E-Book Overview
In a groundbreaking reappraisal of European history, award-winning historian Brian M. Watson gives the secret history of smut through the literature, art, photography, and historical figures you didn’t learn about in school. Watson combs the bawdy and forgotten corners of Western civilization to reveal the hidden story of a topic that still causes anger, arousal, excitement and scandal.
Combining an entertaining style with brand-new research, Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad explores not only the salacious history of pornography, but also explains the evolution of Western sexuality, the ‘creation’ of privacy (and public life), and the ‘invention of manners.’ The book analyzes Western culture’s tortured and rapturous relationship with erotic representation by probing the underside of its culture, art, literature, philosophy, sexology, psychology and its law. Covering everything from the fifteenth century Renaissance all the way up to the twentieth century Playboy magazine, Watson takes the reader on a grand tour of the forgotten debauchery of Western history.
Along the way, we meet a variety of colorful characters who rarely get their historical due: Lord Rochester, the royal Pimp; Pietro Aretino, the Renaissance godfather of pornography; Edmund Curll, the first Hugh Hefner; along with many other tax-dodging street pornographers and radicals who roamed the streets of London, Paris, New York, and other major metropoles. Watson takes us from the hallowed halls of the Council of Trent, where Popes and kings fought over the future of the west, to Grub Street, a narrow and disgusting London alley filled with hack writers, aspiring poets and pushers of dirty French pictures and many other sights and sounds from Western Civilization’s glorious and seedier locales.
Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad reveals, for the first time, exactly how pornography went from being beautiful to being bad.
E-Book Content
ANNALS OF PORNOGRAPHIE: HOW PORN BECAME ‘BAD’
BY BRIAN WATSON
for a.g. and s.m.
Table of Contents 1338-1556: Arentine and Tridentine Perverted Humanists The Scourge of Princes The Positions and ‘The Reasonings’ 1556-1644: To Reform and to Counter-Reform To Reform: Sex, Scat, and Sin To Counter-Reform Index Librorum Prohibitorum 1647-1690: The Girls, The Earl, and The Reforms L'escolle des filles The Sodatical Satires of Nicolas Chorier The Libertines The Reformers 1690-1740: Curlicisms The Unspeakable Curll The Cloister of Venus Curll’s Venereal Trial Doctors and Lawyers and Farmers, oh my! 1740-1800: The Society for the Suppression of Fannies Marriages, Privacies, Sexualities Cultivating the Principles of Virtue and Religion Fanny Hill: “The Most Depraved Fantasy of a Feverish Mind” The Terrible Mistake of Virtue
1800-1900: The Birth of Pornography Declarations and Proclamations The Society for the Suppression of Vice Lusty Struggles Campbell's Law The Romance of Lust 1900-1960: Sexology, Psychology, Filmography Hick's Test The Eldery Grey Ones The Battle of the Lonely Well Photography and Filmography Conclusion Source List Thank-yous.
INTRODUCTION
Omnium rerum principia parva sunt. (The beginnings of all things are small.) Cicero, De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, V. 21. Truth! stark naked truth, is the word, and I will not so much as take the pains to bestow the strip of a gauze-wrapper on it. John Cleland, Fanny Hill begin, v1 /bɪˈɡɪn/ Of common West Germanic or ? Germanic formation: Old English bi- , be-ginnan is identical with Old Saxon and Old High German bi-ginnan. . . . The latter (Old High German and Middle High German) had the senses 'to cut open, open up, begin, undertake'; hence it is inferred that the root sense of *ginnan was 'to open, open up,' [and] Old English gínan 'to gape, yawn,' from a stem *gi- , appearing also in