchemists to cure it with gold dust and prayers.
One gentleman of my acquaintance claimed to have been infected merely by shaking a woman’s hand. “Stop doing that,” I advised, “and other things.” He replied that it was impossible, as women were “the only comfort God granted men after the invention of taxation.”
The Church, curiously, did not revoke its teaching that female pleasure aided conception. It simply added that, if pleasure resulted in affliction, the sufferer must be grateful for divine correction. Thus, even in agony, many believed themselves the special objects of heavenly notice.
By 1500, the disease had spread from soldiers to merchants, priests to painters. I attended the trial of a friar accused of infecting half his convent’s laundresses. He insisted it was the Devil’s work, perhaps actual in spirit if not in detail.
Physicians argued over cause and cure. Some said the illness came from eating too many new fruits from the Indies—pineapples, say, or tomatoes. Others maintained that it was a punishment for using lambskin rather than marriage beds. I recall one earnest doctor declaring that only prayer, mercury, and abstinence could help—though he confessed that he personally avoided the last.
And yet life went on. Men limped to the market; women prayed for healthy babies; and the poets produced verses so morbidly romantic that they could only have been written by the infected. It was, in its way, a golden age for gallows humour.
Twenty years later, I published The Illustrated Tudor Dictionary, including—after much persuasion from my publishers—the entry on sex. It read, in part:
“Sex: A necessary inconvenience by which the species persists and physicians prosper. Governed by the Church, ignored by the people, and complicated beyond all reason by love, vanity, and disease.”
At the time of writing, Europe was still reeling from war and infection. The disease had softened—no longer instantly fatal but lingering, chronic, cruel. People learned to live with it, as with all divine corrections. The courtesans returned to their trade, the priests to their sermons, and the young to their reckless optimism.
As for myself, I remained unmarried, though not for lack of opportunity. Having witnessed so much folly, I preferred solitude, dictionaries, and the company of my cat, who, being both celibate and immune, struck me as the perfect Christian.
Looking back, I confess a grudging admiration for my generation. We were ignorant, superstitious, and perpetually itchy—but never dull. We made our tragedies comedies, and our diseases metaphors. We wrote sonnets to sores, ballads to blisters, and prayers to patron saints of unmentionable afflictions. We believed, with touching sincerity, that every misfortune had meaning.
Perhaps that was our salvation: not faith in the Church, medicine, or the lambskin glove—but faith that laughter itself was a cure. If the Almighty truly wished to punish humanity, He might have made us humourless
