Bodily Figurae: Sex and Rhetoric in Early Libertine Venice, 1642-51

This essay will examine and compare two texts that originated in the Venetian Libertine milieu of the Accademia degli Incogniti: Ferrante Pallavicino's La retorica delle puttane (The Whores' Rhetoric; 1642) and Antonio Rocco's L'Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Alcibiades the Schoolboy; 1651). Pallavicino's work, a parody of a textbook for Jesuits, presents an oration in which an old former prostitute persuades a destitute young girl to embrace a career in whoredom. Here the rhetorical discourse, while also aiming at persuading, doubles as a taxonomy in which every figure of speech corresponds to a sexual act. This short circuit of elocution and (bodily) performance recreates the correspondence between figures (skhêmata) of speech and copulative positions that provided a framework to the sex manuals of classical antiquity. In Rocco's text, a teacher of rhetoric engages his pupil Alcibiades in a diatribe on the righteousness and ethicality of sodomy, with the goal of not only persuading the reluctant boy but also to achieve the "performance" of that particular sexual act. A professor of rhetoric in Venice, Rocco was a paramount example of the contradictions and the circuitous heterodoxy of early Italian Libertines. A staunch Aristotelian in the Paduan tradition, he was at the same time a sworn enemy of the rising experimental method, of positive religions, and reason of state.