I've been wondering about the evolution of sex positions names. I do not know enough books and pieces of writing of that time countaining such names, so I really have no idea.
Let me offer a small window into the names of sex positions as one guide called them c. 1500.
In the summer of 1524, an artist named Giulio Romano was working on painting saints in the Vatican. In the spirit of bored workers and doodling schoolchildren everywhere, he decided to dash off 16 sketches of obscene character to amuse his friends. In the words of one contemporary, these sketches "dealt with the various attitudes and postures in which lewd men have intercourse with lewd women." Had this been a century beforehand, a good number of rich and powerful nobles would have had a laugh at the sketches, passed them around to their friends, and then they would have disappeared forever. However, along with the printing press, another German technology with great and terrible potential had filtered down into Italy—engraving.
Inspired by the printing press, artists looking for mass reproduction had turned to carving a block of wood, filling the gaps with ink, and then pressing them on paper, resulting in what was called a 'woodblock print.' These woodblocks were capable of several thousand impressions, and were often colored in with watercolors or by hand. In fact, woodblocks were most often used to create playing cards. The downside to using wood was that the images would begin to fade and wear down after a few thousand impressions. Additionally, like with the printing press, demand very quickly outstripped supply, and an alternative method was needed. This alternative was found in copper, first by goldsmiths (who had a right to metal engraving under feudal law), and then by painters, the most famous and influential of which was Albrecht Dürer. Dürer, much like Aretino, realized that the developing middle class could not yet afford to own beautiful paintings or decorations, but they could afford copper engravings, which could be sold by the hundreds of thousands.
Although Dürer was the first to realize the potential profits and fame, he was not the only one. One Marcantonio Raimondi (who drew our picture of Aretino above) , from Bologna, stole Dürer's engraving technique and used it to print a few hundred copies of Romano's dirty pictures, arguing in a letter to his friend that "they will circulate, and [you and I] will at the same time become both rich and famous." And they did. However, Raimondi perhaps sold the engravings far too eagerly and recklessly, to every possible customer, which, even in Rome, led to his arrest and imprisonment by Clement VI. In a lucky break, his friend Pietro Aretino managed to secure his release. The thankful Raimondi showed Aretino the engravings that he had been imprisoned for, and Aretino declared that he was inspired by them, and wrote 16 sonnets to go along with them, dedicating them in a letter to “all hypocrites [such as Giberti], for I am all out of patience with their scurvy strictures and their villainous judgment and that dirty custom that forbids the eyes to see what most delights them. What harm is there to see a man possess a woman? Are the beasts freer than we?” The pairing of the engravings with Aretino’s dirty poems created something really unique—perhaps the first Playboy Magazine in all of history.
The combined work of these three men was a work called I Modi and it was explosive in its success, crossing Europe like wildfire and being translated and spewed into new editions for centuries. The origanls are largely lost, the British Library has the only recorded surviving ones from the second edition--you can see a picture here of the remainders:https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/I_modi_raimondi.JPG
However in 1602, one Agostino Carracci made copies of the originals for a French translation. These editions that he captioned with the names of various Greek and Roman figures and god(desse)s are the versions that come down to us today. Their subtitles would go on to describe some sexual positions for the next century or so. For example, the position that we call wheelbarrow was termed the Bacchanal style in later pornography. Another, the Herculean described what we might call a standing position. I've compiled several of these in this imgur album [super NSFW]
