The Early Modern Erotic Imagination

Abstract

The Prognostication neatly demonstrates that it is practically impossible to avoid encountering the classical past when reading any early modern text where sex is involved. The classical world is embedded in the fabric of such discussion. The art, literature, and philosophy of the Graeco-Roman world served a number of functions in discussions of sex in this period. The greatest contribution made by classical culture was to provide a matrix by which the plentiful and rich sexual discourse of the period could be ordered and analyzed. It supplied a vocabulary for the expression of desire. It made strange or difficult concepts more explicable. It opened alternative ways of viewing relationships. It told you about bodies–how they felt, looked, and loved. It fuelled pornographic fantasy.

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