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Popular Medicine, Erotica, and Sexual Aesthetics in 17th Century France and England
| The importance of the seventeenth-century body and its appearance manifests itself many complex ways. My paper focuses on the concept of the human subject as represented in early modern popular medical works on reproduction, and erotica (focusing on England and France). Both types of sources are fundamentally books about the human body – they are very much concerned with studying and illustrating its forms as well as its functions. Both sets of sources are also quite obviously concerned with sexual intercourse. But what can these sources tell us about the sexual aesthetics of the human subject? The intention of this paper is to examine how popular medico-sexual and erotic works portray the human body in relation to sexual attraction and thus its aesthetical qualities. The first portion of this paper explores how erotic and medico-sexual works portray both beauty and the body. The second part of this paper examines textual representations of the appearance of both male and female genitalia, seeking out some of the main themes in such representations. The purposes of this paper are actually quite simple; I am interested in exploring what was portrayed as attractive or ‘ideal’ within these texts. A secondary motive for such a study lay in the idea that by looking at sexual portrayals of the human subject within these texts, some small light may be shed on the role of sexual attraction within early modern sexual relations.
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