Riddling Sex in Early Modern England

• In Event: Renaissance Jokes and Jokebooks

Abstract

“Belly to belly, hand upon back, I put a raw morsel in a gaping gap.” This paper will explore bawdy riddles such as this one, which use a process of “epistemological foreplay” to break down distinctions between the sexual and the non-sexual. The bawdy riddle, I propose, functions as follows: it depicts a sexual scene or image, and then reveals its answer to be something supposedly “non-sexual,” such as a candle, glove (or, in the above riddle, breastfeeding). At the same time, however, the seeming dichotomy between the sexual and the non-sexual created by these riddles is undermined by the way in which the riddles highlight the erotic charge that those objects do have. This paper will thus respond to recent criticism that asks how we are to understand “what sex is” in the early modern period via analysis of joke books and riddles, thereby illuminating the epistemological complexity of sex and sexual meaning.

Author

• Penelope Meyers Usher, New York University