ABSTRACT
While the topic of masturbation has effectively escaped critical scrutiny until now, such scholarly silence is not due to a lack of texts representing masturbation in late medieval and early modern Iberian literature. Drawing on a broad range of poetic evocations of masturbation from the late medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas and Castillian popular lyric to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish poetry, this study traces the representation of masturbation—along with the objects associated with it, including dildos—in its civil, religious, and social contexts. The fundamentally transgressive evocation of solitary sexuality in this long-ignored poetic corpus remains equally interesting for what it reveals, not just concerning historical practices of masturbation, but more provocatively, for what it tells us about how such practices could be poeticized for pornographic consumption.
