What the Monk’s Habit Hides: Excavating the Silent Truths in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron 31

Contributor(s): Elizabeth Chesney Zegura

In Heptaméron 31, Marguerite de Navarre portrays a lascivious “Cordelier” or Franciscan who takes over a matron’s household during her husband’s absence, kills her servants, and disguises the woman as a monk before abducting her. Despite its surface resemblance to Rutebeuf’s “Frère Denise,”...

Broken Lutes and Passionate Bodies in A Woman Killed with Kindness

Contributor(s): Deanna Smid

Thomas Heywood’s 1607 play, A Woman Killed with Kindness, ends with the protagonist, Frankford, discovering the lute of Anne, the wife he has just banished for adultery. Grieved by the sight of the instrument that he conflates with his marriage and with Anne herself, Frankford exiles the lute...

“Nature’s Bastards”: Grafted Generation in Early Modern England

Contributor(s): Claire Duncan

This paper examines the shared rhetoric between human and horticultural generation in early modern England, particularly focusing on grafting. Early modern English gardening manuals imagine grafting as a method of controlling generation in the natural world, and early modern English obstetrical...

Introduction

Contributor(s): Colette H. Winn

La passion au miroir: les dizains spéculaires de Délie

Contributor(s): Nancy Frelick

Cet article se donne pour but d’examiner l’expression et la représentation des passions dans les dizains spéculaires de Délie, object de plus haulte vertu de Maurice Scève à la lumière de plusieurs traditions (ovidienne, platonicienne, pétrarquiste, ficinienne, etc.). Il s’agira donc...

Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels: Writing Passion within and against the Petrarchan Tradition

Contributor(s): Deborah Lesko Baker

This article will focus on the ways in which Gabrielle de Coignard’s Sonnets spirituels, cultivated in purposefully sought domestic isolation, reveals conflictual aspirations nourished by the pursuit of an untainted devotional path that nevertheless cannot escape the assimilation of the earthly...

“C’est un amour ou Cupidon nouveau”: Spiritual Passion and the Profane Persona in Anne de Marquets’s Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (1568–1569)

Contributor(s): Annick Macaskill

While best known for her 480 Sonets spirituels, published seventeen years after her death in 1605, the Dominican nun Anne de Marquets also contributed a remarkable collection of personal spiritual poetry during her lifetime in Les Divines Poesies de Marc Antoine Flaminius (Paris, chez N....

Éros médical. Le périple anatomique de René Bretonnayau (1583)

Contributor(s): Dominique Brancher

À la Renaissance, seule l’utilité biologique reconnue aux jeux de Vénus paraît conférer le droit de les pratiquer et d’en parler dans les traités médicaux en langue vulgaire. Mais le plaisir du texte, à l’instar du plaisir sexuel, peut se délier de l’utilité et conduire à savourer ces...

« Si je ne suis pas sans reproches, du moins suis-je sans peur »: la passion dévorante de Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard

Contributor(s): Hervé-Thomas Campangne

Descendant du chevalier Bayard, Pierre de Boscosel de Chastelard faisait partie de la compagnie de gentilshommes qui accompagnèrent Marie Stuart en Écosse après la mort de François II. Épris de la reine, il se cacha sous son lit en espérant peut-être séduire sa bien-aimée ; la souveraine...

A Fantastic Frenzy of Consumption in Early Modern France

Contributor(s): Kathleen M. Llewellyn

The enthusiastic (even excessive) consumerism of contemporary western society has its roots, according to some, in the expansion of the consumption of goods in Renaissance Europe. Early modern men and women were ardent, even “passionate” consumers. Such self-indulgence was regarded as decadent...

« Quant à ce beau discours du mespris du monde ... »: Foi calviniste et plaisirs mondains chez quatre grandes dames de la Réforme en France

Contributor(s): Jane Couchman

Le rejet des « vanités de ce monde » tient, on le sait, une place prépondérante dans la théologie calviniste. Cette étude explore le rôle de ces « plaisirs mondains » dans les lettres et les mémoires de quatre des grandes dames de la Réforme en France : Louise de Coligny (1555–1620),...

Playing with Fire: Narrating Angry Women and Men in the Heptaméron

Contributor(s): Emily E. Thompson

In De Ira, Seneca dedicates three books to the denunciation of anger, a passion he insists serves no necessary purpose and leads to countless ills. Certainly Marguerite de Navarre acknowledges the violent potential of this passion in the stories of the Heptaméron. Yet her devisants not only...

Laughing at Unbearable Urges: Reshaping the Male-Authored Script of Desire

Contributor(s): Dora E. Polachek

As Pierre Champion noted a half a century ago, “ The Cent Nouvelles nouvelles open a secret door into the house of men of that time.” The misogynous aspect of these novellas, designed to inspire laughter, is evident in most of the stories dealing with masculine drives and uncontrollable desires...

Preface

Contributor(s): Vanessa McCarthy, Amyrose McCue Gill

Introduction

Contributor(s): Ian Frederick Moulton

On Lesbian Acts and Female Pleasures in Juvenal Commentaries from Antiquity to 1500

Contributor(s): Marc D. Schachter

This article explores the representation of sex between women in an understudied archive: commentaries on Juvenal’s Satires from antiquity to the end of the fifteenth century. By tracking the changes in glosses to a passage in the Sixth Satire that refers to sex between women, it contributes to...

Renaissance Painting and Expressions of Male Intimacy in a Seventeenth-Century Illustration from Mughal India

Contributor(s): Mika Natif

This article explores the artistic relationship between Western European Renaissance art and Mughal painting ca. 1630s at the ateliers in North India. A central theme is the employment of European painterly modes in the Mughal visual tradition that expressed male-male intimacy, carnal desire, and...

Reading and Viewing Sex in Early Modern French Vernacular Medicine

Contributor(s): Sarah E. Parker

Discussions of sex in early modern medical discourse did not simply legitimize a titillating topic. Medicine was engaged in a broader struggle to establish itself as a legitimate and professionally defined discipline; yet many practitioners marketed their ideas to a non-professional public...

Bestiality and Gluttony in Theory and Practice in the Comedies of Giovan Battista Della Porta

Contributor(s): Sergius Kodera

Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), Neapolitan nobleman, scholar/scientist, and writer famed for books on natural magic and physiognomy, expressed quite explicit views on bestiality—that is, on human beings having sex with animals. Della Porta populated his plays with characters who allude...

Sex Acts in La Celestina: An Ars Combinatoria of Desire

Contributor(s): Marlen Bidwell-Steiner

This article investigates one of the most important and erotically explicit early modern Spanish texts: Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina (1499/1507). Highlighting the dynamics of the three sex acts depicted in the plot, it argues that intercourse can be read as a negotiation of the text’s main...