This chapter is a comprehensive history of sexually-explicit literature drawn from books banned and prosecuted in Asia and Europe, sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The prurient treatment of sexual violence and the lewd mockery of authority form part of this discourse, yet law and censorship denied its literary value, reduced all erotica to the most basic “obscenity” or mere “pornography” (literally, “whore-writing”), and sometimes put the author to death. (Paradoxically the cultures richest in sex-writing also suppressed it most fiercely.) Here is a more complex history, hybridizing multiple genres: manuals of sexual positions, courtesans” autobiography, satire against hypocrisy and repression, philosophies of mind, body, and desire – normally homoerotic, though in China and the West true knowledge of sexuality is represented as female, passed down by mistresses of the secret arts providing instructions for the wedding night (and beyond). The phallus was even gendered female. Libertinism continued to explore same-sex desire (especially in Italy and Japan), while its heteronormative branch dissociated sexuality from procreation, insisting that biological sex should be transformed into an art of aesthetic “transmutation”, urging women to pursue erotic pleasure as a supreme end in itself – centuries before contraception made this realistic. Feminocentric and masculinist perspectives intertwine.

This chapter looks at the transmission history of Catullus and the elegists into the Renaissance and their surprising presence, given their reputation as ‘lascivious’ and ‘wanton’ , on the early modern humanist school curriculum. We consider florilegia and printed common-place books as the site where English school-boys, and some girls, first meet Latin elegy, and the institutionalised nature of imitatio as a foundational practice of writing. We then go on to look at the broad receptions of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid and Sulpicia across Renaissance Europe as a context for the close readings which follow.