ABSTRACT
The Sevillian poet Baltasar de Alcázar (1530–1606) is well-known for his witty and often erotic epigrams on topics including the carnal transgressions of friars, syphilis, the foot as an erotic object, and the naked body. While these poems have regularly been read as lighthearted texts designed for comic recreation, some of these poems engage in an erotic rhetoric that can be productively read as properly transgressive. The form and structure of these poems suggests their private and social uses within particular interpretative communities of cosmopolitan sixteenth-century Seville. The survival of these evocative eight-verse rhymes in manuscript form, rather than in print, underscores the suggestive clandestine circulation that these salacious verses enjoyed, unlike other erotic verses that did in fact pass censorship to be included in early modern print poetic anthologies. Focusing on Alcázar’s corpus of openly erotic poems, this chapter examines the cultural and literary history of these written materials that circulated beyond the watchful eye of the mechanisms of censorship.
