Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio, and the Study of the History of Sexuality

Abstract

This essay contributes to recent debates in the study of the history of sexuality that have developed out of a comparison of a story from Apuleius'sGolden Assand its transformation by Boccaccio in theDecameron.Addressing questions of book history, philology, and textual transmission, the article offers another perspective on the problems of identity, temporality, and epistemology that have been at the center of these debates and proposes reorienting considerations of Michel Foucault's still-contested role in the field by drawing on the underappreciated later volumes of his landmarkHistory of Sexuality.Instead of mining the stories of Apuleius and Boccaccio for exemplary social types or for information about the social meanings of past sex acts, this essay uses philological and paratextual materials to focalize these tales' interpretive erotics, complicate the temporal relations between them, and model a way of studying the history of sexuality that is not tied to a history of social types, identities, or acts.

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