On Lesbian Acts and Female Pleasures in Juvenal Commentaries from Antiquity to 1500
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the representation of sex between women in an understudied archive: commentaries on Juvenal’s Satires from antiquity to the end of the fifteenth century. By tracking the changes in glosses to a passage in the Sixth Satire that refers to sex between women, it contributes to our understanding of how and when the discourse on sex between women changed with the rise of humanism and the increased availability of classical texts after the advent of print in Europe. The article also addresses the vexed question of “lesbian” sex and female pleasure as understood in early modernity by considering the interpretations offered for Juvenal’s mention of urinating women and their urine—which was sometimes taken to be female sperm generated through sexual contact between women. The article tracks how the implications of this generation are addressed in different commentaries to either emphasize or downplay female pleasure. Cet article explore la représentation des pratiques sexuelles entre femmes dans les sources insuffisamment étudiées que sont les commentaires des Satires de Juvénal, de l’Antiquité à la fin du quinzième siècle. L’examen de l’évolution des gloses à un passage de la sixième satire évoquant des rapports sexuels entre femmes permet de mieux comprendre quand et comment les discours à ce sujet se sont transformés, en rapport avec l’émergence de l’humanisme et la disponibilité croissante de textes de l’Antiquité classique avant l’arrivée de l’imprimerie en Europe. Cet article traite également de la question polémique de la sexualité « lesbienne » et du plaisir féminin, tel qu’ils étaient conçus pendant les débuts de la modernité, en examinant les interprétations de la mention que fait Juvénal de femmes urinant et de leur urine, cette dernière étant parfois considérée comme la semence féminine produite pendant le contact sexuel entre femmes. On retrace comment les conséquences de cette production sont traitées dans les différents commentaires qui accentuent ou minimisent le plaisir féminin.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".