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CHAPTER 5

The Joys of Martha Joyless

Queer Pedagogy and the (Early Modern) Production of Sexual Knowledge

I want to inspire queers to be more articulate about the world they have already made, with all its variations from the norm, with its ethical understanding of the importance of those variations, with its ethical refusal of shame or implicitly shaming standards of dignity, with its refusal of the tactful silences that preserve hetero privilege, and with the full range of play and waste and public activity that goes into making a world.

—Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal

Teachers and writers might better serve the claims of knowledge if we were to resist not sex but the impulse to split off sex from knowledge.

—Jane Gallop, Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment

“A Wanton Mayd Once Lay with Me”

In Richard Brome’s stage play The Antipodes, a comedy first performed in 1638, a theme of sexual distress is introduced by a reference to two women lying in bed together. Martha Joyless, a countrywoman suffering from a virgin’s melancholy straight out of Robert Burton,¹ is dismayed that her marriage of three years has never been consummated; she reports to her new London acquaintance, Barbara, of her equally melancholic husband, Peregrine: “He nere put child, nor any thing towards it yet / To me to making.”² At the same time, she expresses ignorance about the actual means of conceiving children: “For were I now to dye, I cannot guesse / What a man do’s in child-getting” (1.3.319–20). Joyless and clueless as she is, however, she is not altogether without sexual experiences, as becomes clear when she relates to Barbara this memory:

I remember

A wanton mayd once lay with me, and kiss’d

And clip’t, and clapt me strangely, and then wish’d

That I had beene a man to have got her with childe.

What must I then ha’ done, or (good now tell me)

What has your husband done to you?

(1.3.320–25)

In an aside, Barbara directs the audience’s perceptions: “Was ever / Such a poore peece of innocence, three yeeres married?” (1.3.326–27). She then asks Martha directly: “Does not your husband use to lye with you?” Martha’s earnest answer further displays her ignorance:

Yes, he do’s use to lye with me, but he do’s not

Lye with me to use me as he should, I feare;

Nor doe I know to teach him, will you tell me,

Ile lye with you and practise, if you please.

Pray take me for a night or two, or take

My husband and instruct him, But one night.

Our countrey folkes will say, you London wives

Doe not lye every night with your owne husbands.³

(1.3.328–36)

Despite Martha’s unwitting, if nonetheless thoroughly conventional, jab at the promiscuity of city wives, the dramatic focus throughout her request for erotic instruction is her astonishing “innocence.” So eager for knowledge that she would place both herself and her husband in Barbara’s bed, Martha’s rural simplicity is posed against Barbara’s urban sophistication. Clearly, Martha is the butt of this sexual joke.⁴ Yet, her lack of understanding of the mechanics of procreation is nonetheless accommodating of her fond recollection of a “wanton mayd” who kissed, clipped, and clapped her. Modern editors gloss “clip’t and clapt” as “embraced and fondled passionately,” as well as “embraced and patted”—with the added suggestion that “clapt” “may imply something more firmly administered”; and one editor suggests that “‘slap’ is a recent equivalent”—still so used, I am told, in contemporary Ireland.⁵ Apparently, this unnamed maid’s behavior took the form of passionate, even forceful caresses that were not incompatible with her own desire to be penetrated and impregnated. Like Barbara’s urbane sophistication, this maid’s erotic desires and actions contrast comically to Martha’s erotic ignorance and dependence on the knowledge of others.

The play’s thematization of Martha Joyless’s sexual dilemma invites us to consider anew the historical production of sexual knowledge: the conditions of collecting, creating, and disseminating information about sexuality, in the past as well as in the present. Although the intent of Brome’s play is to satirize Martha’s “innocence” and to pity her marital lot,⁶ I want to resist its satiric pull long enough to consider the implications of the fact that she does articulate knowledge about sex, although not the kind her culture readily acknowledges. Of what does Martha’s knowledge and ignorance consist?⁷ On the one hand, she is inexperienced in the mechanics of sex with men—so much so that although she is, by her own admission,

past a child

My selfe to thinke [children] are found in parsley beds,

Strawberry banks or Rosemary bushes,

she nonetheless confesses to “have sought and search’d such places / Because I would faine have had one” (1.3.306–8). On the other hand, she is experienced, however briefly, in the erotic caresses of a woman; but other than realizing that this is not the way to procreate, she possesses little understanding of what such contact signifies. Indeed, given her incomprehension, one hesitates to call it knowledge at all.

Martha’s asymmetrical position of knowing and not knowing (or more precisely, of having experienced a form of “sex” eccentric to the dominant discourse that is then overwritten as simplicity) introduces sexual knowledge as a problem of pedagogy: Martha seeks tutelage from Barbara because she has not been properly taught by her husband. At the same time, in its lack of accommodation to both dominant discourses of reproductive sexuality and to the counterdiscourses generated by queer scholarship, Martha’s situation forces us to confront, as an epistemological problem, the function of sexual knowledge as an analytical category within historiography. One only has to inquire whether the conceptual categories thus far made available by the history of sexuality help to elucidate Martha’s erotic situation to see the difficulty, given the present state of our knowledge, of doing her analytical justice. As prior chapters have detailed, within the history of sexuality, debate has focused largely on whether same-sex sexualities in eras prior to the nineteenth century are best understood as connoting sexual identities or sexual acts. Yet, neither the logic of sexual identities (that is, the self-perception or social ascription of being a “lesbian,” “heterosexual,” or even a “sapphist”) nor the idiom of sexual acts (in which all nonreproductive contact is simply a form of carnal sin) adequately comprehends or describes the complex meanings of Martha’s experience.

Nor are the analytical categories that have illuminated the relationship of modern homosexuality to knowledge of particular help here: this is not the “open secret” analyzed by D. A. Miller, nor is it precisely the “privilege of unknowing” anatomized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick—not only because the epistemology of the closet requires homosexuals, that is, sexual identities, in order to enact its discipline, but because Martha is so very open about what is not a secret.⁸ Nor is it sufficient to fall back on the tired trope of inconceivability that has dominated understanding of lesbianism in the past; erotic acts between women are part of what is at stake, albeit comically, in Martha and Barbara’s exchange, or the joke would lose its effectiveness. We are in undefined territory here, where the relations of knowledge to subjects, and both to eroticism, have yet to be charted.⁹

Indeed, to what extent is it possible to apprehend Martha’s subjective desire at all? The passage from The Antipodes inscribes nothing of her possible pleasure and is equally silent about her possible displeasure. Only Martha’s ambiguous descriptors of the “wanton” maid and her “strange” behavior offer any clue—and both of these could signify approval, disapproval, or neither.¹⁰ Other than her wish to learn what her husband must do to conceive a child, Martha gives us little access to her desire or interiority. Indeed, her indifference as to whether Barbara bed down with her or her husband underscores that nothing essential about the state of Martha’s erotic subjectivity is revealed in her remembrance.¹¹

Even when we broaden the analytical optic beyond the question of Martha’s subjectivity to survey the wider implications of her recollection, its significance remains obscure. Indeed, the status of her erotic remembrance is a prime example of the principle that eroticism need not signify or convey particular meanings. Is Martha’s experience with her unnamed bedmate a transgressive act? Is her narrative a tale of misconduct? To the contrary: no repugnance on the part of other characters is generated by her story of clipping and clapping, nor is any stigma attached to it. Barbara’s pity is explicitly directed toward the sorry state of Martha’s marriage:

Poore heart, I gesse her griefe, and pitty her.

To keepe a Maiden-head three yeares after Marriage,

Under wed-locke and key, insufferable! monstrous,

It turnes into a wolfe within the flesh.

(1.3.261–64)

Contrary to modern expectations, the homoerotic experience recalled by Martha is neither cause nor symptom of her illness; rather, it is the protracted keeping of her “Maiden-head” that has given rise to her virgin’s melancholy and obsession with “child-getting.” It is not just that Martha’s ignorance is its own form of knowledge or that her knowledge is overwritten as a form of ignorance, but that her ill health is a result of her ignorance. It is from this position that her “virgin’s melancholy” authorizes her quest for carnal knowledge.¹²

The play is quite clear about the need for Martha’s marriage to be consummated, and it pursues this end via a medical discourse and therapeutic intervention that diagnoses Martha as “full of passion,” “distracted,” “mad for a child,” and, my personal favorite, “sicke of her virginity” (1.2.211; 2.1.769; 2.1.770, 2.1.770, emphasis mine). Under the dominant Galenic medical dispensation, the conventional treatment for virgin’s melancholy was a wedding, the presumption being that legitimate sexual congress would bring about the orgasm that purges the sexually congested body of its built-up humors.¹³ Absent regular vaginal intercourse, an alternative treatment prescribed in several medical textbooks was the manual manipulation of the genitals by a female midwife;¹⁴ given that Martha’s sexless marriage is diagnosed as the cause of her melancholy, it is significant that The Antipodes does not allude to this method of cure. To do so, of course, would be to call further attention to the same-sex contact that the play introduces only in order to forget. Instead, Martha’s narration calls little attention to itself and is quickly passed over as the text focuses on the means of bringing Peregrine back to a state of mental health capable of the penetrative sexual performance demanded by the tight early modern linkage of marriage to reproduction.¹⁵

Despite the fact that Martha “presents” as both a melancholic and hysteric, and, in seeking Barbara’s help, positions herself as a patient, it is Peregrine who is judged to be sicker than his wife, and it is he who holds the promise of the couple’s return to sexual health. Peregrine’s melancholy, initially caused by an overindulgence in reading travel literature, was exacerbated by his parents’ refusal to allow him to travel the world; instead, seeking to bind him close to home—and in spite of his overdetermined name—they married him off to Martha. Forbidden to travel, he is now “in travaile” (1.3.230), his mind fully taken up in wandering “beyond himselfe” (1.2.198). His refusal to consummate his marriage apparently derives from an overly credulous reading of Mandeville’s Travels, which includes a description of the “Gadlibriens” who employ other men to deflower their wives because of the risk of being stung by a serpent lodged within the female body.¹⁶ There is much that could be said about Peregrine’s resistance to marital sexuality and the specific form that his resistance takes. Motivated in part by the desire for travel,¹⁷ his “Mandevile madnesse” (4.10.2400) could also be motivated by other desires—homoerotic ones, perhaps—that would render this unhappy family multiply queer. Given that travel in this period offered Englishmen opportunities for a variety of sexual encounters—travel narratives are full of descriptions of both cross-sex and same-sex liaisons, whether fantasized or real, consensual or coercive—it would be a mistake to view Peregrine’s resistance to marital sexuality as a rejection of sex altogether.

Nonetheless, the play enacts Brome’s customary belief that the best way to remedy madness is by humoring delusions through metatheatrical fantasy. Under the direction of a doctor and a rather eccentric lord, Peregrine’s family and a troupe of actors collude in convincing the patient that he has journeyed to the Antipodes (when he actually has been under the influence of a sleeping potion). Not surprisingly, the Antipodes, also called anti-London in the play, provides Brome with the opportunity for an extended dramatization of the world turned upside down, where lawyers are honest, servants govern their masters, and men are ducked as scolds.¹⁸ The climax of this theatrical inversion therapy occurs when Peregrine, who, in good colonialist fashion, proclaims himself king of the realm, marries and takes to bed the Antipodean queen: Martha, thinly disguised.¹⁹ Thus tricked into consummating his marriage by committing mock adultery, Peregrine is cured of his melancholy. As the lord Letoy surmises, Peregrine’s

much troubled and confused braine

Will by the reall knowledge of a woman

… be by degrees

Setled and rectified.

(4.12.2444–47)

In fulfillment of the expectations of Galenic psychophysiology, coitus proves to be a potent restorative. The newly unified spouses emerge from their bedroom kissing, caressing, and cooing, to the obvious delight of the other characters, who, throughout much of the stage action, have functioned as onstage voyeurs. Peregrine confirms his cure: “Indeed I finde me well.” While Martha responds: “And so shall I, / After a few such nights more” (5.2.3016–18).

The Antipodes is extremely canny about staging its interest in sex through metatheatrical means. Although the consummation of the Joyless marriage takes place offstage, this does little to minimize its erotic interest;²⁰ indeed, the play’s dramatization of onstage voyeurs who are deeply invested in the success of the coital cure saturates the performance space with eroticism.²¹ A subplot dramatizing the attempted seduction of another woman, Diana, by the fantastic lord Letoy (who turns out to be her long-lost father) adds to the erotic effect.²² In addition, roughly half of the vignettes staged to convince the delusional Peregrine that he has voyaged to the end of the earth concern sexual matters: courtiers who complain of being “jested” sodomitically from behind (4.6.2105–11); old women who “allow their youthfull husbands other women…. And old men [who] give their young wives like license” (2.7.1085–86); a maid who attempts to sexually assault a gentleman (4.2.1934–72); and a tradesman who procures a gentleman to sexually pleasure his wife, to the acclaim of the gentleman’s lady (2.7, 2.8, 3.8). With its sexual thematic and innuendos, with its treatment of voyeurism as entertainment and entertainment as cure, The Antipodes publicizes sex in such a way as to come very close to making sex public.

At issue, of course, is not only what Martha or Peregrine knows, but, given that this play was written for the stage, what the performers and audience know. What kind of sexual knowledge is being produced and exchanged, not only among the characters involved in this metatheatrical sex play, but also among the performers, and between them and the audience? Given the cultural context of the original production—wherein cross-dressed boy actors played the female parts—some audience members may have experienced an additional homoerotic frisson. Yet, while transvestite boy actors may ironize Martha’s assertion of erotic ignorance, their performance of femininity does not resolve the issues raised by it. Evidently, The Antipodes was designed to meet the needs of Christopher Beeston’s company with its large numbers of children.²³ One might well ask, how did this play function pedagogically for these young players? Just what was it that they were learning? No less salient is the pervasive interpretation of Brome’s drama, which, based on the play’s Jonsonian commitment to theater as comic therapy, submits that the “real patients” are those who are watching the play.²⁴ To what kind of “therapy” is the audience being subjected through The Antipodes’ public discourse about sex?

To speak of public sexual discourse in the early modern era may seem odd, especially insofar as modern relations between public and private were only beginning to emerge.²⁵ Yet certain aspects of sexual life that we now tend to consider private were performed “publicly” in a variety of ways, including the sexual contact that arose, either consensually or through acts of violence, out of the practice of sharing beds (especially common among servants and between servants and masters); the sex unwittingly witnessed by travelers, both male and female, sleeping in communal inn rooms; and deliberate acts of group sex and voyeurism in taverns, fairs, and, later in the century, molly houses.²⁶ More conventionally, the early modern community was unabashedly concerned with the status of marital consummation. Until the urban elite started to separate themselves off from communal celebrations after the Restoration, wedding festivities across all status groups were accompanied by a good deal of sexual innuendo and erotic play, not least of which was the customary ritual of wedding guests escorting the bridal couple to bed, relieving them of the ribbons and laces that served as clothing fasteners, and “throwing the stocking,” or relieving them of their hose.²⁷ As David Cressy notes, these actions were meant both “to help them to their happiness, and to help establish plausible evidence of their consummation.”²⁸ The public theater likewise promoted its own discourse of sex, in no small part through stage comedy’s focus on physicality, bodily senses, domestic scenarios, and, more often than not, erotic desire. A traditional comedic plot device, the bed-trick, makes comic hay out of sexual knowledge relations. Temporarily inverting the usual patriarchal hierarchy in order to reintegrate the recalcitrant man into the reproductive community, the conventional Renaissance bed-trick dramatizes male ignorance about particular female bodies while asserting female knowingness over the duped male. The Antipodes trumps this convention by exploiting Peregrine’s delusion and making Martha pose as his sexual fantasy, the Antipodean queen. Depending less on male ignorance and female duplicity than the collusion of an entire community, the bed-trick in Brome’s play functions like the ritual festivities of the wedding night, forging ties of communal sexual knowledge through the approbation of marital consummation.

Within the play’s context of marital dis-ease, theatrical sex therapy, publicity about sex, and communal investment in it, it is striking that Martha’s narration of her prior homoerotic encounter with the “wanton mayd” elicits no overt condemnation—indeed, it seems to exist in some field of discretion untouched by moral, medical, religious, or legal judgment. We would err in judging the application of this discretion to be a form of tolerance, for tolerance assumes recognition of the object of forbearance—precisely what is lacking here. Nor is such discretion explained by other conceptual safety nets that might seem to minimize the threat of female-female sex: that Martha’s sexual experience is presented in the past tense; that she now is safely married. After all, she has just asked Barbara to repeat, if in a more pedagogical guise, the bedroom performance of the “wanton mayd,” and it is the miserable state of her marriage that has led her to look outside it for erotic instruction. We need only imagine the direction the plot might have taken if, in the adulterous mode of Restoration comedy, Barbara had capitalized on maximizing her own erotic pleasure and, in response to Martha’s plea, bedded down with Peregrine, or Martha, or with both of them; the fact that the play entertains no such possibility for comic entanglement confronts us with the particular indifference with which Martha’s reminiscence is met.

I am not suggesting that a patriarchal teleology or heterosexual privilege fail to organize the logic of Martha’s situation: Martha’s naïveté expresses an altogether conventional form of early modern femininity; her friend’s embraces are positioned narratively as a precursor to marital intercourse; and her request for Barbara’s tutelage likewise has the restoration of procreative sexuality as its end. Nonetheless, Martha’s predicament forces us to acknowledge a decided disjunct between marriage and sex. Of what does Martha’s marriage of three years consist? Whatever it is, it is not sex: and this absence of joy, of jouissance, is quite literally driving her mad. Even though Brome’s play craftily brings about a three-years-delayed consummation to great communal fanfare and tendentiously maps erotic jouissance onto a reproductive imperative, the fact remains that Martha’s journey to erotic satisfaction can hardly be called straight. And having turned to her friend Barbara for erotic instruction once, it is certainly conceivable, if we permit ourselves the intellectual indulgence of thinking outside the plot, that she might do so again. That, at least, is a conceit made possible by Martha’s erotic remembrance, embedded as it is in a scene of erotic yearning—a yearning simultaneously for knowledge and sex—that the play both gestures toward and disavows.

“What Must I Then Ha’ Done, or … What Has Your Husband Done to You?”

By raising marital sexuality to the status of a question and by posing that question by means of female-female eroticism, Brome’s representation of the state of Martha’s knowledge urges us to reconsider the state of our knowledge about early modern sex: not only what we know, but also how we know it. I thus turn away from the possible pleasures we might infer from Martha’s fictional biography to pursue instead the knowledge relations that the representation of her ignorance performs. Within this inquiry, Martha functions less as a character or a subject—indeed, her flat characterization all but precludes that—than as a heuristic for accessing strategies of knowledge production. To treat her in this way no doubt accords to Brome’s play more intellectual heft than it deserves. Nonetheless, this strategy propels analysis further than does simply rehearsing the terms of early modern patriarchy or, alternatively, fantasizing a queer erotic elsewhere for women beyond patriarchy’s frame.

To begin, then, with the current state of historical knowledge. If, as I’ve begun to intimate, the historiography of sexuality fails to do justice to Martha’s situation, so too does the work of most feminist and social historians. Taking gender as its primary term of analysis, for instance, feminist scholars have tended to focus on sexuality as it pertains to women’s so-called “life cycle” as maid, wife, mother, or widow.²⁹ The patriarchal “life cycle” likewise informs the work of most social historians, whose studies of marriage, gender identity, and social transitions generally are organized along the lines of wooing, wedding, birth, and maternity.³⁰ Were they to read The Antipodes, such scholars would likely emphasize Martha’s obsession with child-getting, thereby implicitly privileging a reproductive imperative over sexual pleasure. Those scholars of sexuality who attempt to work outside the logic of the female reproductive life cycle tend to do so by deploying categories of deviance or transgression: premarital sex, bastardy, adultery, prostitution.³¹ Whether the critical accent is on the disciplining of women’s bodies or opportunities for female agency, transgression has functioned heretofore as the primary analytical means for conceptualizing erotic conduct that fails to conform to patriarchal mandates. Yet, because notions of norms and their transgression are structured by a binary of the licit and the illicit, they necessarily are indexed to the dominant social orthodoxy—even when the intention is to uncover the existence of those who would defy it.

But what of Martha’s memory of kissing and clipping? Some forms of female eroticism are neither subsumed under marital exigencies nor performed in defiance of them; not primarily organized by the neat logic of a life cycle lived in compliance with patriarchal ideology or its transgression, they cannot adequately be comprehended within the licit/illicit divide.³² Thus, simply adding female homoeroticism to a list of deviant acts or identities would fail to account for Martha’s desire for marital sexuality and procreation alongside her experience of sex with a woman. Nor does this divide help us to map the complex relations inscribed in Martha’s sexual history: casual sex with an unnamed woman; marriage utterly devoid of sex; request to a female acquaintance for erotic instruction; marital consummation with an unfaithful husband. Much less does it account for the erotic improvisation of Martha’s anonymous bedmate, who passionately embraced and slapped her companion while expressing her own desire to conceive a child. Was she as ignorant about the means of procreation as Martha? How are we to understand the maid’s desire to be impregnated by Martha and Martha’s desire to learn how to conceive by having sex with Barbara? How do we account for the queer circuit whereby these characters’ desires, frustrations, and hopes are represented?

The representation of Martha’s sexual history urges a recognition that none of the bicameral rubrics through which we routinely process early modern sex—the licit and the illicit, the homo and the hetero, the queer and the normative, erotic acts and erotic identities—provide us with much analytical purchase on the sexual and knowledge relations enacted in this play. Let us ask, then: What are the historical conditions of the production of erotic knowledge in the early modern period? To date, the most analytically generative method for approaching this question has been Michel Foucault’s distinction between “two great procedures for producing the truth of sex”: an ars erotica, supposedly pursued by premodern and non-Western cultures through practices of initiation, secrecy, and mastery; and a scientia sexualis, the distinctively modern, Western disciplinary apparatus, based on confession, which elicits and produces knowledge of sexuality in order to administrate it.³³ Yet, despite the therapeutic intent of Brome’s play, Martha’s homoerotic experience is not subject to any particular procedure for producing truth. Her request for erotic initiation, after all, is denied; and if the ars erotica proves unavailable to her, also unavailable is the disciplinary effect of confession. It is striking that Martha’s confession is one that no one wants to hear—not Barbara, not the Doctor, perhaps not even Brome, so quickly does he pass over it. It would appear that Martha’s problems, experiences, and queries exist outside of the nexus of knowledge, truth, and power that both the ars erotica and the scientia sexualis, however distinct their methods, tend to produce. Martha’s tenuous and ambiguous relation to erotic knowledge thus calls for a mode of analysis eccentric to Foucault’s opposition of initiation to discipline.

Although Brome denies Martha access to an ars erotica, some knowledge of continental Renaissance pornography seems to inform his approach to the relation between sexual knowledge and sexual pedagogy. As pornography has developed in the West, it has seemed to possess an overdetermined relationship to pedagogy; not only, as Sarah Toulalan remarks, is “one person’s pornography … another person’s sex education,”³⁴ but one of the defining features of “modern” Western pornography from its inception in the sixteenth century is the extent to which it thematizes and dramatizes sex as tutelage. The enduring tropes of early modern literary obscenity were created by Italians such as Pietro Aretino, whose Ragionamenti (1534) depicts an older, experienced woman initiating a young, “innocent” girl into the arts of love—first by talking, then by doing.³⁵ Her own desire for pleasure drawn forth from a homoerotic scene of instruction, the girl then is emboldened to seek out more “mature” pleasures with men. While female naïveté is a compelling trope that invites instruction, mature women are also imagined as telling men how best “to do it” in Aretino’s Sonnetti lussuriosi and Thomas Nashe’s narrative poem “The Choise of Valentines.”³⁶ If, in Aretino’s sonnets, the women are simply egging their male partners on to try greater variety, in Nashe’s poem, the hapless male lover, Tomalin, is clueless about the mechanics of sex, specifically about how to pleasure a woman. Francis helpfully instructs him in what is needed, crying out “Oh not so fast” (line 179), and then directing: “Togeather lett our equall motions stirr / Togeather let us live and dye, my deere” (lines 183–84).³⁷ Considerably elaborated by the French later in the seventeenth century,³⁸ the pedagogical conventions of pornography pursue their purpose by means of a variety of narrative strategies: loquacious female speech; graphic nomination of body parts; sequential movement from sex talk to sex acts; a metaphoric inventiveness that mirrors the inventiveness of bodily postures and activities; and the eroticization of narrative itself.³⁹ And women, for whatever reason, often play the role of instructor.⁴⁰

All of this inventiveness and loquaciousness is denied to Martha. On the one hand, as Laura Gowing remarks, “this was a culture in which it was positively virtuous not to be able to describe sex”—particularly, one might note, for women.⁴¹ Even within women’s unofficial oral culture, marital status tended to regulate the circulation of knowledge about sexual matters: “The key rituals of the female body, those where knowledge was shared and experiences were public, were organized by and for married women. Being single meant exclusion from the exchanges of reproductive knowledge.”⁴² Although alternative ways to gain entrance to such knowledge existed, especially among communities unconcerned with social legitimation (such as bands of rogues or prostitutes), Martha remains outside of such circuits of verbal instruction. And her plea to another wife for information results not in the sharing of women’s secrets but the communal orchestration of her husband’s sexual performance.