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Yet despite such outrages, sex continued its slow but inexorable journey towards its place in the sun. If the celebration of masturbation, especially by women, is one of the best indicators of a sexually liberated society, this example from
The Delights of Venus
by Johannes Meursius, a seventeenth-century
Dutch poet, is suggestive of a culture not overly burdened by Christian strait-lacedness; Meursius's lines were in praise of dildos.

Just at sixteen her breasts began to heave

Yet scarce knows what the titillation means
.

All night she thinks on Man, both toils and sweats
,

And dreaming frigs, and spends upon the sheets;

But never knew the more substantial bliss
,

And scarce e'er touched a man, but by a kiss
.

Her virgin cunt ne'er knew the joys of love

Beyond what dildoes or her finger gave …

Come this way, I've a pretty engine here
,

Which us'd to ease the torments of the fair;

This dildo ‘tis, with which I oft was wont

T'assuage the raging of my lustful cunt
.

For when cunts swell, and glow with strong desire
,

‘Tis only pricks can quench the lustful fire
.

And when that's wanting, dildoes must supply

The place of pricks upon necessity
.

Contraception, another key indicator, along with masturbation and gay sex, of the existence of sex for fun, was officially unacceptable but widely practised from the third century onwards, at least by prostitutes. Chaucer mentions contraceptive sponges and tampons used by those who have sex ‘moore for delit than world to multiplye'. As far as male contraception was concerned,
coitus interruptus
was described in a 1375
Book of Vices and Virtues
as a sin ‘agens [against] kynde and agens the ordre of wedloke'. But it was still used routinely by husbands to separate orgasmic pleasure from child-begetting.

Shakespeare, inevitably, is our barometer of how far an understanding of sex was ingrained in the popular culture of post-Medieval ‘Merrie England'. As the mainstream BBCl or HBO dramatist of his day, he trod a skilful path between
rudeness and respectability; hidden reference was his method of getting sexy bits in. Thus he mentions dildos, if a little obscurely, in 1611 in
A Winter's Tale
(‘He has the prettiest Loue-songs for Maids and with such delicate burthens of dildos and fadings'), although Ben Jonson did so the previous year in
The Alchemist
(‘Here I find the seeling fill'd with poesies of the candle: And Madame, with a Dildo, writ o' the walls'). The lines, ‘Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry, Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie', are often attributed to Shakespeare but alternatively believed to be Alexander Pope's. But scattered throughout confirmed Shakespeare material there are also numerous less-than-subtly concealed terms for genitals, both male (‘cod', ‘thing') and female (‘quaint', ‘count', ‘sheath'). ‘Arise' or ‘stand' often refers to an erection; in
Macbeth
, the porter describes how alcohol can make a man ‘stand to or not stand to', illustrating his theory by pointing and then dropping a key.

The Elizabethans were in thrall to the rather melodramatic notion of every orgasm shortening a person's life by one minute. This was more likely a seduction ruse by men to convince the ladies that each selfish orgasm ‘hurts me more than it will hurt you', but Shakespeare exploited the idea for all it was worth. Thus the word ‘die' is often interchangeable with ‘orgasm' (the French idea of
le petit mort
was curiously pervasive), although it is only fair to add that a love-death connection is also common in love poetry, as well as to connect romance with concepts of transience, impermanence and mortality.

But one can be fairly sure that patrons of the cheap seats at the Globe would have known precisely what Shakespeare was getting at when Cleopatra kills herself after Antony's death, holds the asp to her breast and calls, ‘Husband, I come!'
Romeo and Juliet
, similarly, is stiff with death-orgasm images. There is a recurring motif in the play depicting death as Juliet's bridegroom including a passage where Romeo dreams he is dead and anticipates that he will ‘lie' with the dead Juliet. There is
also what seems to be a distinctly sexual image where Juliet kills herself with Romeo's dagger.

It is in the Sonnets that Shakespeare loosens his ruff a little more. But while Sonnet 116 (‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments …' is the staple of wedding services, extolling as it does the correctly chaste ingredients for a seemly relationship, few of us can quote so freely from Sonnet 129, which is on the trials and tribulations of the orgasm. Nicknamed ‘the Lust Sonnet', it deals with sentiments quite different from the sort of meaningful relationship alluded to in 116. In the Lust Sonnet, the word ‘love' does not appear at all.

Shakespeare elucidates instead upon the problems surrounding sex and the pitfalls and disappointments of orgasm that are still keeping modern-day sex therapists in business. So neurotic is 129 on the matter of sex – it names and shames orgasm as the source of lust, which is characterised as ‘perjur'd, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust' – that one scholar, John Robertson, suggested in his 1926 book
The Problems of the Shakespeare Sonnets
that Shakespeare did not write it; but he may merely have been protecting the Bard's reputation in a Britain still suffused with Victorian sexual attitudes.

Dr Marvin Krims, a psychoanalyst and lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, gives particular attention to the Lust Sonnet in his essay ‘A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeare's Sonnet 129'. ‘From the initial pejorative portrait of lust as emotional exhaustion and orgiastic offal (‘Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action') … the sonnet delivers a dismal account of what the words also endorse as an exceedingly enjoyable and profoundly satisfying experience,' writes Krims. (‘Spirit' here means semen, so its waste or expulsion is ejaculation. ‘Shame' refers to genitalia, since the Latin ‘pudenda' (not actually used by the Romans) derives from
pudere
– ‘to be ashamed' and translates as ‘things to be ashamed of'.

‘Sex,' Krims deduces of Shakespeare's attitude, ‘is both desirable and dreadful, from seduction to final satiation. And the concluding couplet, in a tone of supreme irony, assures us that there is absolutely nothing we can do, “To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”.'

Another academic in the psychiatric field, Brett Kahr, a psychotherapist at the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, Regent's College, London, makes the point that Shakespeare, reflecting the culture around him, was no early advocate of women's liberation. ‘In
Measure for Measure,'
Kahr wrote in a 1999 essay in the
Digital Archive of Psychohistory
, ‘Shakespeare has described men as “great doers”, and as creatures who go “groping for trouts in a peculiar river” [i.e. having sex recreationally]. These fragments offer some idea of how Renaissance men continually failed to understand women, regarding them instead as objects of obscurity who must be probed and prodded by a “rapier and dagger man”, another one of Shakespeare's references to male sexual behaviour which teems with violence of an extreme Nature.'

The defining sexual advance of the Medieval Christian world (achieved in spite of Christian values rather than as a result of them, it must be stressed) was made in 1559 by a scientist in Venice. That his name, in this age of exploration, was Columbus – more properly Mateo Renaldo Colombo – is one of history's sweeter ironies because his achievement was to plant the flag, you might say, on a piece of uncharted territory which was arguably as unexpected and important a discovery as the New World found by Christopher Columbus. For Mateo Columbo it was who identified a small organ which, he believed, was ‘pre-eminently the seat of woman's delight'.

Like a penis, Columbus reported in his book
De Re Anatomica
, ‘if you touch it, you will find it rendered a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male member … If you rub it vigorously with a penis, or touch it even with a little finger, semen swifter than air flies this way and that on account of the pleasure … Without these
protuberances, women would neither experience delight in venereal embraces nor conceive any foetuses.' We know this ‘protuberance' as the clitoris, from the Greek for ‘little hill'.

There are more than a few sub-ironies in the Mateo Columbus story, as wonderfully unravelled by an Argentinian psychotherapist Federico Andahazi in his poetic novelised version of it,
The Anatomist
, which was published in 1997. Christopher Columbus, Andahazi pointed out, ‘discovered' America when the Native Americans knew where it was all the time; Mateo Columbo revealed what half the world's population – women – had a pretty shrewd idea about, so far as location and function were concerned, and none more so than on the pre-Christian American continent.

‘Mateo Colombo searched, travelled and finally found the “sweet land” he longed for,' wrote Andahazi, ‘the organ that governs the love of women.' The
Amor Veneris
(such is the name the anatomist gave it, “if I may be allowed to give a name to the things by me discovered”) was the true source of power over the slippery, shadowy free will of women.'

‘What would happen,' Andahazi speculated in his preface, ‘if the daughters of Eve were to discover that, between their legs, they carried they keys to both Heaven and Hell?' He went on to tell us precisely what did happen: the Dean of the Medical School in Padua, it turns out, was not best pleased by the other Columbus's New World of orgasmic pleasure for women: ‘In the eyes of the Dean, the anatomist's newest findings had exceeded all limits of tolerance. The
Amor Veneris
, Mateo Colombo's America, went far beyond what was deemed permissible for science. For more than one reason, the mere mention of a certain “pleasure of Venus” made the Dean's gorge rise.'

Colombo, we learn from Andahazi, discovered in his anatomical researches a woman from Spain, Inés de Torremolinos, who had what appeared to Colombo to be a tiny penis, and to us, presumably, would have been an unusually well-developed clitoris. The mysterious organ, Colombo noted, was ‘inflamed,
throbbing and moist'. (It is probable that, by happenstance, Inés was suffering from clitoromegaly, an enlargement of the clitoris that causes it to appear like a small penis; the condition is caused by excess androgen and is usually accompanied by heavy hair growth on the body.)

Colombo obviously thought at first that he was examining a hermaphrodite, but by the medical understanding of the day in these cases both sets of sexual organs are withered and reproduction is impossible. Yet Inés was a mother of three.

‘Intuitively, the anatomist took hold of the strange organ between his thumb and index fingers, and with the index finger of his other hand he began gently caressing the red and engorged gland. He then observed that every muscle in the patient's body, up to then completely relaxed, tensed suddenly and involuntarily, while the organ grew somewhat in size and throbbed with brief contractions.'

The second Columbus went on to examine over a hundred other women, both living and cadaver. To his considerable shock, he realized that the Inés de Torremolinos ‘penis' existed, ‘small and hidden behind the fleshy labia', in all women. As a scientist, he was delighted to find that Inés's odd orgasmic behaviour, too, was repeatable experimentally. The anatomist, who admitted he set out on his quest to try better to understand women from a romantic point of view, had discovered the key to love and pleasure. ‘He was unable to explain,' Andahazi wrote, ‘how this “sweet treasure” had remained undetected for centuries, and how generations of scholars, anatomists from the West and from the East, had never seen that diamond that could be observed with the naked eye simply by parting the flesh of the vulva.'

Colombo reported his momentous findings to the Dean of his faculty in March 1558. Whereas today he might have won a Nobel Prize for Medicine, in the sixteenth-century his reward for ‘discovering' the clitoris was being arrested in his classroom
within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned. His manuscripts were confiscated, and his ‘America' was never permitted to be mentioned again until centuries after his death.

Another sexual pioneer working at precisely the same time in Venice had better luck. In the wake of history's first recorded syphilis epidemic, Gabriel Fallopius – whose name was given to Fallopian tubes – invented the condom, or more correctly re-invented it since the Ancient Egyptians and others had used rudimentary sheaths. Fallopius's condom was a linen sheath, designed ostensibly for protection not as a contraceptive. Fallopius advocated the very unusual and progressive notion of hygiene in a book entitled
De Morbo Gallico
– The French Disease. ‘As often as a man has intercourse, he should, if possible, wash the genitals, or wipe them with a cloth,' Fallopius advised. ‘Afterwards he should use a small linen cloth made to fit the glans, and draw forward the prepuce over the glans; if he can do so, it is as well to moisten it with saliva or with a lotion.'

So far as is known, the pre-rubber Fallopius sheath was not at first appreciated as a contraceptive. ‘For the rake cared little whether he left his victim with child or not,' explained Gordon Rattray Taylor in his 1953
Sex in History
. ‘Women, however, were beginning to equip themselves with effective contraceptive devices, and Casanova relates how he once stole a supply of the devices, which are so necessary (as he puts it) to those who wish to make sacrifices to love, leaving a poem in their place.'