HIST 354: Discipline and Pleasure in the Early Modern City (HC)

Encompassing the long 18th century, Amatory Pleasures examines a broad variety of topics in the history of sexuality in England. It includes discussion of sexual perversion, criminal conversation, erotic gardens, gentlemen's homosocial societies, flagellation, pornography, writings of courtesans and the world of female friendship, revealing the secret or hidden meanings circulating between mainstream and covert activities of the 18th century. Julie Peakman draws connections between these pieces and situates them within current debates and examines how Georgian sexual activity was integrated from low life and high places, from brothels to palaces.

Bad Books reconstructs how the eighteenth-century French author Nicolas-Edme Rétif de la Bretonne and his writings were at the forefront of the development of modern conceptions of sexuality and pornography. Although certain details are well known (for example, that Rétif's 1769 treatise on prostitution, Le Pornographe, is the work from which the term pornography is derived, or that he was an avid foot and shoe fetishist), much of this story has been obscured and even forgotten. This book is also about literary history and how it is written: it explores how Rétif, perceived as a bad author in both senses of the term, and his contributions were glossed over or condemned, such that the originality of his texts has still not been fully established. Placing Rétif's novels and short stories in dialogue with his autobiographical writings as well as with contemporary and modern critical commentaries, the various chapters of the book examine the author's repeated testing of the limits of censorship to define and redefine the boundaries of obscenity; his advancement of the modern form and definition of pornography through a focus on intimacy and (female) pleasure; his detailed narrative explorations of foot and shoe fetishisms that were later appropriated by the sexologists; and his development of theories of eugenics and reproduction in his utopian science fiction. The history of Rétif's texts and their reception reveals an evolution in the criteria of what is considered to be "good" or "worthy" literature-a category once defined purely on moral grounds that is increasingly seen in cultural terms.

An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

Focusing on the period 1566-1656, this original and lively study, first published in 2008, sheds light on the daily lives and material culture of ordinary prostitutes and their clients in Rome after the Counter-Reformation. Tessa Storey uses a range of archival sources, including criminal records, letters, courtroom testimonies, images and popular and elite literature, to reveal issues of especial concern to contemporaries. In particular, she explores how and why women became prostitutes, the relationships between prostitutes and clients, and the wealth which potentially could be accumulated. Notarial documents provide a unique perspective on the economics and material culture of prostitution, showing what could be earned and how prostitutes dressed and furnished their homes.

The question of an erotic readership has always vexed scholars. With little evidence of anyone's actually reading erotic material, scholars have had to make do with variations of an "ideal reader" approach. Insofar as it presupposes authorial intention and a stable meaning, this theoretical model proves unsatisfactory. Using an interdisciplinary approach, Carnal Reading: Early Modern Language and Bodies proposes a new theory of erotic reading that refigures bodily responses as constitutive of cognitive understanding.

In this book, Bonnie Lander Johnson explores early modern ideas of chastity, demonstrating how crucial early Stuart thinking on chastity was to political, medical, theological and moral debates, and that it was also a virtue that governed the construction of different literary genres. The volume also offers new readings of Milton's Comus, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, Henrietta Maria's queenship and John Ford's plays. It will appeal to scholars of early modern literature, theatre, political, medical and cultural history, and gender studies.

This book charts the prosecution of sodomy in such cities as Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, and explains the reasons behind local differences and variations in the intensity of prosecution over time. It also examines how sodomy was viewed particularly within the local culture.

Concentrating largely on the 'middle ranks' of Renaissance society this book addresses lacunae in current scholarship on the social and visual dimensions of sexuality in early modern Italy. Looking at neglected archival resources, amateur pornography and material artefacts often dismissed by historians of art and society, contributors here expose the existence of a pervasive erotic culture in which sexually explicit images, gestures and objects were considered essential to a variety of rituals and social occasions.

In Erotic Exchanges, Nina Kushner reveals the complex world of elite prostitution in eighteenth-century Paris by focusing on the professional mistresses who dominated it. In this demimonde, these dames entretenues exchanged sex, company, and sometimes even love for being "kept." Most of these women entered the profession unwillingly, either because they were desperate and could find no other means of support or because they were sold by family members to brothels or to particular men. A small but significant percentage of kept women, however, came from a theater subculture that actively supported elite prostitution. Kushner shows that in its business conventions, its moral codes, and even its sexual practices, the demimonde was an integral part of contemporary Parisian culture. Kushner's primary sources include thousands of folio pages of dossiers and other documents generated by the Paris police as they tracked the lives and careers of professional mistresses, reporting in meticulous, often lascivious, detail what these women and their clients did.

Because every previous edition of Casanova's Memoirs had been abridged to suppress the author's political and religious views and tame his vivid, often racy, style, Willard R. Trask's translation of the complete original text in six double volumes is an important resource. For the French text, see the Bouquins edition (2013-15) or the volumes in the Pléiade series (2013).

This book explores images whose sexual content has all too often been either ignored or denied. Each chapter is devoted to a place that artists associated with sexual activity or desire: the bed, the dressing area of the home, the window and doorway, the bath, and the street. Diane Wolfthal looks at both canonical works, such as Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait and Petrus Christus' Goldsmith's Shop and long-neglected objects, such as combs, badges, and bathhouse murals, and by investigating a wide range of sexualities - same-sex desire, adultery, marriage, courtship, and prostitution - she demonstrates how illicit forms of sexuality were linked to the "chaste sexuality" of marriage. She shows also how both church and state attempted to regulate sexual conduct and examines not only those sources that reinforced this way of thinking, but also those that resisted or subverted it. Revealing the cracks in the ideological edifice, she demonstrates that the insistence that sexual intercourse should be confined to marriage, performed in a particular manner and reserved for the purpose of procreation was subverted and undermined both in the visual culture of the period and in reality. --Book Jacket.

Louis-Georges Tin shows in The Invention of Heterosexual Culture, in premodern Europe heterosexuality was perceived as an alternative culture. The practice of heterosexuality may have been standard, but the symbolic primacy of the heterosexual couple was not. Tin maps the emergence of heterosexual culture in Western Europe and the significant resistance to it from feudal lords, church fathers, and the medical profession. Tin writes that before the phenomenon of "courtly love" in the early twelfth century, the man-woman pairing had not been deemed a subject worthy of more than passing interest. As heterosexuality became a recurrent theme in art and literature, the nobility came to view it as a disruption of the feudal chivalric ethos of virility and male bonding. If feudal lords objected to the "hetero" in heterosexuality and what they saw as the associated dangers of weakness and effeminacy, the church took issue with the "sexuality," which threatened the Christian ethos of renunciation and divine love. Finally, the medical profession cast heterosexuality as pathology, warning of an epidemic of "lovesickness." Noting that the discourse of heterosexuality does not belong to heterosexuals alone, Tin offers a groundbreaking history that reasserts the cultural identity of heterosexuality.

A lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art As a condition both represented through metaphors and used as a metaphor, venereal disease provided a vehicle for the discussion of cultural anxieties about gender, race, commerce, and immigration. Gallagher highlights four key concepts associated with venereal disease, demonstrating how infection's symbolic potency was enhanced by its links to elite masculinity, prostitution, foreignness, and facial deformities. Also available in print.

This explicit novel about a prostitute is also known under the title Fanny Hill.

How are the histories of English colonialism and Sapphism intertwined? In what ways did the consumer culture that colonialism fuel encourage or inhibit women from forming romantic and erotic bonds with one another? These are some of the historical and theoretical questions this volume attempts to answer in its exploration of desire between women in Restoration and eighteenth-century England.

A richly illustrated literary anthology that explores the fantasies, seductions, and intrigues of the eighteenth-century French lover. This sumptuous volume presents more than eighty selections from eighteenth-century French literature, each concerning some facet of the game of love as practiced by the libertine, or the freethinking aristocratic hedonist, a type that flourished-not least in literature-in the declining years of the Ancien Regime. Each selection is illustrated by well-chosen period artworks, many rarely seen, by Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, and numerous others.

The anonymous novella Vida y costumbres de la Madre Andrea (ca 1650, The Life and Times of Mother Andrea) is a fascinating account of the life of the owner/ administrator of a Madrid brothel. Probably written by a Sephardic resident of Amsterdam, and following the picaresque mode of first person narrative, it details the amusing experiences of Mother Andrea, the prostitutes under her charge, and the varied social types who make up the brothel's clients. Emphasizing the corrupt practices of prostitution and the controversy over the licensing of brothels in early modern Spain, the novella proposes a highly entertaining view of the very life experiences it purports to condemn. This bilingual edition, based on the novella's only extant text, an eighteenth-century copy discovered in a Utrecht bookstore in 1950 by the late Hispanist J. A. Van Praag, offers a thorough introduction that contextualizes the novella both historically and linguistically.
The book is also available in Tripod online: http://tripod.brynmawr.edu/find/Record/.b3814994.

"Reusing on cases of extramarital sex, Johanna Rickman investigates fornication, adultery, and bastard hearing among the English nobility during the Elizabethan and early Stuart period. Since members of the nobility were not generally brought before the ecclesiastical courts, which had jurisdiction over other citizens' sexual offences, Rickman's sources include collections of family papers (primarily letters), state papers, and literary texts (prescriptive manuals, love sonnets, satirical verse, and prose romances), as well as legal documents."--BOOK JACKET.

This captivating history exposes a clandestine world of family and community secrets -- incest, abortion, and infanticide -- in the early modern Venetian republic. With the keen eye of a detective, Joanne M. Ferraro follows the clues in individual cases from the criminal archives of Venice and reconstructs each one as the courts would have done according to the legal theory of the day. Ferraro recounts often colorful testimony, giving voice to the field workers, spinners, grocers, servants, concubines, midwives, physicians, and apothecaries who gave their evidence to the courts, sometimes shaping the outcomes of the investigations. Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice also traces shifting attitudes toward illegitimacy and paternity from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Both the Catholic Church and the Republic of Venice tried to enforce moral discipline and regulate sex and reproduction. Unmarried pregnant women were increasingly stigmatized for engaging in sex. Their claims for damages because of seduction or rape were largely unproven, and the priests and laymen they were involved with were often acquitted of any wrongdoing. The lack of institutional support for single motherhood and the exculpation of fathers frequently led to abortion, infant abandonment, or infant death.

"Although the French Renaissance has a persistant reputation for 'Rabelaisian' debauchery, there are few critical works devoted to analysing obscenity in sixteenth-century France. The studies collected here show how the notion of obscenity emerged during the French Renaissance through a process of contestation and change as the moral and social frames of reference on which the concept depends were not yet fixed. The word ‘obscène’ appears in French for the first time in the sixteenth century and obscenity spreads through very different contexts, from medicine to music and from farce to travel writing – all areas in which obscenity becomes a hermeneutic challenge, for it can only be defined through its effects and because it blurs the boundaries between action and representation. Hence the innately provocative nature of the obscene unleashes an energy which leads to a fundamental questioning of the basis of morality, of the function of works of art, and of human nature itself." - Publisher's description

Presents 12 essays about obscenity during the French Renaissance. Treats topics including Scaliger, Rabelais, travel accounts, and medical texts.

In this comparative study, Pluskota offers an analysis of the lives of prostitutes that looks beyond a purely criminal perspective, and which encompasses their roles within their families, relationships and social networks. Using police and judicial records, she provides a valuable corrective to the narrow analysis of prostitutes in terms of immorality or deviance. The unique forms of development and problems faced by port cities in the early modern period make them particularly interesting subjects for comparative history.

This is the first historical survey ever conducted on prostitution at the time of the French Revolution. This is a key period to understand the place of prostitutes in contemporary politics.
It also marks an unprecedented turning point by decriminalizing this activity while maintaining police control over the women involved with the result of making prostitutes, "infamous women" of the Ancien Régime and diminished citizens of the Republic. At the crossroads between the history of women and gender, the history of the French Revolution and the contributions of sociology and political science, this work revisits the fantasies and prejudices that all too often summarize the history of Revolutionary prostitution.

Dealing with questions on the meaning of eroticism in Renaissance England and its separation from other affective relations, Queer Renaissance Historiography examines the distinctive arrangement of sexuality during this period, and the role that queer theory has played in our understanding. As such this book not only reflects on the practice of writing a queer history of Renaissance England, but also suggests new directions for this practice. Queer Renaissance Historiography collects original contributions from leading experts, participating in a range of critical conversations whilst prompting scholars and students alike to reconsider what we think we know about sex and sexuality in Renaissance England. Presenting ethical, political and critical analyses of Early Modern texts, this book sets the tone for future scholarship on Renaissance sexualities, making a timely intervention in theoretical and methodological debates.

"Focusing on multiple aspects of Renaissance culture, and in particular its preoccupation with the reading and rewriting of classical sources, this book examines representations of homosexuality in sixteenth-century France. Analysing a wide range of texts and topics, it presents an assessment of queer theory that is grounded in historical examples, including French translations of Boccaccio's Decameron, the poetry of Ronsard, works in praise of and satirising Henri III and his mignons, Montaigne's Essais, Brantome's Dames galantes, the figures of the androgyne and the hermaphrodite, and religious discourses and practices of penance and confession. Throughout this study, emphasis is placed on the coexistence of different models of homosexuality during the Renaissance - homosexual desire was simultaneously universal and individual, neither of these views excluding the other. Insisting equally on points of convergence and difference between Renaissance and modern understandings of homosexuality, this book works towards a historicisation of the concept of queerness."--BOOK JACKET.

Balancing long-overlooked and well-known works from early modern England, Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts is a collection of English texts about homoerotic love, relationships, desires, and sexual acts. The anthology's core texts are selections from works of drama, fiction, romance, poetry, essays and translation.

The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.

This remarkable book concerns a same-sex wedding ceremony in sixteenth-century Rome. The case in question involved a group of mostly Spanish and Portuguese men, arrested and executed in Rome in 1578, said to have performed same-sex wedding ceremonies in one of the city's major churches. We know about the incident from a number of sources, including the travel journal of the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. Emphasizing the instability of marriage in premodern Europe, Ferguson argues that same-sex unions should be considered part of the institution s complex and contested history."

Secret Sexualitiesis expansive in its historical range, vast sources and scholarly research. It contains rare, unpublished, primary material, extensive critical and contextual material by the editor, and refuses to discriminate between issues of sex, sexuality and gender.

Explicitly interdisciplinary in approach, this collection opens up a critical discourse on sexuality and visual culture in early modern Italy. 'Sex acts' is interpreted broadly, from the acting out, or performing, of one's (or another's) sex to sexual activity, including what might be considered peculiar practices and preferences.

"Did sex education actually exist in eighteenth-century France? Shaped by competing currents of religious dogma, atheist materialism and bourgeois morality, eighteenth-century France marked the beginning of what Michel Foucault called une fermentation discursive on matters related to sex. But when we consult the educational theorists or philosophes of the time for their opinions on preparing a young person for life as a sexual being, we are met with a telling silence. Did an Enlightenment era that dared to make sex an object of discourse also dare to make it an object of pedagogy? Sex education in eighteenth-century France brings together specialists from a range of disciplines to address these issues. Using a wide variety of literary, historical, religious and pedagogical sources, contributors explore for the first time the nexus between sex and instruction. Although these two categories were publicly kept distinct, writers were effectively shaping attitudes and behaviours. Unraveling the complex system of rules and codes through which knowledge about sex was communicated, contributors uncover a new dimension in the practice of education in the eighteenth century."--Book jacket.

This roman à clef is based on a true story involving the French ambassador to the Ottoman Porte from 1699 to 1711. It is the story of the tormented relationship between the diplomat and a beautiful young Greek concubine, Théophé, whom he frees from a pasha&’s harem. While her benefactor becomes increasingly infatuated with her and bent on becoming her lover, the Greek girl becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming a virtuous and respected woman.

"How were male bodies viewed before the Enlightenment? And what does this reveal about attitudes towards sex and gender in premodern Europe? This richly textured cultural history investigates the characterization of the sex of adult male bodies from ancient Greece to the seventeenth century. Before the modern focus on the phallic, penetrative qualities of male anatomy, Patricia Simons finds that men's bodies were considered in terms of their active physiological characteristics, in relation to semen, testicles and what was considered innately masculine heat. Re-orienting attention from an anatomical to a physiological focus, and from fertility to pleasure, Simons argues that women's sexual agency was perceived in terms of active reception of the valuable male seed. This provocative, compelling study draws on visual, material and textual evidence to elucidate a broad range of material, from medical learning, high art and literary metaphors to obscene badges, codpieces and pictorial or oral jokes"-- Provided by publisher.

When the French invaded Italy in 1494, they were shocked by the frank sexuality expressed in Italian cities. By 1600, the French were widely considered to be the most highly sexualized nation in Christendom. What caused this transformation? This book examines how, as Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge rippled outward from Italy, the sexual landscape and French notions of masculinity, sexual agency, and procreation were fundamentally changed.

What do we know about early modern sex? And how do we know it? How, when, and why does sex become history? In this book, Valerie Traub addresses these questions and, in doing so, reorients the ways in which historians and literary critics, feminists and queer theorists approach sexuality and its history. Her answers offer interdisciplinary strategies for confronting the difficulties of making sexual knowledge.

This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. The case contributed significantly to the French people's ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king.