ABSTRACT
From the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries, the Italian Renaissance was approached almost exclusively as a period of learning, elegance, and manners as reflected by the arts and letters of the time. The idealized creations of Castiglione and Burckhardt, their princes and poets, court ladies and courtesans, appeared as the bright stars in the Renaissance firmament, and contributed to the lure of the field. In the 1970s, scholars began to ask new questions that ultimately led to a recalibration of research on the history of sex, gender, and sexuality in the Renaissance. The essays in Desire and Discipline reveal the richness, diversity, and intellectually invigorating research that in just two decades had made the new field of sex, gender, and sexuality one of the most exciting areas in Renaissance studies. One of the most obvious sites of sex and disorder in Renaissance Italy surely lies with the buying and selling of women’s bodies.
