TY - JOUR
AU - Weisser, Olivia
AB - Abstract Inspections of the body’s most intimate surfaces were crucial to rape cases in early modern England. Female medical experts evaluated bruises, lacerations, and stretched skin for evidence of a violation. Yet numerous courtroom investigations seemed to centre around the marks of venereal disease rather than sexual abuse. These cases reframed the focus of inquiry from rape to disease at nearly every step, from witnesses’ accounts of the discovery of rape to courtroom inspections of bodies and clothing. This article examines fifty-nine such cases and argues that placing the poxed body, as opposed to the ravished body, center stage made rape easier to communicate, convict, and condemn. More than a simple proxy for penetrative sex, venereal disease provided a detailed and morally loaded language for talking about otherwise unspeakable acts. And perhaps most importantly, the disease offered tangible, if contested, evidence of rape that could be touched, viewed, and evaluated by male – rather than female – medical experts. Venereal disease effectively refocused rape cases away from the kinds of words and bodily inspections that were viewed with suspicion and onto those that were deemed reliable. The body’s most intimate surfaces provided crucial evidence in early modern rape cases. London’s central criminal court, the Old Bailey (Fig. 1), charts the medical experts who evaluated bruises, lacerations, and stretched skin for signs of a violation. Yet in a significant number of rape cases, it was the marks of venereal disease, not abuse, that were the focus of courtroom investigations. This article examines fifty-nine such cases spanning 1604–1754, although the majority of cases are from the 1700s. In nearly all of them, women and girls claim to contract venereal disease from their assailants.1 The analysis that follows looks at the common ways the disease emerges in these cases and attempts to explain a subtle trend throughout them: bodily behaviours and signs otherwise associated with rape are reframed as evidence of disease. This reframing appears at each step, from witnesses’ accounts of the discovery of rape to medical experts’ inspections of bodies and clothing. Why put the poxed body rather than the ravished body centre stage? Refocusing cases of rape around venereal disease seemed to make sexual abuse easier to communicate, convict, and condemn. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Old Bailey Sessions House, 1750. From Walter Thornbury, ‘Newgate’, in Old and New London: vol. 2, London, 1878, p. 451. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ysmheeu7. Fig. 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Old Bailey Sessions House, 1750. From Walter Thornbury, ‘Newgate’, in Old and New London: vol. 2, London, 1878, p. 451. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/ysmheeu7. I am by no means the first to note the prevalence of venereal disease in early modern rape cases.2 No one, however, has made it a focus of analysis. Scholars typically have been drawn to other aspects of these intriguing sources: the laws that framed them, low conviction rates, the contours of women’s narratives, stereotypes about defendants, the creation and reception of trial reports, and so on. As a historian of medicine, I take a new perspective by focusing on disease. Those scholars who have sought to explain the role of venereal disease in these cases have tended to view it as evidence of the ‘virgin cure.’3 This was the notion that sex with a virgin could heal the foul disease. While accusers tended to be young and belief in the virgin cure may have endured throughout the 1700s, there is little evidence in legal records to support this explanation. Another theory is that venereal infection provided proof of penetrative sex.4 The disease certainly served this function, and yet as the evidence here shows, it was no simple proxy for sex. Diagnoses were difficult, symptoms were deceptive, and connections to penetrative sex were far from clear-cut. This article suggests, rather, that venereal disease was so common in rape cases because it offered a richly detailed, morally loaded language for talking about otherwise unspeakable events. And it did so in ways that could be seen, touched, and evaluated by male – rather than female – medical experts. Venereal disease, in other words, refocused rape cases away from the kinds of words and bodily inspections that were viewed with suspicion and onto those that were deemed reliable. Most of the cases here are from the Old Bailey (fifty-one out of fifty-nine), most likely as a result of the unusual detail of extant reports. By 1720, some of those reports, known as proceedings or Sessions Papers, even contained verbatim testimony. The proceedings were published and sold to middling and upper status readers for three or four pence eight times a year. The very public nature of the proceedings sits in stark contrast with the intimate, often inexpressible content of cases--a paradox that made the published reports all the more titillating. The goal of producing entertaining reading material certainly explains the detail of the proceedings, as well as the inclusion of finer points about disease transmission. Intended readership framed how clerks recorded court transcripts and publishers later edited those transcripts for publication. For instance, historians have found that salacious topics were afforded more space in print. And even the most descriptive accounts did not always capture what transpired in court. Clerks relied on stock language and glosses, and in some cases they compressed or omitted testimony altogether.5 Even verbatim accounts of oral testimony do not provide unproblematic reflections of past experiences. Rather, they are constructions, rife with conventional language and formulaic plots. For example, in her work on early modern rape narratives, Miranda Chaytor has noted the ‘often-used fiction’ of a traveller stopping to light his pipe by the fire.6 Accounts of rape also tend to conform to prevailing notions of what a credible and convictable rape entails. Cases may capture actual lived events and uttered words, but they do so in ways that are shaped by contemporary cultural assumptions and legal expectations. As such, the cases here are perhaps most valuable for reflecting early modern perceptions of illicit sex, women’s speech, and the powerful yet contested role of venereal disease as medico-legal evidence. We cannot know for certain whether accusers actually contracted venereal disease from the accused. But a close analysis of cases recovers how the disease provided a key strategy for navigating prosecutions of rape within the constraints of a patriarchal system. Most cases also come from the Old Bailey because it was the assize court for London where felonies such as rape were tried. I was unable to find mention of venereal disease in rapes tried at assizes outside London, although this may be a reflection of the surviving sources more than anything. Clerks in southern assizes did not retain depositions, examinations, and recognizances that would have provided details about venereal disease. Rape cases from northern assizes offered more detail, but the cases that I consulted tended to focus on events leading up to the incidents in question, before the possible transmission of disease. I have found a smattering of evidence from lower courts that tried attempted rapes as misdemeanours. One defendant, for example, claimed not to have penetrated a child, despite having ‘intent to ravish her’. When he developed symptoms of venereal disease he surmised (and a surgeon later confirmed) that he infected her through touch.7 I suspect that venereal disease appeared in early modern English rape cases even more frequently than sources suggest. Because legal records are summaries of much longer interrogations, the disease may have figured in cases without getting recorded. For example, there is no mention of venereal disease in the published proceeding of a rape tried at the Old Bailey in 1749. But the unpublished ‘information’, or accusation, for that case in the Middlesex Sessions Papers does mention the disease: ‘the said George Tenent did feloniously… force the Body of the said Mary and as this Deponent believes gave her the foul Desease.’8 Another case does not name venereal disease because most of the testimony from the surgeon who examined the prosecutrice is omitted from the record out of ‘decency.’ Yet a passing reference to ‘mercurials’, a common component of antivenereal cures, suggests that the case did involve the disease.9 The 1740 case of Elizabeth Moreton illustrates some of the common ways that venereal disease surfaces in early modern English rape trials. Moreton was thirteen years old and living in a house on Milk Street when her mistress went to the market one morning, leaving her alone with a servant named William MacCarrol. According to testimony, MacCarrol asked her to go down to the cellar with him. When she refused, he forced her down the stairs, pressed her to the ground, and raped her. Moreton did not mention the incident to her family. It only came to light because she allegedly contracted venereal disease from MacCarrol and her mother noticed conspicuous signs of the infection. First, she observed that her daughter ‘walked comically’, but assumed it was from tight shoes. When she found peculiar stains on her daughter’s clothing, she asked her husband to examine the girl. This led to Moreton’s confession about what happened that day in the cellar. A surgeon confirmed that she was ‘miserably clapp'd’ and sent her to a hospital for treatment. Another surgeon testified that he was unable to find traces of the disease on MacCarrol’s body, and Moreton’s mother refused to let him examine her daughter. Two women who washed MacCarrol’s laundry further testified that they did not notice signs of the disease on his linen. He was acquitted. This was a case of rape, and yet a significant portion of the trial seemed to centre on disease.10 Perhaps the most striking aspect of this case, and indeed a trend in most of the cases here, is Moreton’s youth. In all, seven prosecutrices were married or offered no indicator of age, while the remaining fifty-two were girls ranging from seventeen to, unimaginably, two. There were unusually high numbers of children in early modern English rape cases overall. Scholars have debated why this was the case, though the consensus seems to be that convictions were more attainable when rape victims were virgins or under the age of ten, the legal age of consent.11 Cases involving children were especially odious and were easier to convict since they did not require proof of non-consent; penetrative sex alone was required to convict a rape in these instances. As a result, historians have found, rape cases involving young girls tended to focus on corporeal evidence more than verbal testimony.12 Claiming to have contracted venereal disease facilitated this emphasis on the physical, and with some success. The conviction rate for rape in cases involving venereal disease was 34%, in distinction from the 11% conviction rate for all rapes at the time.13 This tactic only worked for children, however, which further explains their high numbers. When an adult woman claimed to have contracted venereal disease, the defendant used the disease to characterize her as ‘an idle hussey’ or, if married, infected by a wayward husband.14 Adult women had to prove both penetrative sex and non-consent to convict a rape. This was especially challenging to do since early modern English women lacked a language for articulating coerced sex. As a result, historians have shown, women’s rape narratives tended to focus on female resistance and male violence.15 Physical conflict indicated non-consensual sex without mentioning the act of sex. A key way that venereal disease functioned in these cases was as a frame for witnesses’ stories of discovery. Much like Moreton, most girls kept rapes secret out of fear of punishment or under threat.16 Friends and family only learned that something was amiss upon noticing symptoms of venereal disease. Fourteen cases, for example, connected an odd way of walking to the detection of venereal disease and, subsequently, rape. This symptom was so common that it was reasonable to ask a witness, ‘Did you observe any thing in her gate?’17 In early modern medical literature, venereal contagion was typically associated with a putrid odour because the popular antivenereal ingredient mercury caused bad breath. The disease was also commonly linked to sound, as later stages could lead to rotten palates that made patients speak in a garbled way known as ‘snuffling’.18 Added to these well-known signs of venereal contagion, legal records suggest, was gait. Further evidence comes from a case involving theft rather than sex. When a man tried to flee a burglary with a silver tankard tucked under his shirt, a witness testified that he ‘went down the Street straddling as if he had got the Pox’.19 Victims’ mothers were usually first to notice signs of venereal disease and link those signs to sexual violence (thirty-two cases). Mothers could not simply report what their daughters told them, as this was hearsay evidence. Instead, their testimony tended to trace their own stories of discovery, accounts that hinged on observations of the conspicuous signs of venereal disease. Mothers reported seeing awkward gaits, physical anguish, and suspicious stains. Such observations frequently led to bodily inspections and, ultimately, confessions. When Rachel Bishop noticed that her daughter would not sit down, she asked what was the matter. The girl explained that her ‘backside was sore’. This compelled Bishop to inspect her daughter’s body, upon which she found ‘a bad condition in her private parts’. Bishop sent for a doctor who confirmed a diagnosis of venereal disease, and she later elicited a confession from her daughter that included the name of the alleged abuser.20 Fathers hardly ever provided such stories of discovery, perhaps because they rarely made them. The Moreton case offers an unusual instance in which a father examined a girl’s body, and yet even then it was Moreton’s mother who provided the details in the trial report. The father’s testimony included only a single line: ‘John Moreton’s Evidence was agreeable to that of his Wife’. Perhaps the editors of the proceedings considered such matters to be the sole purview of women.21 Venereal symptoms could be ambiguous and some mothers overlooked or misattributed them. Hepzibah Dover’s mother noted that her daughter refused to sit down and was unable to complete everyday tasks. She thought not much of it, telling her daughter that she would probably improve in a few days. Dover still refused to sit several days later, her mother deposed, and she ‘always hung on the backs of chairs, or leaned upon a table’. Continued evidence of pain, coupled with an observation that the girl walked ‘badly’, still did not raise her mother’s suspicions, however. It was only when Dover’s mother asked her daughter to run a quick errand at a neighbouring carpenter’s house that she learned of the rape. The girl pleaded, ‘don’t send me any more, for I never will go again’. Confessions like this one bore little weight in court on their own. But as conclusions to mothers’ stories of discovery, such confessions did the work of placing misunderstood observations of physical debility within the proper frame of venereal disease. Tenuous verbal allegations became grounded in sound corporeal evidence.22 It is possible, of course, that Dover’s mother observed signs of sexual violence rather than venereal infection. Stiff limbs, searing pain, and the inability to complete everyday tasks commonly alerted relatives to the existence of venereal disease, but those symptoms could also result from sexual abuse. Rape cases that did not involve venereal disease tended to mention the very same symptoms as those that did: stiffness, soreness, lacerations, swellings, and ‘fetid stinking’ discharges. Some cases linked rape rather vaguely to ‘indisposition’.23 Difficulty walking, likewise, was known to result from sexual abuse, as well as the foul disease. In a case involving a nine-year-old, a surgeon was asked, ‘if a full grown man was to lie with such a child, but it should be immediately discovered by its gate?’ The surgeon replied, ‘it must’, explaining how inflammation would make it ‘difficult for it to go about’.24 The bodily effects of venereal disease and rape had so many overlaps that medical experts were not always able to distinguish one from the other. When two women inspected the body of Elizabeth Salter, their list of symptoms included common marks of abuse. Salter was sore, swollen, red, raw, and she suffered from emissions, also called ‘gleets’ or ‘claps’, as well as distended labia. Yet when a doctor examined the girl, he viewed these same symptoms as evidence only of ‘a bad distemper’. A second male medical expert confirmed there was no sign of force or violence, but only ‘what we call a clap’.25 What two women saw as marks of rape, two men interpreted solely as symptoms of disease. Reframing accounts of rape as discoveries of disease recentred these cases around evaluations of sickly, rather than ravished, bodies. Yet, as the above examples show, the bodily signs of venereal disease were easily mistaken or missed altogether. This is because venereal disease was notoriously deceptive. ‘Venereal disease’ referred to a large umbrella of related symptoms, as opposed to a clearly defined disease category that affected all bodies uniformly. Medical experts were the first to admit to the challenges of making a definitive diagnosis. In one case, a surgeon refused to attribute a genital ‘running’ to venereal disease since he had seen a similar symptom result from mere inflammation.26 In another case, a defendant was found clear of venereal disease, but a surgeon admitted ‘there may be a possibility of it’ if he had recently been cured and was ‘almost well, at the time that the Fact was committed’. Venereal disease also was confused easily with other maladies, such as strains (over-exertion), the itch, leprosy, and ‘bad nursing’, as well as everyday accidents like getting kicked by a horse.28 Perhaps the surgeons who linked venereal symptoms to innocuous strains and accidents were working on behalf of defendants. Maybe they were lying. It is impossible to say. But the fact that they could reasonably make such determinations points to the difficulty of identifying the disease. These diagnostic challenges were discussed in numerous medical texts from the era and have been the focus of valuable historical scholarship.29 Legal cases give that medical literature new context, suggesting how individuals in court could harness the ambiguities of venereal disease to help prove or disprove illicit sex.27 Using the pox as proof of penetrative sex is the most complicated role of the disease in rape cases. A surgeon explained in 1698 how Grace Price ‘could not be infected with the Venereal distemper but by carnal Knowledge of a Man’.30 The link between venereal infection and penetrative sex was not as simple as this quotation suggests, however. Beneath such seemingly neat associations were complex evaluations of ambiguous and misleading symptoms. Unpublished records associated with Price’s case include testimony from a surgeon that suggests a much more thorough investigation of her condition: she was sore, clapped, inflamed, and showed evidence of having been ‘deflowered’, all of which supported a diagnosis of ‘the veneriall distemper’.31 Such details were necessary because venereal disease was thought to be illusory and to spread in non-sexual ways. Venereal specialists recounted cases that developed from sweating in bed next to infected people. Others accused wet nurses of communicating the disease to their nurslings via breast milk. And midwives were said to transmit venereal disease by means of their hands. The bodies of children and women were thought to be more porous than those of adults and men, and therefore more susceptible to contracting the disease through touch.32 Perhaps this explains why so many non-sexual forms of transmission seemed to involve midwives and wet nurses. Sexual modes of transmission also involved the spread of virulent matter, be it semen conveyed through intercourse or ulcerous secretions spread by touch. These multiple modes of transmission, as well as the protean nature of the disease itself, complicated its role in court. Medical experts were called to testify at rape trials both to diagnose the pox and to determine how it was contracted, a designation they made by evaluating the most intimate parts of bodies. Identifying the source of disease transmission had considerable legal consequences. A diagnosis of venereal disease spread internally through sex could result in the conviction of rape, a felony punishable by death. Disease spread externally through touch, on the other hand, could lead to a charge of assault, a misdemeanour.33 Scrutiny of swellings, stretched labia, and lacerations were key to differentiating internal versus external transmission. When one judge asked a man-midwife whether a young woman could have developed venereal symptoms in a way other than penetrative sex, the practitioner replied, ‘No; not to make its appearance in that manner’. In response to a reminder that the pox spread through touch, as well, the man-midwife explained, ‘Yes; but then it would not make its appearance in this kind.’34 The underlying presumption was that venereal disease looked a certain way when it spread through penetrative sex. That ‘look’ entailed two aspects of the disease that were the focus of expert medical testimony at rape trials: location and severity. Internal sores and lacerations were thought to result from penetration, while external swellings did not. For this reason, when a witness testified that a victim was sore, a reasonable follow-up question might attempt to pinpoint the exact location of that soreness: ‘Was it inward or outward?’.35 In addition to location, the severity of symptoms indicated particular modes of transmission. More severe cases, known as ‘true claps’ or ‘confirmed poxes’, were assumed to result from the emission of seed, and therefore penetrative sex. As one apothecary affirmed, such cases could not develop from mere touch or ‘contraction of the parts without penetration’.36 While true poxes infected the blood and spread throughout the body, weaker forms of the disease remained localized as ‘claps’. These mild cases were thought to result from infectious matter spread externally by touch. The surgeon who testified in Moreton’s case, for example, linked her ‘venereal Taint’ to ‘meer Contact, &c. which would produce the Disorder the Witness laboured under, without infecting the blood’.37 Confusingly, mild claps were also thought to develop from non-sexual sources -- the result of cold baths, hard drinking, or a more general ‘ill Habit of Body’. One practitioner’s account book from the early 1700s mentions a man who suffered from ‘Gonorrhea pain’ after falling off his horse.38 It was not always clear, then, whether mild venereal symptoms were of sexual or non-sexual origins. Such ambiguity made the disease a problematic proxy for sexual intercourse. Attempts to connect rape to certain modes of disease transmission point, once again, to how venereal disease refocused cases of rape around assessments of the poxed body. Many of these medical experts, after all, came to court to evaluate evidence of disease, not abuse. Joseph Wilson diagnosed venereal disease ‘occasioned by a penetration into the parts’ based on an examination of stretched labia. Medical experts commonly cited distended labia as corporeal evidence of rape. Wilson, however, mentioned it as proof of disease transmission rather than abuse: ‘the child could not have had the foul disease without the parts had been dilated in order for the emission’. According to Wilson, the girl had a severe form of venereal disease that could only be contracted by the emission of seed, and therefore penetrative sex. Otherwise, he explained, the disease would have presented externally as an inflammation or ulcer (Fig. 2).39 Wilson’s testimony confirmed that the girl was violated, but that confirmation was secondary to his chief aim of assessing disease. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Venereal swellings, ulcers, and excrescences, from R. J. Brodie, The Secret Companion, a medical work on onanism or self-pollution, London, 1845. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/spxghyav. Fig. 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Venereal swellings, ulcers, and excrescences, from R. J. Brodie, The Secret Companion, a medical work on onanism or self-pollution, London, 1845. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/spxghyav. Cases here recount a seemingly endless displacement from one imperfect witness to the next. Because the court did not trust the words of women, it turned to the body instead. But the body too was a poor witness. Corporeal signs and bodily behaviours could obscure reality. Venereal disease spoke some truth in certain ways, its symptoms exposing those who kept their rapes secret. But, as the above examples show, the disease was no simple stand-in for penetrative sex. A diagnosis of venereal disease was difficult to make. Its symptoms were commonly misunderstood, overlooked, or misdiagnosed. And the presentation, location, and severity of the disease indicated varying modes of transmission, some of which specified no sexual contact at all. Evaluating venereal disease, let alone using that evaluation to prove penetrative sex, was complicated work. In the face of such uncertainty, linen stained by venereal sores and ulcers offered more tangible evidence, observable to all. Clothing was thought to provide more reliable proof than bodies in rape cases that did not involve venereal disease.40 Physical signs of sexual violence provided problematic legal evidence, after all. Time elapsed between alleged assaults and court appearances, which made bruises and other bodily marks untrustworthy. One rape case here involved an incident that took place four years before the trial.41 Moreover, marks of rape could be attributed to non-sexual sources, such as falling down a flight of stairs or the weather.42 And women’s bodies in early modern England, even those on the brink of puberty, were thought to be secretive and deceptive by nature. Interpreting such vexing body parts was neither simple nor straightforward. Soiled clothing provided more dependable proof, though in varied ways depending on the age of victims. For those over the age of consent, torn clothing was evidence of physical resistance, and therefore forced sex. For younger victims, bloodied clothing offered potential proof of lost virginity. Clothing played a similar role in nineteen rape cases involving venereal disease: it provided a more visible and reliable extension of the poxed body. Medical experts described diagnosing the foul disease solely on the basis of stained linen, avoiding problematic bodies altogether. One doctor and his apprentice looked at only a stain on a woman’s shift, noting ‘its quantity, colour, and malignity’. Another apothecary testified: ‘I thought by her Linnen, that her Disorder was Venereal’.43 Even if these healers performed additional examinations, they mentioned only the evidence yielded from stained clothing. The testimony of surgeon Thomas Renton further suggests that clothing offered more trustworthy evidence than bodies. When Renton examined a defendant for signs of the pox, he was unable to make a definitive diagnosis: ‘I was ordered to examine the man, which I did, and from his person could not determine whether he had the venereal disease, though there was something like it.’ When it came to evaluating spots on the flap of the defendant’s shirt, however, he was more assured: ‘the spots… I am positive were from such a disease’.44 Stained clothing provided a more valuable and visible indicator of the pox than ambiguous and secretive bodies, thereby overcoming some of the diagnostic challenges posed by the disease. Stained linen provided powerful proof. The Moreton case hinged, in part, on assertions that the defendant’s linen bore no marks of disease.45 Conversely, cases ended in guilty verdicts based partly on assessments of the colour and stiffness of stained clothing. Soiled linen also was a common way that mothers and friends discovered venereal infections in the first place. Margaret Holmes noticed that her daughter, Mary, acted oddly but chalked it up to loose petticoats. Only when she saw spots on her daughter’s clothing, ‘as though a person had spit upon it who had a consumption’, did she grow wary and inspect her daughter’s body. Holmes explained to a surgeon’s servant that she suspected ‘the prisoner had used her ill, for he had but the day before confessed he had the foul disease’.46 Likewise, Susan Faucet reported finding ‘disorder’ in her daughter’s linen and showed it to a neighbour who affirmed that it ‘could be no natural Thing’. Additional testimony provided even more unsavoury details: the linen was ‘very nasty’, bloody, ‘greenish and whitish’, and stiff. Faucet further testified that when she washed the defendant’s linen she found it wet, ‘as if it had been dipp’d in Water and wash’d out before it came to me’. A messenger went to fetch the man’s clothing as evidence, but accidentally returned with the girl’s shirt. ‘Since the Shift is come, let the Jury look on it’, the court decided. Faucet admitted that her daughter was not even wearing that particular shirt when the alleged assault occurred. Nonetheless it was material evidence, visible to all. The defendant was found guilty.47 As medico-legal evidence, stained clothing was not infallible. The surgeons, midwives, and apothecaries who served as medical experts in court could misdiagnose stains, for example. One surgeon admitted that marks on a defendant’s linen resembled the tail end of the foul disease, but when asked to confirm that the case was venereal, the surgeon demurred: ‘I cannot positively say so’.48 Venereal stains were known to resemble marks caused by other, less malicious maladies. One medical text outlined three different ‘species’ of a common reproductive ailment known as ‘the whites’ that caused discharges resembling venereal ‘claps’. One version of the disorder ‘does not pierce it [linen] thro & thro’, while another does so without staining. And a third discolours linen ‘as much as a Clap & cant well be dis[tin]guish’d from it’.49 Parsing the subtleties of stained undergarments was a niche form of medical expertise (Fig. 3). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Linen shift, England or America (17801810). Fig. 3. Open in new tabDownload slide Linen shift, England or America (17801810). As an observable, dependable extension of the poxed body, linen played the same key roles in rape cases as venereal symptoms: it alerted friends and relatives to infections, and by extension rapes, and it provided visible proof of penetrative sex. But while the stiff gaits and sore limbs associated with venereal disease might be overlooked, misunderstood, or misdiagnosed, linen seemed to offer unmistakable evidence of foul play. The value of linen as both diagnostic tool and legal evidence lay in its durability and tangibility. Unlike bodily symptoms, stains were permanent and could be examined up close. They could be touched and smelled. Linen was further suitable as a stand-in for the poxed body because it functioned day-to-day much like a second skin. It was the most intimate of garments, the bottom-most layer of clothing worn directly against the skin. As such, it came to possess many of the same qualities as skin itself. By the 1600s, people tended to wash their linen instead of their bodies. One manual even listed recipes for removing spots on linen alongside those for removing spots on the face.50 And just as blemishes on the skin were thought to offer external representations of internal moral conditions, the state of one’s linen–its crispness and whiteness–became an increasingly important marker of status. The sweet smell and bright flash of freshly laundered linen peeking out from necklines and cuffs became associated with civility and prosperity.51 Linen, in sum, was an indicator of the health, wealth, and virtue of the body beneath -- what Kathleen Brown calls ‘a public skin’.52 As legal evidence, that skin retained its marks well past the time frame in which actual bodies healed. The remainder of this article offers two additional explanations for the prevalence of venereal disease in early modern English rape cases. First, the disease provided a language for talking about unmentionable sex crimes. Valuable studies by historians of rape have shown how early modern women’s testimony skirted direct discussions of sex. Women at the time were not accorded sexual agency. They only spoke publicly about sex in passive terms and there was no clear language for articulating non-consent. Indeed, the ability to talk about sex at all implied an immodest character, which could jeopardize a rape case.53 Girls close to the age of consent may have been able to talk about sex more freely than adult women, but their testimony too contained glosses and euphemisms. The 1691 case of Mary Clarke drew on medical language to describe her afflicted body following a rape – she was ‘sore about the matrix’ – as if to distance Clarke from the act of sex and her own knowledge of it.54 In many instances, we will never know what prosecutors said in courtrooms because clerks redacted their testimony or replaced their words with formulaic phrases such as, ‘the particular Circumstances were too shocking to be exposed’.55 Descriptions of rape were deemed too indecent to reproduce. While such redactions and euphemisms were common in legal records, so too was complete silence. In numerous cases, accusers were considered too young to take an oath and so were not permitted to speak at all. Stories of sex were silenced, edited, or removed altogether from the legal record, but accounts of venereal disease were fair game. The pox provided a way to speak the unspeakable. And the vocabulary that the disease supplied was fittingly moralizing. Connections between venereal disease and sin were deeply ingrained in the early modern imagination. The disease commonly represented unbridled passion and unnatural desire in popular literature. One ballad from 1727 describes a marriage celebration marked by ‘ryat, excesse, and wontonnesse’ that includes ‘Quack-salvers’ and apothecaries standing by ‘to lend reliefe/with oyles and applicasies/Rich waters rare in vyols are/for buboes and for poxes’.56 As a result of such connotations, a diagnosis of venereal disease suggested that a sexual encounter took place while also characterizing that encounter as illicit. Conspicuous and disfiguring venereal swellings, ulcers, discharges, and sores were apt manifestations of reprehensible acts. Mary Holmes found her daughter’s body raw, ‘as if she had been skinned’. The girl’s aunt described the effects of venereal disease in even more grotesque terms: she ‘ran like a tap, and her shift was black and yellow with the filth’. Holmes was flayed like an animal, her body a fountain of corrupt, unnatural matter. Such descriptions of disease communicated both physical and moral corruption, not to mention the ‘detestable Villany’ of assailants.57 Likewise, those who contracted venereal disease were characterized in terms that emphasized the wretchedness of their states: they were ‘in a most miserable condition’ and looked ‘like the picture of death’.58 Even cases that mentioned the pox in the most cursory terms used language that pointed to both the physical and moral ramifications of a diagnosis: it was a ‘fowle & lothsome disease’.59 The physical marks of the disease provided visual evidence of the depravity of rape, all the while avoiding the subject of rape itself. Court testimony hinted at the corrupt conditions of victims in other ways, as well. Whereas rape narratives by adult women tended to note interrupted domestic labour, those by children involved interrupted play. Assaults occurred when girls went upstairs to fetch a doll or were lured into danger with delectable fruit.60 Such details highlighted lost innocence and the stark divisions between former purity and newly debauched conditions. The prosecutors in these cases, after all, were doubly damaged: poxed and ravished. Both conditions were associated with sexual corruption and moral decay, not to mention physical incapacity. The disease played a similar role in at least one case involving a different kind of sexual transgression. In 1694, a Turkish man named Mustapha Pochowachett was tried for sodomy, an act deemed so loathsome that it was ‘not fit to be named among Christians’. Like the many women who prosecuted rape, Pochowachett was voiceless. He did not speak English and had to make use of a translator to communicate in court. In the face of his silence, as well as that surrounding the crime of buggery, venereal disease provided a full and morally loaded vocabulary for talking about the events in question. A surgeon testified that Pochowachett had the foul disease and transmitted it to a fourteen-year-old named Anthony Bassa, whose ‘body hath been Unnaturally made use of’. Associations between sodomy and sin were reflected in ghastly descriptions of both infections. Pochowachett had ‘two great Ulcers on both sides of his Fundament’. while Bassa was ‘shanker’d and much bloody, and a great hole upon the fleshly part of his Yard.’ Such details stood in for behaviour that was deemed too indecent to discuss. Buggery and venereal disease were so conflated in the language of this case that either one might have been the subject of its concluding line: ‘the thing appeared very very foul and detestable before the Face of Christians.’ Cases of sodomy are not comparable to those of rape, and yet this case aptly shows how venereal disease could play a similar role in both.61 Reframing rape around disease provided a language for talking about sexual abuse at each step of legal cases. The disease communicated heinous crimes on behalf of voiceless victims. It gave mothers a way to narrate their own discoveries of abuse -- tales of detection that were substantiated by tangible stains and visible gaits. And venereal disease provided a complex, if contested, array of bodily marks and excretions for medical experts to evaluate. Finally, refocusing cases of rape around assessments of disease shifted the burden of proof away from the words of women and onto those of men. Rape cases typically hinged on women’s words, which in early modern England were largely believed to be untrustworthy. The women and girls who brought rape cases to court lacked an ability to speak about sex or were prevented from speaking altogether. And most of the witnesses who testified on their behalf were women whose words were deemed to be largely unreliable. Aunts, mothers, and neighbours testified with authority about matters of abuse and disease, as both topics were well within the realm of early modern women’s common knowledge. Yet in the thirty-two cases in which female relatives recounted discoveries of venereal disease and rape, all but three turned to male medical experts to validate their findings. Even the laundresses who testified about stained linen were viewed with suspicion by the court. Single women who took in laundry as part-time work were commonly suspected of sexual impropriety. Their labour involved handling intimate and tainted material, and their occupation as a whole came to be associated with sex work.62 Likewise, the court mistrusted the female medical experts, namely midwives, who inspected bodies for evidence of abuse. Midwives visited homes to confirm rapes and also testified in court, some performing physical examinations in back rooms at trials. These evaluations drew on midwives’ expert knowledge of ‘those natural Symptoms that are incident to Women’, and entailed assessing the marks of lost virginity and forced penetration.63 Midwives found evidence of forced sexual contact in lacerations, runnings, sores, weakness, bleedings, and pain. Their inspections might also involve locating and assessing signs of physical struggle on the skin’s surface, in bruises and depressions. One midwife described visiting a girl and finding marks on her arms, legs, thighs, and back, ‘all over, like the Bark of a Tree’.64 And yet, as Cathy McClive has shown in her work on early modern France, these female medical experts lacked the same authority in court as their male counterparts. The very subject of midwives’ expertise – the mysterious female body – paradoxically made their expert knowledge suspect.65 This mistrust is evident in English cases, as well. If testimony from a female midwife contradicted that of a male surgeon or apothecary, it was the man’s evaluation that took precedence.66 Other early modern female medical workers were similarly invested with authority while also stripped of it. Parishes hired searchers to go door-to-door tallying deaths during times of plague. Despite their important work codifying disease and determining quarantine orders, searchers were viewed with suspicion on account of their old age, female gender, and marginal status. As Richelle Munkhoff explains, ‘the searcher must stand by her words even as she knows those words are mistrusted.’67 Like searchers, the midwives who testified at rape trials handled corrupt bodies and interpreted ambiguous signs to discern objective truths. And like searchers, they made decisions that had very real consequences over matters of life and death; their words could lead a man to the gallows. Such power is partly what made these women so threatening. Venereal disease provided a way to prosecute rape without women’s words. Diagnosing disease, after all, relied on the expert testimony of men. Of the cases here, thirty-seven involved male medical experts, mostly surgeons and apothecaries, who testified about venereal disease. These men might also comment on the physical marks of abuse, but many left such assessments to the work of women. When the court asked one apothecary whether he saw evidence of rape, he replied: ‘I examin’d no farther than only to observe the Gleet’. Likewise, sixteen cases included testimony by female midwives and nurses who focused primarily on signs of sexual abuse. Midwives spoke with confidence about rape, but deferred to the expertise of men when discussing disease. ‘The Doctors please to think [it] is the foul Disease, and I think so too’, reported one midwife. When venereal disease came up in another case, a midwife refused to make an evaluation: ‘I had no judgement in those things’. One midwife named Mary Maclemara made a rare diagnosis, but she based it on her expert knowledge of rape rather than disease: ‘the child is foul… it is through the abuse of a man’. In another instance, a midwife confidently evaluated signs of a sexual violation: ‘I never saw a child in such a condition, unless she had been ill used by a man who had forced her’. She wavered, however, when it came to evaluating venereal disease: ‘I suppose this child had and has now the foul distemper upon her, though the ointment has done her some good’.68 Midwives did weigh in on matters related to venereal disease and medical men did the same regarding sexual abuse. But each tended to stick to their respective realm of expertise. The patterns in these cases are all too familiar. They expose silenced female voices, assumptions about deceptive female bodies, and beliefs about dubious feminine expertise. They also chart the long history of problematic physical evidence in rape trials. The rape kit was developed in the 1970s to resolve the centuries-old issue of low conviction rates. At long last, medicine would be able to provide definitive, material proof of rape without a need for problematic verbal testimony. Of course, rape kits have not fulfilled that promise. They cannot prove non-consent, after all. And assumptions about women’s deceit, as well as contempt toward alleged victims, insufficient supplies, and incompetent handling of kits, have all resulted in persistently low conviction rates.69 The above cases tell this same story, but it begins in the 1600s as opposed to the 1970s. The pox provided a proto version of the medical forensics exam by offering accessible medico-legal evidence for cases that would have otherwise hinged largely on women’s words. And, much like the rape kit, the court tended to view that evidence largely as insufficient or inconclusive. As much as we like to see ourselves as enlightened compared to those living in the early modern period, surprisingly little has changed when it comes to prosecuting rape. Yet the above cases do show how venereal disease offered a curious way of navigating early modern law. It offered visible and tangible, if contested, proof of sexual violence that avoided taboo discussions of sex and, in cases involving linen, even problematic assessments of bodies. It provided a detailed and morally loaded language for talking about otherwise indescribable events. And it helped to condemn criminal sexual acts based on what was presumed to be the more reliable testimony of men. At first glance, venereal disease played a rather straightforward role in rape cases: it was a proxy for sex. But a closer inspection exposes a more complicated function that involved shifting the focus of rape trials onto the types of evidence and testimony deemed to be trustworthy. These cases also offer a new perspective on early modern perceptions of illicit sex. They show how ideas about the pox, its presentation, and transmission were so deeply ingrained in English minds by the 1700s that they offered common ways of articulating, manifesting, and morally condemning otherwise unutterable acts. A final example comes from a case in which a witness described a girl as ‘shamefully abused, and sent to the Doctors to cure’. The phrase ‘shamefully abused’ conflates rape and venereal infection, the two merging into a single dissolute act that is then confirmed by the subsequent phrase, ‘sent to the Doctors for cure’.70 Rather than a simple stand-in for sin or unlawful sex, venereal disease conveyed a complex experience that included disempowerment, physical anguish, lost innocence, and horrific violence. Venereal disease, in other words, provided a rich repertoire for talking about illicit sex that entailed visually vivid expression, colourful language, and a surprising means of navigating the limits of a patriarchal legal system. Olivia Weisser is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on the history of health and healing, gender, and sexuality in the early modern period. Her first book, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England, was published by Yale University Press in 2015 and was a finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize. She is currently working on a new book about the history of venereal disease. Many colleagues generously shared thoughts and feedback on this material: Danielle Bromwich, Mary Fissell, Heidi Gengenbach, Laura Gowing, Elizabeth Papp Kamali, Liza McCahill, Liz Mellyn, as well as the ‘Renaissance Skin’ team at King’s College London, participants at the University of California San Diego Science Studies colloquium, and the editorial collective at History Workshop Journal. Footnotes 1 There are two exceptions. In one case, a woman claimed to have the pox as a strategy to fend off her assailants and in another a defendant accused a prosecutrix of spreading venereal disease: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, 13 May 2019, hereafter cited as OBPO), Oct. 1740, trial of William Duell (t17401015-53); London Metropolitan Archives, London (hereafter cited as LMA), City Sessions Papers, CLA/047/LJ/13/1718/5. I have come across an additional three cases in secondary literature, bringing the total number to 62. Those three cases are excluded from the analysis here, as I did not consult them myself. 2 For brief but valuable discussions, see Martin Ingram, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England’, in Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy and Subordination in Britain and Ireland, ed. Michael J. Braddick and John Walter, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 69–70, 78; Kevin Siena, Venereal Disease, Hospitals, and the Urban Poor: London’s ‘Foul Wards’, 1600–1800, Rochester, 2004, pp. 193–5; Antony E. Simpson, ‘Vulnerability and the Age of Female Consent: Legal Innovation and its Effect on Prosecutions for Rape in Eighteenth-Century London,’ in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, Chapel Hill, 1988, pp. 193–6; Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, Chicago, 1998, pp. 210-18; Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person?”: Constructing the Child Rapist in Early Modern England’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 23, 2014, pp. 38–40, 42–5. 3 On the virgin cure explanation, see Siena, Venereal Disease, pp. 193-5; Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution, pp. 210–18; Simpson, ‘Vulnerability’, pp. 193–6; Toulalan, ‘Constructing the Child Rapist’, pp. 42–6. On lack of evidence for the virgin cure explanation, see Ingram, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England’, p. 78; Thomas Rogers Forbes, Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878, New Haven, 1985, p. 90. There is only one known instance in which a defendant cited the virgin cure to explain a rape. In a few cases from the late 1700s and early 1800s judges brought it up and counsel promptly dismissed it. 4 See Julie Gammon, ‘ “A Denial of Innocence”: Female Juvenile Victims of Rape and the English Legal System in the Eighteenth Century’, in Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State, ed. Stephen Hussey and Anthony Fletcher, Manchester, 1999, pp. 85, 87; Toulalan, ‘Constructing the Child Rapist’, p. 38; Garthine Walker, ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability in Popular Crime Reports in England, c.1670-c.1750,’ Past and Present 220, 2013, pp. 115–42, at p. 130. 5 See Robert B. Shoemaker, ‘The Old Bailey Proceedings and the Representation of Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth Century London’, Journal of British Studies 47, 2008, pp. 559-80; John H. Langbein, ‘Shaping the Eighteenth-Century Criminal Trial: a View from the Ryder Sources’, University of Chicago Law Review 50, 1983, pp. 1–136; John H. Langbein, The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial, Oxford, 2003, pp. 180–90. 6 Miranda Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century’, Gender & History 7, 1995, pp. 378–407, at p. 378. True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England, For a useful discussion of the value of legal stories as historical evidence, see Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England, Philadelphia, 2013, esp. pp. 52–86, 114–153. 7 LMA, City Sessions Papers, CLA/047/LJ/13/1735/3. 8 LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1749/01/051; OBPO, Jan. 1749, George Tennant (t17490113-15). Another case against Tenent suggests that he infected his victim, although the disease is not named: LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1749/01/052; see also LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1749/01/050. 9 OBPO, Aug. 1741, trial of John Senor (t17410828-63). This case and others like it are not included in my analysis because they do not explicitly refer to venereal disease. 10 OBPO, April 1740, trial of William MacCarrol (t17400416-50). 11 Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch, and Power in Seventeenth-Century England, New Haven, 2003, pp. 94–5; Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 5–6; Garthine Walker, ‘Everyman or a Monster? The Rapist in Early Modern England c. 1600–1750’, History Workshop Journal 76, 2013, pp. 5–31, at p. 18. On this same point for other periods, see Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 56–60; Louise A. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in Victorian England, London, 2000, pp. 90. Thirty-four of the cases here involved children aged ten or younger. 12 Walker, ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability,’ p. 132; Gammon, ‘ “Denial of Innocence”’, pp. 87–8. 13 The 34% figure is based on my own sample. The 11% figure is from Walker, ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability’, p. 115. 14 OBPO, April 1715, trial of Hugh Leeson, Sarah Blandford (t17150427-43); OBPO, Sept. 1738, trial of William Cunnington (t17380906-26); OBPO, Dec. 1735, trial of Edward Jones (t17351210-70). Quote is from OBPO, Dec. 1751, trial of John Bell, Lucy Harris, Richard Gyles (t17511204-36). 15 Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry)’; Garthine Walker, ‘Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England’, Gender and History 10, 1998, pp. 1–25, at pp. 56–7; Gowing, Common Bodies, pp. 92–3; Gammon, ‘ “A Denial of Innocence”’, p. 81; Christine M. Varholy, ‘ “But She Woulde Not Consent”: Women’s Narratives of Sexual Assault and Compulsion in Early Modern London’, in Violence, Politics, and Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Joseph P. Ward, New York City, 2008. 16 This was a common trend regardless of the presence of pox. See, for example, Cathy McClive, ‘The Hidden Truths of the Belly: the Uncertainties of Pregnancy in Early Modern Europe,’ Social History of Medicine 15, 2002, pp. 209–27, at pp. 96–8; Ingram, ‘Child Sexual Abuse in Early Modern England’, p. 70; Gammon, ‘ “A Denial of Innocence”’, pp. 83, 90. 17 OBPO, Sept. 1748, trial of William Garner (t17480907-50). 18 On smell, see Charles Peter, Observations on the venereal disease with the true way of curing the same, London, 1686, p. 28. On snuffling, see Daniel Turner, Syphilis: a Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease, London, 1717, pp. 224, 209. 19 OBPO, July 1735, trial of Edward Omsby, Martha Shelton alias Strutton Patrick Branan (t17350702-25). 20 OBPO, Oct. 1744, trial of Francis Moulcer (t17441017-25). 21 OBPO, April 1740, trial of William MacCarrol (t17400416-50). 22 OBPO, Sept. 1748, trial of William Garner (t17480907-50). 23 LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1717/06/035; OBPO, Jan. 1721, trial of William Robbins (t17210113-28); OBPO, Jan. 1723, trial of Edward Fox (t17230116-39). Quotes are from OBPO, July 1694, trial of Samuel Eales (t16940711-37); OBPO, Dec. 1685, trial of Leonard Bate (t16851209-28). 24 OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22). For another rape case that did not involve venereal disease but did mention difficulty walking, see OBPO, Dec. 1750, trial of Richard Knibb (t17501205-40). 25 OBPO, May 1754, trial of John Grimes (t17540530-1). 26 OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22). 27 OBPO, Aug. 1725, trial of Samuel Street (t17250827-14). 28 OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22); OBPO, Dec. 1735, trial of Edward Jones (t17351210-70); OBPO, July 1715, trial of William Cash (t17150713-54); OBPO, Dec. 1726, trial of Samuel Siddon (t17261207-49); OBPO, Jan. 1721, trial of William Robbins (t17210113-28); quote is from OBPO, April 1738, trial of George Manning (t17380412-56). 29 Cristian Berco, ‘The Great Pox, Symptoms, and Social Bodies in Early Modern Spain’, Social History of Medicine 28, 2015, pp. 225–44; Susan Staves, ‘The Puzzle of the Pox-Marked Body’, in A Cultural History of the Human Body: The Age of Enlightenment, ed. Carole Reeves, vol. 4, Oxford, 2010; Olivia Weisser, ‘Treating the Secret Disease: Sex, Sin, and Authority in 18th-Century Venereal Cases,’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91, 2017, pp. 685-712; Claudia Stein, ‘The Meaning of Signs: Diagnosing the French Pox in Early Modern Augsburg’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80, 2006, pp. 617–48. 30 OBPO, Jan. 1698, trial of Henry Simpkins (t16980114-38); also see OBPO, June 1698, trial of Robert Ingrum (t16980608-9). 31 LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1698/01/059. 32 These examples are from Wellcome Library, London (hereafter cited as Wellcome), MS.3631, Alexander Morgan, Medical case-book, f. 43-44; John Marten, A Treatise of the venereal disease, London, 1711, pp. 338, 326; John Marten, A Treatise of all the degrees and symptoms of the venereal disease, London, 1707, pp. 13, 17, 20, 27; OBPO, May 1754, trial of William Kirk (t17540530-36). 33 Several rape cases ended in acquittals (some of which then were retried as assaults) because medical experts purported to find evidence of venereal disease but not penetration: OBPO, May 1754, trial of John Grimes (t17540530-1); OBPO, Aug. 1694, trial of Thomas Mercer (t16940830-9); OBPO, May 1753, trial of John Birmingham (t17530502-35); OBPO, July 1751, trial of Christopher Larkin (t17510703-21); OBPO, Oct. 1694, trial of Robert Selman (t16941010-6). For similar examples from the later 1700s, see Stephen Landsman, ‘One Hundred Years of Medical Rectitude: Medical Witnesses at the Old Bailey 1717–1817’, Law and History Review 16, 1998, pp. 445–93, at p. 460. 34 OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22). 35 OBPO, May 1754, trial of John Grimes (t17540530-1); see also OBPO, Feb. 1719, trial of G—R—(t17190225-48); OBPO, Oct. 1744, trial of Francis Moulcer (t17441017-25). 36 OBPO, July 1750, trial of Anthony Barnes (t17500711-33); also see OBPO, Oct. 1744, trial of Francis Moulcer (t17441017-25). 37 OBPO, April 1740, trial of William MacCarrol (t17400416-50). For additional cases in which medical experts found venereal disease spread through touch or incomplete penetration, see LMA, City Sessions Papers, CLA/047/LJ/13/1735/3; LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1735/04/004; OBPO, May 1754, trial of William Kirk (t17540530-36); OBPO, July 1751, trial of Christopher Larkin (t17510703-21); OBPO, Aug. 1694, trial of Thomas Mercer (t16940830-9); OBPO, May 1754, trial of John Grimes (t17540530-1). On ‘confirmed’ poxes, see Joseph Cam, A short account of the venereal disease, London, 1719, pp. 9–10. 38 Wellcome, MS.MSL.113, Medical Lectures, 18th century, f. 150r; Thomas Garlick, A Mechanical Account of the Cause and cure of a Virulent Gonorrhaea, London, 1727, p. 51; OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22). Quotes are from OBPO, July 1715, trial of William Cash (t17150713-54); British Library, London, Add. MS 45670, Joshua Firth, Accompt-book (1727–1738), un-paginated. 39 OBPO, Oct. 1744, trial of Francis Moulcer (t17441017-25). 40 Gowing, Common Bodies, p. 92; Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, p. 59. 41 LMA, Middlesex Sessions Papers, MJ/SP/1749/01/52. 42 OBPO, Sept. 1718, trial of William Picket (t17180910-78); OBPO, Sept. 1697, trial of David Martin Shrider (t16970901-26); OBPO, Sept. 1717, trial of John Stevens (t17170911-41). 43 OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22); OBPO, Oct. 1735, trial of Julian Brown (t17351015-28). 44 OBPO, June 1752, trial of Patrick White (t17520625-30). 45 OBPO, April 1740, trial of William MacCarrol (t17400416-50); also see OBPO, June 1739, trial of Samuel Bird, Susannah Clark (t17390607-41). 46 OBPO, April 1754, trial of Hugh M’Kave (t17540424-29). See also OBPO, Sept. 1733, trial of John Cannon (t17330912-55); OBPO, May 1753, trial of John Birmingham (t17530502-35) 47 OBPO, Sept. 1733, trial of John Cannon (t17330912-55). 48 OBPO, May 1754, trial of William Kirk (t17540530-36). 49 Royal College of Surgeons, London, MS0183/1, Anon., Division of Simple Vices, f. 93r. 50 Wellcome, MS.4994, John White, Arts Master Piece, or a Companion for the Ingenious of Either Sex, p. 72. 51 Kathleen M. Brown, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, New Haven, 2009, esp chaps 1–2; Alice Dolan, ‘Touching Linen: Textiles, Emotion and Bodily Intimacy in England C. 1708–1818’, Cultural and Social History 16, 2019, pp. 145–64. 52 Brown, Foul Bodies, p. 30. 53 This summary is based on Walker, ‘Rereading Rape’; Walker, ‘Rape, Acquittal and Culpability’ Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order, pp. 55–6; Varholy, ‘ “But She Woulde Not Consent”’; Gowing, Common Bodies, pp. 90–101, 83; Gammon, ‘ “A Denial of Innocence”;’ pp. 88–90; Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry),’ pp. 382–5, 395. 54 The National Archives, Kew, Assizes, Northern and North-Eastern Circuits, Criminal Depositions and Case Papers, ASSI 45/10/1/145. 55 OBPO, Jan. 1739, trial of John Marsland (t17390117-25). For other examples, see OBPO, April 1740, trial of William MacCarrol (t17400416-50); OBPO, July 1678, trial of young fellow (16780907-50); OBPO, Sept. 1748, trial of William Garner (t17480907-50). 56 ‘Mr. Playstovves Epithalamium:/OR/ The Mariage of Pandarus and Flora’, Printed at London by GE, 1600–1624?, British Library, London, C.20.f.7.348-349, EBBA 30237. On representations of venereal disease in early modern English literature more generally, see Noelle Gallagher, Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination, New Haven, 2018. 57 OBPO, April 1754, trial of Hugh M’Kave (t17540424-29); OBPO, April 1680, trial of William Harding (t16800421-5). 58 OBPO, April 1680, trial of William Harding (t16800421-5); OBPO, Sept. 1748, trial of William Garner (t17480907-50); see also OBPO, Sept. 1716, trial of Mary Pewterer, (t17160906-24). 59 Bethlem Hospital Royal Archive, Beckenham, Bridewell Hospital Court Books, Minutes of the Court of Governors, Vol. 5, Nov. 1604, f. 3r, accessed online at: http://archives.museumofthemind.org.uk/BCB.htm. 60 OBPO, May 1722, trial of James Booty (t17220510-34); OBPO, July 1750, trial of William Tankling (t17500711-25); OBPO, July 1750, trial of Anthony Barnes (t17500711-33); OBPO, April 1747, trial of John Hunter (t17470429-28); OBPO, Feb. 1719, trial of --- (t17190225-48). On interrupted domestic labour, see Chaytor, ‘Husband(ry).’ 61 OBPO, May 1694, trial of Mustapha Pochowachett (t16940524-20); LMA, MJ/SP/1694/05/007. 62 Brown, Foul Bodies, pp. 31, 72. 63 OBPO, Aug. 1694, trial of Thomas Mercer (t16940830-9). On midwives’ roles as medical experts in court, see Cathy McClive, ‘Blood and Expertise: the Trials of the Female Medical Expert in the Ancien-Regime Courtroom’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, 2008, pp. 86–108; Gowing, Common Bodies, esp. pp. 71–3; Thomas R. Forbes, ‘A Jury of Matrons’, Medical History 31, 1988, pp. 23–33; Erwin Ackerknecht, ‘Midwives as Experts in Court’, Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 52, 1976, pp. 1224–8. The history of early modern medical forensics is substantial. Studies that I found helpful include Carol Loar ‘Medical Knowledge and the Early Modern English Coroner’s Inquest’, Social History of Medicine 23, 2010, pp. 475–91; David Harley, ‘The Scope of Legal Medicine in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1660–1760’, in Legal Medicine in History, ed. Michael Clark and Catherine Crawford, Cambridge, 1994; Landsman, ‘One Hundred Years of Medical Rectitude’. 64 OBPO, Sept. 1735, trial of Edmund Togwell, Peter Matthews (t17350911-55); OBPO, March 1720, trial of Michael Dobson (t17200303-48). 65 McClive, ‘Blood and Expertise’. 66 For example, see OBPO, Aug. 1694, trial of Thomas Mercer (t16940830-9); OBPO, May 1754, trial of John Grimes (t17540530-1); OBPO, July 1726, trial of Adam White (t17260711-69). 67 This overview of searchers is based on the ground-breaking work of Richelle Munkhoff in ‘Searchers of the Dead: Authority, Marginality, and the Interpretation of the Plague in England, 1574–1665’ Gender & History 11, 1999, pp. 1–29; quote is at p. 14. 68 OBPO, Dec. 1732, trial of Joseph Pearson (t17321206-69); OBPO, Sept. 1733, trial of John Cannon (t17330912-55); OBPO, April 1749, trial of James Penoroy (t17490411-22); OBPO, April 1754, trial of Hugh M’Kave (t17540424-29). 69 Janice Du Mont and Deborah White, ‘Barriers to the Effective Use of Medico-Legal Findings in Sexual Assault Cases Worldwide’, in Qualitative Health Research 23, 2013, pp. 1228–39. 70 OBPO, Dec. 1678, trial of Stephen Arrowsmith (t16781211e-2). © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Poxed and Ravished: Venereal Disease in Early Modern Rape Trials
JF - History Workshop Journal
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbab002
DA - 2021-07-27
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/poxed-and-ravished-venereal-disease-in-early-modern-rape-trials-7iVMietPcl
SP - 51
EP - 70
VL - 91
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -