And before that, it didn’t exist
Cats: Ilona's Take|In 1492 (if memory serves me) Columbus discovered America.
What a time of discovery, the Renaissance! A resurgence of art, music, architecture and literature, the like of which hadn’t been seen in western Europe for several hundred years. Sculpture, painting, gracious buildings, symphonies, poetry, essays. Political and philosophical thought moved in bold new directions. Science blossomed.
And in 1559, Columbus — Renaldus, not Christopher, no relation — discovered something he called the amor Veneris, vul dulcedo, (“the love or the sweetness of Venus”).
Three guesses what that might be.
Officially, this would have been the result of dissecting cadavers, a chancy business in the days when this was illegal, and the odds of being caught for the sin of post-mortem could have resulted in a fresh cadaver for your fellow anatomists. (As in, you’d be hung. Capital crime, messing with the body which houses the soul.)
He had, he announced, discovered “the seat of a woman’s delight” — which kind of warms you to him, doesn’t it? Nice to hear about the fellows who concern themselves with such things…
Moreover, he had discovered that this particular item would “throb with brief contractions” during sex, causing a woman’s “semen” to flow “swifter than air.” Seems our man Renaldus had a little on-the-ground experience. (And that female ejaculation was a given.)
But amor Veneris, vul dulcedo is a bit of a mouthful. By the time this tidbit of information made its way north to England some 55 years later, the English term was clitoris. Not as lyrical, not as pretty, but shorter. (It’s probably from the Greek ‘kleitor’, meaning “little hill”.)
One wonders: armed with this brave new information, did the intrepid scientists go home and do a little field work of their own?
