The Renaissance in Europe revived not only the arts of painting and literature: from the late fifteenth century onwards, the sex-advice industry resurfaced and rapidly began to churn out international bestsellers, thanks to a vital new innovation – the printing press.

      It had been invented in the mid-1450s and soon became available to entrepreneurs at relatively affordable prices. Ever since this point, the sex industry has relied on latest-tech tricks to pump its wares out faster than bureaucrats and lawmakers can ban them. The relationship has grown so close that the industry has even come to determine the direction that technology takes. In the 1970s, for example, no one knew which of the two rival home-videotape systems, Betamax or VHS, would dominate the market. For a while, it was neck and neck: Betamax had gone on sale first and many users believed it was better quality. But VHS was cheaper for film-making. Porn-movie producers predictably chose profits over art and went for VHS – which meant that masses of home-video buyers quickly followed suit, along with video-rental shops, which in the early days were exclusively pornographic. Bye-bye Betamax. Likewise, the internet would never have grown so rapidly without the financial success of its biggest market by far.

      But this sort of innovation first occurred in Renaissance Italy, where many of the new-fangled printing presses were run by fly-by-night organizations. These were the pirate radio stations of their day, creating an anarchic free-for-all of new and seditious books. There were at least 1,300 publishers in sixteenth-century Italy and more than a third of them were based in Venice, which quickly became the main international marketplace, selling books to buyers from all over Europe. The Catholic Church’s censors suddenly found they had trouble keeping up with the written word. Censorship scored a few spectacular successes but ultimately failed to restrict the free circulation of ideas. The average Venetian book’s print run was probably around a thousand, though bestsellers may have run to 4,000 or more.

      This wild, new info-frontier had few rules. If you could get away with it, then it was probably OK. Copyright hardly existed and libel laws were just as difficult to enforce. In 1540, preambles to legislation in Venice, where book publishing had become a huge source of local wealth, lamented that shoddy sleazebag printing was bringing disgrace to the city. Laws threatened to confiscate and burn cheap, pirated editions of popular works but these appear to have been merely the products of gesture-politics and no such crackdowns seem to have materialized (we can safely guess that plenty of bribes changed hands, though).

      Amid the chaos, sex-manual writers thrived, producing barrow-loads of cheap, low-quality advice books that were poorly covered and bound – that’s if the publishers bothered to bind them at all. Their size and type made them instantly recognizable as lascivious lit. The freely printed word also enabled eccentrics, quacks, visionaries and even churchmen to discuss their strange sex theories in intimate detail in private books, with little fear of criticism. Bizarre medical ideas were no rarity in the Renaissance, which evolved the theory of the wandering womb. If a woman became hysterical or misbehaved, this was blamed on her uterus having got dislodged and gone storming around, wreaking internal havoc. This, the theory claimed, was caused by the womb having been starved of sufficient intercourse or reproduction.

      Other ideas included Giovanni Marinello’s cure for premature ejaculation, in his 1563 Medicine Pertinent to the Infirmities of Women. This was based on the theory that women could not get pregnant if they did not orgasm, which presented a problem for premature-ejaculators. The answer for premature-ejaculators, therefore, was for them to tie string around their testicles. When the wife was ready to orgasm, she could untie the knot to receive hubby’s semen – just so long as she was good at undoing knots at arm’s length in the dark while orgasming and at the same time being careful not to injure her husband. Ouch.

      But the most notorious of all the Renaissance love manuals did not rely on pseudo-science – it invented the simple formula of neat-drawing-plus-snappy-text that 450 years later was to make The Joy of Sex so successful. I modi (The Ways) was an explicitly illustrated guide to pleasurable sexual positions, which was first published in 1524. The first edition was simply a compilation of fine-art drawings of sixteen different sex acts by Giuliano Romano, the talented 25-year-old Mannerist protégé of Raphael. Pope Clement VII was enraged by it and ordered all copies burned. He also prohibited any form of distribution, imprisoned Romano and warned that anyone who published it again would be executed. In spite of this heavy deterrent, the book became an object lesson in the near impossibility of censoring pirate printers. A second edition emerged three years later, each picture now accompanied by a sonnet written by Pietro Aretino, a journalist, publicist, entrepreneur and art dealer who had become infamous as one of the lewdest wits in all Italy. The captions were forthright, to say the least. As for wit, perhaps tastes have changed. One reads: ‘My legs are wrapped around your neck. Your cazzo’s in my cul, it pushes and thrashes. I was in bed, but now I’m on this chest. What extreme pleasure you’re giving me. But lift me on to the bed again – down here, my head hangs low, you’ll do me in. The pain’s worse than birth-pangs or shitting. Cruel love, what have you reduced me to?’

      Ensuing years brought further bootleg copies, and eventually the number of positions grew to 31 as imitators added later and inferior drawings. After Aretino’s death in 1556, the term ‘Aretinian postures’ became synonymous across Europe with acrobatic sex. The book was a popular read and won celebrity endorsement: Casanova recalls in his memoirs how he spent New Year’s Eve 1753 performing Aretino’s ‘straight tree’ position with a nun. He says it featured the man standing and holding the woman upside-down for mutual oral sex. It makes a change from singing ‘Auld Lang’s Syne’.

      In Britain, in the wake of the Protestant Reformation, attitudes to marital sex had thawed in some denominations of the Church – especially among the Puritans. Their name has become a modern byword for all things strait-laced, but they actually believed pleasurable marital sex to be part of the holy sacrament. Early legal records in Puritan New England even record cases of husbands being admonished for failing to make love to their wives. Puritan marriage manuals completely contradicted Catholic distaste for spouse-on-spouse action.