phallus, but rather the potent erection as self-contained symbol was found along with a discourse about the temporal drama of the yard in the lives and on the bodies of individual men. That is, there was a recognition that the process of tumescence and detumescence has different figurative possibilities than does the phallus separated imaginatively from the penis, and the presence of both discursive modes is typical of the period, reflecting an uncertainty about how the relationship of soft and erect tarse might be representative of masculine identity or mind. As well, various mind-yard equations reflected competing definitional systems: in directly proportional formulations, the turgid member was seen as a synecdoche for the power of male will, virility, or social and political sway, and the castrated, impotent, or small-yarded male was representative of forms of failure or mental lack; in inverse modes, however, the large penis was the sign of a fool, and a genital deficiency (castration, impotence, small penis) was compensated by mental capacity. Finally, the yard was sometimes viewed as an irrational and ungovernable Other, at odds with male will, and commodified as a thing to be owned or exchanged by others without reference to the male self or character to which it was attached. In medical debates about what caused an erection, it was agreed that not the will but the subversive imagination was the source, thus associating turgid tarse and wit with irrational bodily forces threatening to overwhelm the typical hierarchy of mind over body. Moreover, new medical techniques for “blowing up” the cut-off penis of cadavers contributed to concepts of the autonomous phallus severed from the conscious mind. The erect privy member as symbolic commodity was evident not only in anatomical explorations, but also in the tumescence of hanged criminals and in the function and status of dildoes. Section six examines several outcomes of these ambiguous symbolic practices as they figured in the notorious impotence trials. In these highly public tribunals, the vexed cultural meanings of the penis were reflected in the startling proposition that the erected yard is not the conclusive sign of male virility, thus destabilizing a notion of masculine identity as it might be proven in relation to the phallus.
A fascinating cultural logic emerged from these competing discourses, one which we have inherited and now largely take for granted: masculinity and male identity were increasingly understood as being intimately defined by one’s groin; this meant that male genitalia—the yard in particular—gained status as the new commodity representing maleness; but the yard-as-masculinity synecdoche included a tendency to separate men from the body part that had also become the key symbol of maleness itself; this commodification of the yard resulted in a new and fractured form of self-consciousness for individual men in which the experiencing self (particular man with penis) had to engage with the experience of self as commodity (yard = maleness). This fracture is symptomatic of later developments (such as Lacanian and feminist psychoanalysis) in which the symbolic freight of the phallus-as-commodity overwhelms the historical record of men and their bodies.
Male Brain-Male Genitalia Interrelationships: Stones and Seed
Prior to the seventeenth century, the yard, stones, and seed were an important adjunct of masculinity, but not necessarily the most important signs of maleness. Male organs of generation were simply one of a variety of social markers acting as a subset of male privilege as citizen, father, patriarchal agent, or legal entity—bodily signs, in other words, which, along with other attributes (lineage in particular), entitled the owner to a position somewhere on a gendered socio-political hierarchy but did not by themselves constitute some essentialized male identity anchored ontologically to biological sex. I need not rehearse the arguments provided by Sander L. Gilman and Thomas Laqueur which trace the cultural manifestations of male and female sexuality within a one-sex, one-flesh corporeal model before the eighteenth century.5 Suffice it to say that before seventeenth-century physiology precipitated a paradigmatic shift from a hierarchical model of biological sex (in which female genitalia were an inverted, colder, less perfect version of male genitalia) to one based on essential biological difference (of sexual organs, nervous systems, skeletons), the privy parts of men served variously as symbolic tokens of a culturally construed masculinity and therefore of a superior position on the scale of being. But it would not be until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that a biological notion of male sexuality was widely imagined as constitutive of masculine psychological reality, and that the male reproductive system would become one of the primary sites of an essentialized maleness, with the yard as the key symbol of that essence.
This is not to suggest that classical medicine and early cultural constructions of the significance of male genitalia did not make important links to masculinity; the testes, yard, and seed were obviously tied to matters of gender before 1650, and invested with cultural symbolism which would be inherited by Pope’s culture, although modified by a newer physiological symbolism which would replace the older equations. One way to assess the nature of this transmission is to ask what it was that mainstream Enlightenment commentaries found most distinctive about the representational qualities in classical medical theories and older social values. What, in other words, struck the moderns as typical in the older symbolism, and how did they both identify with and differentiate themselves from the figurations of bygone traditions?
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century “high” medical treatises and “low” popular sexologies are particularly revealing in this regard, nearly always glancing back at the ways an older symbolism converted biology into culture.6 A typical example from the medical literature is Regnier De Graaf’s Tractatus De Virorum Organis Generationi Inservientibus (1668), the longest medical treatise on male genitalia of the period, frequently cited by subsequent medical writers, and having the distinction of being perhaps the most significant compendium of received medical beliefs about the male organs of generation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In a more comprehensive manner than most, De Graaf’s 160–page treatise included retrospective anthropological nods to older classical theories as well as careful references to all of the significant medical theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.7 Introducing the genital parts outside the cavity of the abdomen, De Graaf begins with “the testes, i.e., ‘witnesses,’ either because they provide evidence of virility, in as much as from them we recognize a man capable of generating offspring, or because, among the Romans, no one was allowed to make a will unless he had witnesses and these were of the male sex.”8 De Graaf’s contemporaries (and the eighteenth-century physiologists to follow) would repeat the testes-as-virility formula, of course, and a rhetoric of “witnessing” would be repeated with few variations by “high” and “low” treatises alike. But his etymological precision is also a means of differentiating the symbolic value which the possession of testicles had earlier signified from the modernness of his own analysis, which I shall consider more fully below. What Enlightenment writers most noticed about the early formulations of masculinity and testicles was the symbolic emphasis placed on them as signs of acceptable oath-taking, the right to bear witness, and reliable testimony. The “testes” are so called, Thomas Gibson wrote in The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1682), “either because they testifie one to be a man, or because amongst the Romans none was admitted to bear witness but he that had them.”9 The twentieth edition of Venette’s Conjugal Love or, The Pleasures of the Marriage Bed Considered (1750) reflected that “it was not allowable formerly, in the courts of justice, at Rome, for any man to bear witness against another, except his testicles were entire.”10 And Voltaire would point to another ancient meaning, to be found in the Old Testament, of touching another man’s testicles as a gesture of promise-making: “It was a mark of respect, a symbol of fidelity, as formerly our feudal lords put their hands between those [thighs] of their paramount lords.”11
This thread of anthropological reportage characterizes Enlightenment understanding of earlier cultural constructions of the stones as biological signs of reproductive ability but also of a certain kind of homosocial privilege involving legal capacity or gestures of fidelity. The most colorful and perversely allegorized variation of these older conceptualizations comes in John Marten’s A Treatise of all the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease (6th ed., 1708), which tells of “one Combalus” who castrated himself:
because he perceiving himself to be affected by Stratonice, the Wife of the King
