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Frantz, David O. Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989. Xiü + 275 pp., fflus. ISBN 0-8142-0463-5. $40.00 US.
PAVLOCK, BARBARA. Eros, Imitation, and the Epic Tradition. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Xi + 230 pp. ISBN 0-8014-2321-x. $29.95 US.
Academics tend to giggle and titter when one of their col-leagues introduces the subject of erotica or pornography, even when that erotica is fairly tame in contrast with its overt display by the media today. For several social, cultural, and perhaps religious and historical reasons, the erotic tradition in literature and art has been largely ignored by serious academic circles, even though borrowings from that tradition appear in many important Renaissance literary works. As David Frantz points out, the censorship of pornographic works during the Renaissance, coupled with the focus of modern critics on genre considerations and on neoplatonic and allegorical interpretations of Renaissance works, has led to a failure to evaluate these literary and artistic compositions in relation to the tradition of erotica which existed from classical times to the present.
Frantz's book is valuable to Renaissance scholars and students for several reasons. He acquaints us with works of Italian pornography and with some little known English pornography of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He attempts to assess the influence of the Italian works on English writers. He finds common categories, plots, types of language, metaphors, and attitudes among the works. However, rather than distancing readers by focusing on categorization and theory, Frantz highlights the content of his chosen works - telling the stories in graphic detail, repeating the vulgar language used by the * authors, and providing illustrations of sexual intercourse. Frantz has given us a beginning, as he says himself in his conclusion - a work critics can refer to and build on in their considerations of Renaissance literature.
Frantz's definition of "erotica" is borrowed from Roger Thompson's study of late seventeenth-century erotica, Unfit for Modest Ears. He divides erotica into four categories - the pornographic, the obscene, the bawdy, and the erotic - using the term "erotica" in a general sense to include all of these types (ix-x). I, nevertheless, find his use of the word "erotica" problematic: there is very little of the...