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188 E p i l o g u e From Pornography to Archaeology: Priapus at the Cluny Museum The investigation of Pornographic Archaeology started with the premise of double transference: sexuality and nation formed the nineteenth-century notions of the medieval world and its sexual practices and, at the same time, these ideas shaped the moral and social views in contemporary France and, more locally, disciplinary knowledge. While the first half of the nineteenth century teemed with open, even if at times phantasmagoric, explorations of the nation’s past medieval sexuality, the second half saw the waning of pornographic archaeology that had been practiced in the histoire des mœurs. Academic disciplines preferred the notion of courtly love that was never taken up as a discourse of sexuality, while examination of sexuality—sex, sexual practices , and desires—was limited to medical literature.1 What were some of the forces at work in this gradual closing off to the eroticism and sexuality present within the nation’s past? In January 1860, sigillographer Arthur Forgeais (1822–1878) put up for acquisition his collection of “historiated pewters” (plombs historiés) in a letter to Edmond du Sommerard, conservator and director of the Musée national du Moyen Âge in Paris. Forgeais’s collection of pilgrim and secular lead badges (enseignes de pèlerinage, enseignes profanes) had been dredged out of the riverbed during the works begun in 1848 to make the Seine navigable. In his final letter addressed to du Sommerard to negotiate the transaction, dated March 5 (or 6), 1861, Forgeais spoke with enthusiasm of “this unique and unrivaled combination of small monuments from the Middle Ages destined to embellish one of the museums in the capital,” a collection that would also “shed a new light on this shadowy and distant era.”2 Acquired by the Musée national du Moyen Âge-Thermes de Cluny in the course of 1861–1862, Arthur Forgeais’s collection Pornography and Archaeology 189 is indeed one of the most important in the world, containing more than 3,000 lead badges, principally from the late Middle Ages. Forgeais published the full inventory of his collection between 1862 and 1866 in five volumes.3 A small part of this collection included secular badges of overt sexual content, called “erotic (or sexual) badges” (enseignes érotiques). But, as the editors of the 2006 catalogue of new acquisitions at the Cluny Museum note, “Because of their content and despite their presence since the beginning within the collection of the museum, they [erotic badges] had hardly been examined or published in the past.”4 Anticipating this attitude of propriety and secrecy, Forgeais published, sometime before his death in 1878, a book on his collection of erotic badges, in a volume that was separate from the five-volume inventory of his collection. His first concern, from the opening pages of this sixteen-page book entitled Priapées, was to justify the motivation for its publication: “There exist some turpitudes that must not be brought together without a serious reason, and I have this excuse that my work will probably not be glimpsed outside the circle of earnest people. The form is moreover always crude enough so as not to inflame the imagination, which knows how to abstain when the heart does not give over willingly to the inebriation of the senses.”5 Despite the crude representation of sexual organs that, Forgeais hoped, was not sufficiently sophisticated to arouse its viewers, this publication, which proved unusual for its time, was warranted in the interest of erudition. But Forgeais remained perplexed as to the possible use of these badges: “As for the purpose that they may have served . . . that’s what is difficult to determine.”6 The collection of these “little priapic monuments”7 was sizable enough, and if this many badges were found in just one locale, they were not only widespread, Forgeais concluded, but also of some practical significance beyond ornamentation that must have been clear to all their users. Although Forgeais understood that these medieval artifacts were not made with the intent to moralize, he nevertheless felt strongly that he had to offer an interpretation for his contemporaries that was indeed moral: “Let us draw at least from these erotic clowneries what they can offer as deeper morality, although the purpose of the artist who drew them may have been entirely different; for it does not seem that one had the pretension of moralizing with such crass forms, since the senses are...

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