The notion of noetic perception may be expanded in relation to the role of the imagination in revelatory experience. Here, the expansion of neo-Platonic perspectives in the understanding of Samuel Taylor Coleridge is significant, as are the notion of the imaginal developed by Henry Corbin and the understanding of the role of the human imaginative faculty in religious visionary experience, as explored by Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This kind of analysis has implications for solving certain puzzles inherent in the New Testament accounts of visions of the risen Christ. However, questions arise in relation to this understanding, and these may be tackled in part through recent Christian thinking about the notion of revelation, in which the focus is no longer on ‘information about God’ but on what Yves Congar has called an orientation towards salvation. This suggests an understanding akin to the perennialist separation of exoteric and esoteric aspects of religious traditions in the sense of suggesting a two-component, psychological-referential model of revelatory experience.

What happens to productive continence after the turn of the twentieth century? The medical profession ceased to mention it as belief in the dangers of sex (and indeed, many of its actual risks) began to wane; but it never quite disappeared from the popular imagination. The Conclusion asks in what further directions the book’s work could be taken and proposes a particular relevance to studies of artistic ethics outside of Decadent literature, for instance, in the work of Henry James and Ezra Pound. It suggests that a similar approach to other texts and discourses can complicate and revitalize our approach to Victorian sexuality.

An iconoclast in religion and marriage in 1854–5, Marian Evans, later George Eliot, was a more conventional female traveller than her precursors in Chapters 2 and 3 due to her limited listening and speaking skills and her reliance on her partner George Henry Lewes for travel arrangements and social contacts. Her potential for cultural exchange was also limited by her desire to avoid encountering scandalous gossip that had followed her from England. Evans’s discernibly greater interest in German intellectual men than women additionally meant that she neither had nor took the opportunity to form a female friendship network in the mid-1850s. Thus, unlike Jameson or Howitt, she never met Goethe or Goethe’s friends (aside from Fanny Lewald). Eliot’s limited ethnoexocentrism also manifested itself in her public and private writing about German Jews, most notably Heinrich Heine. The chapter analyses in detail one of Evans/Eliot’s best-known essays, ‘German Wit’, in which Evans erases Heine’s Jewish identity to posit him as a German writer qualified to succeed Johann von Goethe in greatness. Though she would later have known about Heine’s Jewish origins, they remained erased when she revised her 1855 anonymous essay into George Eliot’s posthumously published essay of 1884.