ABSTRACT
Helkiah Crooke’s description of the organs of generation in his influential English anatomical treatise, Microcosmographia, implicates the sexual act in forgetfulness. He argues that had not “the God of Nature” placed “so incredible a sting or rage of pleasure” in the “obscœne parts,” “as whereby we are transported” “for a time out of our selves,” an extreme pleasure that erases memory, no one would be willing to “defile” themselves “in such impurities.”1 Although this ecstatic transport is cognate with the erotic madness whose central symptom is obsessive recollection and which is described by such writers as Plato, Lucretius, and Robert Burton, what interests me here is Crooke’s focus on the conjunction of eroticism and forgetfulness. He suggests that this oblivion, what “Hippocrates calleth a little Epilepsie or falling sickness” (Crooke 1615: 199), makes women willing to endure pregnancy, arduous childbirth, and the “disquiet” of child-rearing, and it makes men able to bear the degradation that Crooke associates with sexual coupling. Only temporary forgetfulness would, Crooke asserts, make “men” willing to indulge in this carnality and turn away from the “divine nature” that they sense within themselves. This linkage between procreative pleasure and amnesia and between birth and forgetting is a reiterated topos in early modern culture, one that recurs in medical treatises and in such works as Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and Spenser’s Faerie Queene.2 The resonances of this linkage engage the disturbing materiality of procreative bodies, and, in the process, raise questions about the relationship between the body and the senses, on the one hand, and forgetting, on the other.
