ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a highly problematic narrative in Nicolas Chorier’s seventeenth-century pornographic book The Dialogues of Luisa Sigea (1659/60) as it describes sex among children as sexual “play” or “childish folly.” It argues that by constructing the narrative in this way Chorier distanced it from the context of sexual abuse and rape, which were regarded with disgust and treated harshly in early modern European societies. Nevertheless, the narrative included several aspects that transgress both contemporary morals and the boundaries of legitimate sexual behavior, and through which the author demonstrates awareness of contemporary medical understandings about the nature of children’s bodies and their sexual development, and about the bodily evidence required to prove sexual assault and rape in court.
