説明

A HANDSOME 18TH-CENTURY EDITION, FINELY BOUND BY LORTIC AND WITH STRONG IMPRESSIONS OF THE PRINTS. L’Academie des dames is among the earliest erotic texts in a European language. Foxon, writing of its power at the time of publication, notes: ‘the plot continually provides new shocks… as stable figures such as mothers and husbands are disclosed as having highly irregular relationships… as a demonstration of the falsity and hypocrisy of [social and cultural] appearances it is brilliantly anarchistic’. Pia confused this rare Amsterdam edition with the first French translation, which caused a muddle among bibliographers. The prints, sometimes attributed to de Hooghe are actually by Delcroche, who illustrated a number of classics in the 1770s and 1780s,.

The Academie des dames was first published about 1660, spuriously attributed to Sigea, a maid of honor in the court of Lisbon, and purportedly translated into Latin by Johannes Meursius, a Dutch humanist scholar of some note. This history was a complete fiction; the work was penned by Nicolas Chorier, a historian and lawyer in Grenoble, who served as a prosecutor for King Louis XIV. It was circulated in manuscript as a libertine text, and was printed several times, always (because of its illicit nature) under false imprints.

ars erotica(Adult / Slang)

Michel Foucault’s term, in The History of Sexuality (1978), for the Eastern perception of sex as an art form, in distinction to the Western approach of laboratory and statistical analysis, which he calls scientia sexualis. Synonym: art of pleasure.