The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea
Originally in Latin! But kinda NSFW.
Are there any children reading this? Children, please step away from the computer now. I’ll give you a moment.
Only adults left in the room? Good. I am afraid that today I will need to divert our collective attention from the subject of holiday movies, and instead occupy just a few moments of your time with classical erotica.
Despite the accepted wisdom that social media is evil, Twitter regularly brings me joy, and recently it brought me this.
After seeing this, I needed to do additional research. According to the Internet:
This passage comes from a book called The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea. (Source)
Here’s a plot summary, and the original text on gutenberg.org.
“One of the most notorious amatory classic works of the 17th century[, t]he Dialogues are considered the first pornographic work written in Latin.” (Source)
But they weren’t actually written by Luisa Sigea de Velasco, who was an actual Spanish poet.
They were written by a guy named Nicholas Chorier, a French lawyer who dabbled in erotic literature.
So was this a 17th century version of revenge porn?? Why would this French guy write a work of pornography under the name of an actual person?
The Dialogues were first published in 1660. Luisa died in 1560, and Nicholas was born in 1612. So obviously they didn’t know each other.
Luisa did write in Latin and one of her well-known works was a Latin dialogue between two women, but it was about courtly life versus domestic life. Nicholas must have read that or at least heard about it.
Luisa lived in Spain and Portugal and Nicholas was French, which means that her work must have spread within Europe. And I wonder how that happened, but it probably involves research about the printing press and 17th century European travel and commerce which I am not going to do right now.
In 1740, Chorier’s book was translated into English as “A Dialogue Between a Married Lady and a Maid” and the publisher was arrested for distributing smut. (Source)
I still have a lot of questions about how this came about, but that’s all the research I have time for right now. I will leave you with some excerpts from the English translation:
OTTAVIA: Ah! ah! my Tullia, my darling, my lady, how thou art thumping me!
TULLIA: Allow me to rest myself a little after that fit of madness, for Venus’ flux is but madness. My storm has been allayed and tranquility restored to my members.
OTTAVIA: Thou art stirring me unto lust. Thy story would make Vesta more wanton than are the sparrows consecrated to Venus.