Introduction

The introduction frames, on the one hand, and contests, on the other hand, the scholarly tendency to mute the category of “pornography” in premodern and early modern Hispanic Studies. The opening introductory statement addresses scholarly taboos surrounding anachronism and periodization, while also filling thematic lacunae relating to the culture and sensibility of sex, the visceral, and the pornographic mode in imperial Spanish literary and non-literary texts, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Rather than eschew the pornographic as a problematic register for our fields, the introduction shifts the conversation by actively promoting the critical opportunities that the pornographic offers as a mode of reading and seeing. This chapter also explains and links each chapter’s relationship to the book project at hand.