Renaissance Eroticism At The Dawn

Nudity in religious art had been virtually all shameful for the first 1400 years of Christianity-sinners burning in Hell, Adam and Eve after The Fall. But in the early Italian Renaissance, the nude human body can be found with dignity and beauty even in religious art. How were centuries of religious beliefs and traditions overcome? Renaissance Eroticism at the Dawn explores this question. It focuses on a detailed study of the first freestanding nude statue since antiquity, Donatello's puzzling bronze "David." In the popular mind this statue has long been simply the Biblical David standing on the head of Goliath, but experts have found it to be in fact quite mysterious in its details and it has never made sense simply as the slaying of Goliath. It is argued here however that mysterious details of the statue do make good sense in a historical intellectual context that has now become better understood. The general context was an effort in Italian Christian intellectual circles (loosely, the Humanist Zeitgeist) to recover a pure spirituality, unadulterated by the dogmas and politics of the then oppressive Roman Church. Intellectual Christians scoured ancient philosophical, magical, and mythological texts for possible insights into universal and authentic spiritual truths that they felt had been suppressed and denied them by theocrats. Northern European Protestants had much the same complaints with Roman dogma but took their resentments in very different directions with the Reformation. Renaissance Eroticism at the Dawn examines the details of "David" in the context of modern readings of spiritual trends in 15th century Neo-Platonism, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, spiritual alchemy, mythological allegory, magic, and numerology. These were once dismissed as "esoteric" or "occult," superstitious beliefs. But scholars began to study them more seriously in recent decades-for example to better understand the roots of modern CONCEPTUAL science. These have now come to be regarded as important "proto-sciences" and "alternative spiritualities." Of course Renaissance spirituality also forms an important chapter not only for the history of science but also for the complex history of Christian thought and of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation-and indeed for the development of the modern mind. The deeper motivational question looms: What strong compulsions-what powerful human aspirations-could have led bright people to persist doggedly at such efforts, that from our contemporary perspective can seem nonsensical? A consideration of the potential "esoteric" spirituality in "David" is an opportunity to explore the personal and emotional dimensions of that remarkably rich, diverse, and historically transformative climate of questioning, investigation, and speculation in Renaissance Italy. Renaissance, Eros, Plato, Neo-Platonism, Donatello, occult, esoteric, alchemy, magic, Ficino, Florence, putti, Amor-Atys, nudity, baptism, Pagan, Christianity, history of science, sensuality, Pico de Mirandola, mythology, Reformation, Council of Trent, Council of Florence, Dante, homosexual, androgyny.

Sexuality is one of the most influential factors in human life. The responses to and reflections upon the manifestations of sexuality provide fascinating insights into fundamental aspects of medieval and early-modern culture. This interdisciplinary volume with articles written by social historians, literary historians, musicologists, art historians, and historians of religion and mental-ity demonstrates how fruitful collaborative efforts can be in the exploration of essential features of human society. Practically every aspect of culture both in the Middle Ages and the early modern age was influenced and determined by sexuality, which hardly ever surfaces simply characterized by prurient interests. The treatment of sexuality in literature, chronicles, music, art, legal documents, and in scientific texts illuminates central concerns, anxieties, tensions, needs, fears, and problems in human society throughout times.

"Erotic Resistance is an act of memory preservation regarding San Francisco's foundational role in the erotic entertainment and sex industries of the United States. It highlights the contributions of women of color, queer women, and trans women who were instrumental at key moments in the city's history concerning labor as well as the LGBT and sex workers' rights movements. In the 1960s, topless entertainment became legal in San Francisco for the first time in US history, although cross-dressing continued to be criminalized. In yet another first instance in US history, San Francisco activist-strippers, who were also artists, led successful class action lawsuits and efforts to unionize in the strip club industry in the 1990s. Using diverse methods, including ethnography, visual and performance analysis, and historiography, Erotic Resistance relates these phenomena through archival materials, artworks, and original interviews with women who performed in San Francisco's burlesque scene and strip club industry during these time periods"--

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Menon introduces rhetoric into the largely medico-juridical realm of studies on Renaissance sexuality. In doing so, she suggests that rhetoric allows us to think through the erotics of language in ways that pay most attention to the frisson of English Renaissance drama.

Magic rings; seductive she-devils; satyrs bound and whipped on stage; a woman sexually coerced in the confessional; a boy caught masturbating over a midwifery manual; a marriage of true minds between two men; a prince led to repentance at the sight of a naked girl prepared to give her life for his. These varied manifestations of medieval and early modern sexuality--each at the center of one of the essays in this volume--suggest the ubiquity and diversity of eroticism in the period. The erotic is the stuff of legend, but also of daily life. It is inextricable from relations of power and subordination and it plays a fundamental role in the heirarchical social structures of the period. The erotic is also very much a part of the spiritual realm, often in morally ambiguous ways. The seven essays collected in this volume explore the role the erotic played in early modern notions of happiness or fulfillment, in clerical life, in Jewish legend, heretical magic and Christian marriage, in poetry, on the public stage, and in medical manuals.

This sudy focuses on the alba and attempts to understand its techniques and meanings not only in its own terms but also for the light of understanding it throws on other forms of medieval lyric and their later derivatives. Dr. Saville suggests that certain structures of the imagination which find expression in the medieval alba are characteristic of the medieval mind in general and may be detected in the other manifestations of medieval culture, including theology, the visual arts, and certain aspects of everyday life.