I apologize for posting so many comments in a short time -- I'm one of those who hadn't caught up with the new service, so received 14 articles at once a few days ago.
As a past doctoral student of Catholic theology I greatly appreciate your sensitive commentary on this 19th century text. I have one minor cavil. I think the passage on the liceity of a woman "of colder nature" touching herself before sexual relations refers to foreplay (though self-administered), not masturbation.
I am the proud owner of a copy of "Fundamental Marriage Counseling" by Denis Cavanagh, M.D., published in 1957 with an Imprimatur from Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle of Washington D.C. (Archbishop O'Boyle is known to history for two things: Integrating the Catholic schools in D.C. when public schools were still segregated, and suspending diocesan priests who publicly dissented from Humanae Vitae in 1968. Liberal or conservative? Actually, devotedly Catholic.) This copy was signed by Dr. Cavanagh and given to the Archbishop to thank him for his support. Cavanagh was of course writing before Vatican II and committed to Catholic morality, but benefited from the knowledge of sexual physiology of that time (often quoting the consensus of secular medical experts). So, for example, regarding sexual positions he says it is a matter of what is comfortable and desirable for both partners, and for a woman whose hymen is intact he recommends "woman on top" so she has more control and can minimize any discomfort. (For "man on top" he tells the guys to help support their weight on their elbows.) Freed from any imagined correlation between position and likelihood of conception, this very traditional Catholic account of sex is both frank and less subject to real or imagined sexist overtones. Fascinating.
"Unfortunately, I found his footnotes utterly inscrutable (my man, my bish, Your Excellency Frank: “L. vi. n. 199.” is not a citation! It’s a cipher!), so I don’t know where most of those quotations came from, but they are all from sources Bp. Kenrick considered weighty."
I can solve this one. The L stands for Liguori (you misspell his name as Ligouri). I figured this out because I did a search online for the quote in the work that was attributed to "L. vi. n. 199".
Well, actually, it's not 199. The quote is actually found in 909; the 199 appears to be an error of citation or typo. 199 of Book VI can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Rv3P_Wp43BYC/page/301/mode/2up?view=theater and it says absolutely nothing about it; indeed, 199 is about the Eucharist. I am not sure how many of the footnotes include typo errors like this. The other citations we see attributed to "L, vi." on the prior page which mentions in footnotes "L. vi. n. 918" and "Ibidem, n. 919") seem more accurate, as they come from the actual section on sexual ethics.
So anyway, that's what that footnote means. These kinds of abbreviated footnotes are very annoying indeed. While I can understand a desire to save space, there was plenty of room in these particular footnotes to simply write out "Liguori". Indeed, looking at the earliest pages of the work, he does write out the still abbreviated but nevertheless more comprehensible "S. Alph. l." in the footnotes. So perhaps the reader is supposed to figure out the L is in reference to that, but it makes it confusing because when he writes "S. Alph. l." he has the L be lowercase, but then when he defaults to simply L, he does it uppercase, making the connection harder to figure out.
I apologize for posting so many comments in a short time -- I'm one of those who hadn't caught up with the new service, so received 14 articles at once a few days ago.
As a past doctoral student of Catholic theology I greatly appreciate your sensitive commentary on this 19th century text. I have one minor cavil. I think the passage on the liceity of a woman "of colder nature" touching herself before sexual relations refers to foreplay (though self-administered), not masturbation.
I am the proud owner of a copy of "Fundamental Marriage Counseling" by Denis Cavanagh, M.D., published in 1957 with an Imprimatur from Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle of Washington D.C. (Archbishop O'Boyle is known to history for two things: Integrating the Catholic schools in D.C. when public schools were still segregated, and suspending diocesan priests who publicly dissented from Humanae Vitae in 1968. Liberal or conservative? Actually, devotedly Catholic.) This copy was signed by Dr. Cavanagh and given to the Archbishop to thank him for his support. Cavanagh was of course writing before Vatican II and committed to Catholic morality, but benefited from the knowledge of sexual physiology of that time (often quoting the consensus of secular medical experts). So, for example, regarding sexual positions he says it is a matter of what is comfortable and desirable for both partners, and for a woman whose hymen is intact he recommends "woman on top" so she has more control and can minimize any discomfort. (For "man on top" he tells the guys to help support their weight on their elbows.) Freed from any imagined correlation between position and likelihood of conception, this very traditional Catholic account of sex is both frank and less subject to real or imagined sexist overtones. Fascinating.
"Unfortunately, I found his footnotes utterly inscrutable (my man, my bish, Your Excellency Frank: “L. vi. n. 199.” is not a citation! It’s a cipher!), so I don’t know where most of those quotations came from, but they are all from sources Bp. Kenrick considered weighty."
I can solve this one. The L stands for Liguori (you misspell his name as Ligouri). I figured this out because I did a search online for the quote in the work that was attributed to "L. vi. n. 199".
See, that particular citation is found on page 311 (https://archive.org/details/theologiaemoral01kenrgoog/page/n332/mode/2up) and the quote in question it refers to is "si morbus esset diuturnus, et non proxime tendens ad mortem, nempe quod non soleat de brevi et facili mortem inferre" and so on. So I do a search online for the start of it ("si morbus esset diuturnus") and viola, https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_4zOmww5CU68C/page/n337/mode/2up?q=%22si+morbus+esset+diuturnus%22 pops up. This also explains the numbers, as L means Liguori, vi means Book vI, and the n. 199 is that it's number 199.
Well, actually, it's not 199. The quote is actually found in 909; the 199 appears to be an error of citation or typo. 199 of Book VI can be viewed at https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_Rv3P_Wp43BYC/page/301/mode/2up?view=theater and it says absolutely nothing about it; indeed, 199 is about the Eucharist. I am not sure how many of the footnotes include typo errors like this. The other citations we see attributed to "L, vi." on the prior page which mentions in footnotes "L. vi. n. 918" and "Ibidem, n. 919") seem more accurate, as they come from the actual section on sexual ethics.
So anyway, that's what that footnote means. These kinds of abbreviated footnotes are very annoying indeed. While I can understand a desire to save space, there was plenty of room in these particular footnotes to simply write out "Liguori". Indeed, looking at the earliest pages of the work, he does write out the still abbreviated but nevertheless more comprehensible "S. Alph. l." in the footnotes. So perhaps the reader is supposed to figure out the L is in reference to that, but it makes it confusing because when he writes "S. Alph. l." he has the L be lowercase, but then when he defaults to simply L, he does it uppercase, making the connection harder to figure out.