{"id":175752,"date":"2026-10-22T08:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T12:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175752"},"modified":"2026-10-21T12:47:33","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T16:47:33","slug":"unexpected-literary-history-of-the-dildo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/22\/unexpected-literary-history-of-the-dildo\/","title":{"rendered":"Murano Parsnips: The Unexpected Literary History of the Dildo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The

The School of Venus, or the Ladies Delight, Reduced into Rules of Practice<\/em><\/a>, by Michele Millot (1680).<\/p><\/div>\n

The first dildo named in English literature appears in a brothel on Valentine\u2019s Day. Thomas Nashe\u2019s <\/span>The Choise of Valentines<\/span><\/i>, an erotic farce written in the early 1590s, follows Tomalin, an impatient lover visiting a sweetheart in the bordello where she works<\/span>. He pays the hostess (a \u201cfoggy three-chinned dame\u201d) and hurries upstairs through the building\u2019s \u201ccrankled wayes.\u201d But his reunion with Mistress Francis is urgent and disastrously brief. \u201cI faint! I yeald!\u201d he cries. Left unsatisfied, Francis briskly reaches for her \u201clittle dildoe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Francis makes the device\u2019s advantages ruthlessly clear. She prefers it to Tomalin\u2019s \u201csillie worme\u201d: 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 \u201cknave\u201d\u2014a mischievous lover and jaunty sexual performer who \u201cplayes at peacock,\u201d soon becoming Francis\u2019s true valentine. \u201cBehold! how he usurps in bed,\u201d she cries. For Tomalin, that is precisely the problem; he angrily dismisses the dildo as a filthy, \u201cdasht\u201d toy and \u201csenceless counterfet.\u201d But the violence of the complaint<\/span> betrays his true feelings. The dildo becomes an antagonist: an obscene rival, a bedroom interloper, one that should be \u201cwhipt with nettles,\u201d as one might another man.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014such as the leather penises of Aristophanes\u2019 <\/span>Lysistrata<\/span><\/i>, used by women during a sex strike\u2014but a Renaissance luxury device. It is made of \u201cthick congealed glasse,\u201d enveloped in white silk, and designed to improve upon flesh by \u201ctickling\u201d Francis in the right places, producing \u201cmanie a sighe.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At first, Francis\u2019s 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 \u201cforraine artes,\u201d as Nashe terms them, came from Murano, an island of furnaces on the Venetian lagoon, whose masters had made their name synonymous with spotless <\/span>cristallo<\/span><\/i> 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\u2014glass carrots and quinces, crystal turnips and other gleaming delicacies. The nuns have a name for them: <\/span>pastinaca muranese<\/span><\/i>, Murano parsnips.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDildoe,\u201d after first entering English in Nashe\u2019s poem, would become associated with delight through the Italian <\/span>diletto<\/span><\/i>, and later defined more gravely as a <\/span>penis succedaneus<\/span><\/i>, a penis substitute. But the word\u2019s origins are uncertain; it may have first circulated in the nonsense refrains of merry ballads and tavern songs, alongside euphemisms like <\/span>nonny-nonny<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>ding-a-ding<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> and <\/span>fa la la<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The dildo flourished in this unstable register across bawdy verse, pornography, satire, and political lampoon\u2014which 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\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201cMerry Monarch\u201d 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\u2019s brothel and into court satire, where it proved extraordinarily generative.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In one notorious Restoration lampoon, the dildo enters public life as \u201ca noble Italian called Signior Dildo,\u201d a foreign gentleman whose \u201cvirtuous abilities\u201d quickly make him a sensation at court. Ladies \u201cfall down and worship Signior Dildo,\u201d 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 \u201cready and dumb.\u201d<\/span> In a later poem, the dildo becomes a Frenchman, \u201cMonsieur Thing,\u201d traveling through London in women\u2019s beds and climbing the social ladder like an ambitious gigolo. In both poems, he is explicitly named a \u201cRival\u201d\u2014not only a substitute for husbands, lovers, and courtiers but a preferred competitor. One admirer judges Monsieur Thing\u2019s caresses \u201cwithout denyal the best, most pleasing thing as e\u2019er she felt.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The joke makes him a convenient vessel for Restoration alarms: aristocratic excess, women\u2019s appetite, foreign contamination, and the court\u2019s political impotence. But wonderful details emerge, as the poems also make the dildo a commodity\u2014sold in the \u201cToy-Shop\u201d in Covent Garden, and along the fashionable St. James\u2019s Street, where it can be found among \u201cpowder, gloves, essence.\u201d At the Royal Exchange, the dildo appears in a glittering display alongside other imported luxury goods: frangipani-scented gloves, tortoiseshell snuffboxes, and velvet <\/span>mouches<\/span><\/i> (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 \u201ctender Virgins\u201d and others for the \u201cwide salacious Slit.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Another scandalous work of erotica, <\/span>The School of Venus<\/span><\/i>, 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\u2019s readership was often male. Samuel Pepys bought the \u201crogueish\u201d book on the Strand in 1668, took it home and masturbated, recording the climax in his diary using multilingual code\u2014\u201cuna vez to decharger\u201d\u2014then setting the volume on fire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span><\/p>\n

Across this erotic culture, the dildo was imagined with an increasing attention to likeness. Some were painted skin-tone, veined, and capillaried to \u201ccome up so near to Nature.\u201d Others were hollow, equipped with chambers, springs, and pumps able to expel \u201cwarm water\u201d or \u201cmilk\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u2014Murano dildos, for example, have entered museum collections as \u201choax drinking glasses,\u201d their hollow interiors reassigned from bed to table. In 1992, when excavators at a Roman fort near Hadrian\u2019s 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\u2019s gate? Or, as it was catalogued for decades, a \u201cdarning tool\u201d?<\/span><\/p>\n

Other records show active destruction. In 1672, customs officers uncovered a \u201chogshead\u201d (a large barrel) filled with contraband French dildos. The cargo was broken open and burned publicly at a marketplace \u201cwithout mercy.\u201d The episode inspired poetry, such as <\/span>Dildoides<\/span><\/i>, a mock epic whose title mimics Homeric register and turns the burned barrel into a fallen Troy: \u201cO barbarous Times, where Deities are made themselves a Sacrifice.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But the dildo\u2019s 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, <\/span>Malleus Maleficarum<\/span><\/i>\u2014or \u00a0The <\/em><\/span>Hammer of Witches\u2014<\/span><\/i>documents the clerical terror over penis theft, explaining that witches could take away the male organ by a glamour, leaving a man to find \u201cnothing but his smooth body.\u201d 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 \u201coats\u201d and hide them away \u201cin a bird\u2019s nest\u201d or a \u201cbox.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Beneath the fantasy of male loss lies another, more disturbing anxiety that women might possess penises themselves\u2014not inert substitutes, but as things to wear and use. It imagines women\u2019s sexual independence, going beyond solitary pleasure to the potential for sex between women, making male bodies unnecessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u201ca red piece of leather\u201d and \u201ca wooden stick.\u201d She confessed to tying it around her waist with \u201ca string\u201d and having sex with a married woman. The crime didn\u2019t have a name in 1477. The angry, baffled judges issued a death sentence and Katherina was thrown into the Rhine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such records are rare\u2014not because women escaped regulation, but because the law rarely named their conduct directly. The evidence survives in scattered forms\u2014town trial records, legal treatises, chronicles, and journals. In the sixteenth century, two Spanish nuns were burned for using \u201cmaterial instruments\u201d; in France, a woman was executed for the \u201cwickedness which she used to counterfeit the office of a husband.\u201d Not long after, a weaver who lived as a man and married a woman was hanged in France for using \u201cillicit devices.\u201d By the eighteenth century, such figures were increasingly named \u201cfemale husbands.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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, \u201cfemale husbands\u201d were prosecuted for vagrancy, perjury, or breach of the peace. In the process, Signior Dildo\u2019s dangerous counterpart disappears from view: the woman who possesses, wears, and uses the dildo herself.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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Izabella Scott is the author of<\/em>\u00a0The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial<\/a>\u00a0(2026), published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her writing has appeared in the\u00a0<\/em>Financial Times, <\/em>Granta, the\u00a0<\/em>London Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>The World of Interiors.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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