The School of Venus, or the Ladies Delight, Reduced into Rules of Practice, by Michele Millot (1680).

The first dildo named in English literature appears in a brothel on Valentine’s Day. Thomas Nashe’s The Choise of Valentines, an erotic farce written in the early 1590s, follows Tomalin, an impatient lover visiting a sweetheart in the bordello where she works. He pays the hostess (a “foggy three-chinned dame”) and hurries upstairs through the building’s “crankled wayes.” But his reunion with Mistress Francis is urgent and disastrously brief. “I faint! I yeald!” he cries. Left unsatisfied, Francis briskly reaches for her “little dildoe.”

Francis makes the device’s advantages ruthlessly clear. She prefers it to Tomalin’s “sillie worme”: it is always stiff, cannot make her pregnant, and does not fail through haste or fatigue. The dildo is not a sad substitute, but a youthful “knave”—a mischievous lover and jaunty sexual performer who “playes at peacock,” soon becoming Francis’s true valentine. “Behold! how he usurps in bed,” she cries. For Tomalin, that is precisely the problem; he angrily dismisses the dildo as a filthy, “dasht” toy and “senceless counterfet.” But the violence of the complaint betrays his true feelings. The dildo becomes an antagonist: an obscene rival, a bedroom interloper, one that should be “whipt with nettles,” as one might another man.

The poem treats the dildo with the inflated seriousness of a mock epic, describing its hero with astonishing material precision. This is not the passing joke of older comic traditions—such as the leather penises of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, used by women during a sex strike—but a Renaissance luxury device. It is made of “thick congealed glasse,” enveloped in white silk, and designed to improve upon flesh by “tickling” Francis in the right places, producing “manie a sighe.” 

At first, Francis’s device seems like an elaborate erotic fancy. But surviving dildos made from Venetian glass, held in museums in Trier and Paris, suggest a startling literalness. The most prized of these “forraine artes,” as Nashe terms them, came from Murano, an island of furnaces on the Venetian lagoon, whose masters had made their name synonymous with spotless cristallo and richly veined glass mimicking precious stones. A few decades earlier, the Italian poet Pietro Aretino described similar devices in an erotic dialogue set in a Venetian convent. In one scene, a boy arrives with a basket of translucent fruit for a banquet—glass carrots and quinces, crystal turnips and other gleaming delicacies. The nuns have a name for them: pastinaca muranese, Murano parsnips. 

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“Dildoe,” after first entering English in Nashe’s poem, would become associated with delight through the Italian diletto, and later defined more gravely as a penis succedaneus, a penis substitute. But the word’s origins are uncertain; it may have first circulated in the nonsense refrains of merry ballads and tavern songs, alongside euphemisms like nonny-nonny, ding-a-ding, and fa la la. 

The dildo flourished in this unstable register across bawdy verse, pornography, satire, and political lampoon—which is partly why it is difficult to trace. Private, taboo, and vulnerable to censorship and confiscation, the dildo rarely appeared plainly as itself. In Nashe’s poem it was unusually explicit, serving at once as a pleasure-object, comic rival, and threatening joke. But later poems took the imaginative excess further, dressing the dildo ever more elaborately as something else.

Restoration London offers a particularly vivid instance of its public disguise. Between 1660 and 1685, Charles II returned from a long French exile to a nation emerging from Puritan rule. The “Merry Monarch” restored the theaters, patronized the arts, and made courtly pleasure conspicuous. His mistresses became public figures; sexual language, too, became a medium of courtly wit, scandal, and political attack. Outside the royal palace, London was expanding into a city of coffeehouses, playhouses, pleasure gardens, and ill-gotten wealth. New goods moved through its streets and shops, as the literary dildo moved out of Nashe’s brothel and into court satire, where it proved extraordinarily generative. 

In one notorious Restoration lampoon, the dildo enters public life as “a noble Italian called Signior Dildo,” a foreign gentleman whose “virtuous abilities” quickly make him a sensation at court. Ladies “fall down and worship Signior Dildo,” the poet jeers; one conceals him up her sleeve, another steals him from her mother. Unlike the importunate men to whom penises are attached, the obedient dildo is “ready and dumb.” In a later poem, the dildo becomes a Frenchman, “Monsieur Thing,” traveling through London in women’s beds and climbing the social ladder like an ambitious gigolo. In both poems, he is explicitly named a “Rival”—not only a substitute for husbands, lovers, and courtiers but a preferred competitor. One admirer judges Monsieur Thing’s caresses “without denyal the best, most pleasing thing as e’er she felt.” 

The joke makes him a convenient vessel for Restoration alarms: aristocratic excess, women’s appetite, foreign contamination, and the court’s political impotence. But wonderful details emerge, as the poems also make the dildo a commodity—sold in the “Toy-Shop” in Covent Garden, and along the fashionable St. James’s Street, where it can be found among “powder, gloves, essence.” At the Royal Exchange, the dildo appears in a glittering display alongside other imported luxury goods: frangipani-scented gloves, tortoiseshell snuffboxes, and velvet mouches (beauty patches affixed to the face with pine gum). These dildos are made of horn, ivory, or bone; dressed in satin, velvet, and taffeta for enhanced stimulation. One poem claims there are models for “tender Virgins” and others for the “wide salacious Slit.”

Another scandalous work of erotica, The School of Venus, arrived in London from France as a dialogue of sexual instruction, advising young women on pleasure commodities like a life-size bronze lover, complete with an erect, red-tipped penis. But the novel’s readership was often male. Samuel Pepys bought the “rogueish” book on the Strand in 1668, took it home and masturbated, recording the climax in his diary using multilingual code—“una vez to decharger”—then setting the volume on fire. 

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Across this erotic culture, the dildo was imagined with an increasing attention to likeness. Some were painted skin-tone, veined, and capillaried to “come up so near to Nature.” Others were hollow, equipped with chambers, springs, and pumps able to expel “warm water” or “milk” through an opening at the tip. This was not mere literary invention. An eighteenth-century ivory dildo found in a convent near Paris, hidden in the seat of an armchair, was fitted with a pump to simulate ejaculation. This mechanism answered a period belief that female pleasure depended, at least in part, on male emission. These ingenious instruments were made not only to resemble a penis but to outdo it.

Yet little remains of this ingenuity. Some examples survive in glass and ivory, but exhibits are scarce; leather rots, wax deforms, glass breaks. Even when a dildo survives, it may be given another name—Murano dildos, for example, have entered museum collections as “hoax drinking glasses,” their hollow interiors reassigned from bed to table. In 1992, when excavators at a Roman fort near Hadrian’s Wall found a life-size wooden phallus complete with carved glans, the scholarly speculations took on a certain comedy. Was it a pestle used for grinding herbs? A protective sculpture mounted on the fort’s gate? Or, as it was catalogued for decades, a “darning tool”?

Other records show active destruction. In 1672, customs officers uncovered a “hogshead” (a large barrel) filled with contraband French dildos. The cargo was broken open and burned publicly at a marketplace “without mercy.” The episode inspired poetry, such as Dildoides, a mock epic whose title mimics Homeric register and turns the burned barrel into a fallen Troy: “O barbarous Times, where Deities are made themselves a Sacrifice.”

But the dildo’s comic life has a darker underside. The fifteenth-century German inquisitor Heinrich Kramer imagined artificial penises as instruments of supernatural disorder, long before Restoration poets turned them into figures of satire. His witch-hunting manual, Malleus Maleficarum—or  The Hammer of Witches—documents the clerical terror over penis theft, explaining that witches could take away the male organ by a glamour, leaving a man to find “nothing but his smooth body.” The accused women were said to hoard these living members; Kramer warns they could domesticate stolen penises, keeping them as prisoners or pets. Witches would fatten them up with “oats” and hide them away “in a bird’s nest” or a “box.”

Beneath the fantasy of male loss lies another, more disturbing anxiety that women might possess penises themselves—not inert substitutes, but as things to wear and use. It imagines women’s sexual independence, going beyond solitary pleasure to the potential for sex between women, making male bodies unnecessary.

Occasionally, this possibility becomes visible in the court records. In a trial from fifteenth-century Germany, a woman named Katherina Hetzeldorfer was tried for sexual relations with women. At trial, Katherina scandalized the court by describing a homemade penis that she fashioned with “a red piece of leather” and “a wooden stick.” She confessed to tying it around her waist with “a string” and having sex with a married woman. The crime didn’t have a name in 1477. The angry, baffled judges issued a death sentence and Katherina was thrown into the Rhine.

Such records are rare—not because women escaped regulation, but because the law rarely named their conduct directly. The evidence survives in scattered forms—town trial records, legal treatises, chronicles, and journals. In the sixteenth century, two Spanish nuns were burned for using “material instruments”; in France, a woman was executed for the “wickedness which she used to counterfeit the office of a husband.” Not long after, a weaver who lived as a man and married a woman was hanged in France for using “illicit devices.” By the eighteenth century, such figures were increasingly named “female husbands.”

The unnameable fact was sex between women. The dildo mattered because it seemed to reproduce the penile act, making it recognizable as (female) sodomy. Over the ensuing centuries, courts increasingly displaced the offense into other legal categories; in England, “female husbands” were prosecuted for vagrancy, perjury, or breach of the peace. In the process, Signior Dildo’s dangerous counterpart disappears from view: the woman who possesses, wears, and uses the dildo herself.