ABSTRACT
Whatever the oversexed male author of A Game at Chess may have been thinking, to modern readers a book seems an improbable symbol for the scrotum. If we sexualize writing at all, we are more likely to think of phalluses than testicles. Of course, this penile preference reflects the historical shift in emphasis that I have already discussed, which makes us uncomfortable with the genital proportions assumed by Michelangelo and Rabelais. Most of us would accept Freud’s insistence that maleness be symbolized by “long, stiff objects”; unlike the seventeenth-century French priest and influential skeptical philosopher Pierre Charron, when we think of “The body of man” few of us would begin by observing that it “consisteth of a number of parts inward and outward, which are all for the most part round and orbicular, or coming near unto that figure,” and few of us would immediately go on to mention the “stones” (testicles) without ever even specifying the penis at all.
