ABSTRACT
The contrast between these two realms of knowledge, loosely defined as ‘literature’ and ‘history’, is not just a matter of conflicting data. Rather it is a matter of different ways of conceptualizing sexuality so as to deal with contrasting sources of evidence and to locate them in the social experience of early modern culture (Dollimore and Sinfield 1990:91-100).1 However, in contrasting the discourses of pleasure and social regulation we ourselves accept a discursive distinction defined by Foucault (1976) as the contrast between an ars erotica and a scientia sexualis. The literary critic deals with the ars erotica of the pleasures of the text while the social historian investigates the scientia sexualis of sexual relations in the social world, themselves seen as epiphenomena of larger social and economic movements.
