"Mikrokosmographia"
Feb. 9th, 2016 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marnanel"Mikrokosmographia" by Helkiah Crooke (1576-1635) was the first book in English to use the word "clitoris". Oddly, there's not much of the book online [edit: there's a blog!] But here's page 238, where he explains about orgasms, lesbians, and squirting. I've modernised the spelling a bit.
"Although for the most part it hath but a small production hidden under the Nymphes [==labia], and hard to be felt but with curiosity, yet sometimes it groweth to such a length that it hangeth without the cleft like a man's member, especially when it is fretted with the touch of the cloaths, and so strutteth and groweth to a rigidity as doth the yard of a man. And this part it is which those wicked women do abuse called Tribades (often mentioned by many authors, and in some states worthily punished) to their mutual and unnatural lusts.
The use of this part is the same with the bridle of the yard [==the frenulum of the penis]; for because the Testicles of the women [==ovaries] are far distant from the yard [==penis] of the man, the imagination is carried to the spermatical vessels by the motion and attrition of this Clitoris, together with the lower ligatures of the womb, whose original [==the cervix] toucheth, cleaveth and is tied to the leading vessels of the seed. And so the profusion of their seed is stirred up for generation, for which business it was not necessary it should be large. Wherefore although by this passage their seed is not ejaculated, yet by the attrition of it their imagination is wrought to call that out that lieth deeply hidden in the body, and hence it is called "aestrum Veneris" & "dulcedo amoris". For in it with the ligaments inserted into it is, the especial seat of delight in their veneral embracements, as [Renaldus] Columbus imagineth he first discovered.
For Nature [...] hath given to all creatures both the instruments of conception, and hath also infused into them a strange and violent kind of delight, that none of the kinds of the creatures should perish but remain ever (after a sort) immortal. And truly it was very necessary that there should be a kind of pleasant force or violence in the Nature of mankind to transport him out of himself, or beside himself as it were, in the act of generation; to which otherwise (being master of himself) he would hardly have been drawn; which ecstasy (for it is called a little epilepsy, or falling sickness) is caused by the touch of the seed upon the nervous and quick-sensed parts as it passeth by them."
"Although for the most part it hath but a small production hidden under the Nymphes [==labia], and hard to be felt but with curiosity, yet sometimes it groweth to such a length that it hangeth without the cleft like a man's member, especially when it is fretted with the touch of the cloaths, and so strutteth and groweth to a rigidity as doth the yard of a man. And this part it is which those wicked women do abuse called Tribades (often mentioned by many authors, and in some states worthily punished) to their mutual and unnatural lusts.
The use of this part is the same with the bridle of the yard [==the frenulum of the penis]; for because the Testicles of the women [==ovaries] are far distant from the yard [==penis] of the man, the imagination is carried to the spermatical vessels by the motion and attrition of this Clitoris, together with the lower ligatures of the womb, whose original [==the cervix] toucheth, cleaveth and is tied to the leading vessels of the seed. And so the profusion of their seed is stirred up for generation, for which business it was not necessary it should be large. Wherefore although by this passage their seed is not ejaculated, yet by the attrition of it their imagination is wrought to call that out that lieth deeply hidden in the body, and hence it is called "aestrum Veneris" & "dulcedo amoris". For in it with the ligaments inserted into it is, the especial seat of delight in their veneral embracements, as [Renaldus] Columbus imagineth he first discovered.
For Nature [...] hath given to all creatures both the instruments of conception, and hath also infused into them a strange and violent kind of delight, that none of the kinds of the creatures should perish but remain ever (after a sort) immortal. And truly it was very necessary that there should be a kind of pleasant force or violence in the Nature of mankind to transport him out of himself, or beside himself as it were, in the act of generation; to which otherwise (being master of himself) he would hardly have been drawn; which ecstasy (for it is called a little epilepsy, or falling sickness) is caused by the touch of the seed upon the nervous and quick-sensed parts as it passeth by them."
