The Early Modern Theater of Foul Lust

Paraphilia from Peritext to Nosology

Abstract

The nineteenth-century psychiatric fixture of sexual perversion—unusually themed or driven erotic interest—was anticipated by multiple ancient writers, and ubiquitously taken up in various early modern genres ranging from philological exempla and moral theology to “psychological” (proto-psychiatric), legal, and other commentaries. These discussions participated in the wider, twinned questions of the plurality and sanity of amor and libido/cupiditas. Consistently central in lists of vignettes of amor insanus were examples of love/lust directed to or invoked by statues and “images” (frescoes in the ancient world, engravings in early modernity), with concerns variably voiced in terms of mental alienation. Statue-love, among other anecdotal amores, raised the nosological question of its relation to medieval medico-poetic notions of lovesickness (heroes, amoris intemperantia, melancholia amatoris). An inventory of pertinent primary sources suggests an early modern emergent entanglement of legal, moral and medical frames for “paraphilia” persisting to date—however around shifting moral strictures.