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- M. Eisner and M. Schachter. "Libido Sciendi: Apuleius, Boccaccio and the History of Sexuality." PMLA (May, 2009).
Abstract:
This essay contributes to recent debates in
the study of
the history of sexuality that have developed
out of a
comparison of a story from Apuleius’ Golden
Ass and its
transformation by Boccaccio in the Decameron.
Addressing questions of book history,
philology, and
textual transmission, it offers another
perspective on the
problems of identity, temporality, and
epistemology that
have been at the center of these debates and
proposes
reorienting considerations of Foucault’s
still-contested
role in the field by drawing on the
underappreciated later
volumes of Foucault’s landmark History of
Sexuality.
Rather than mining these stories for
exemplary social
types or for information about past sex acts’
social
meanings, this essay uses philological and
paratextual
materials to focalize these tales’
interpretive erotics,
complicate the temporal relationship between
them, and
model a way of studying the history of
sexuality that is
not tied to a history of social types,
identities, or acts.
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