Aretino's Pornography and Renaissance Satire

Abstract

Apart from his reputation as a lashing satirist, scourge of princes, Pietro Aretino was famous-or infamous-in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for his works of pornography,' perhaps the first of their kind in Christendom. His most notorious book was the Ragionamenti, where two harlots dwell on the techniques and practices of sex through about the lives of nuns, married women, and courtesans. There were also his sixteen obscene sonnets, I Sonnetti Lussuriosi, dealing with modes of intercourse, which accompanied of sexual positions, usually called I Modi, designed by Giulio Romano and engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi.2 Allusions to these bawdy manuals occur so frequently in English literature from Spenser to Milton that they constitute a phenomenon which is worth exploration. In many cases the references to Aretino's pictures and dialogues become functional as a medium of social, moral and political satire in the later English Renaissance.

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