The emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the
whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual
practices, as seen in religious, literary, and medical texts and
images. In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal is a
new history of voluntary flagellation in Europe, from its invention
in medieval religious devotion to its use in the modern
pornographic imagination. Working with a wide range of religious,
literary, and medical texts and images, Niklaus Largier explores
the emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the
whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual
practices. From early modern pornography to the Marquis de Sade and
the fantasies of Swinburne and Joyce, the erotic and devotional
imagination drew on the whip. Largier explores how the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation problematized the medieval culture of
arousal. The stimulating qualities of medieval visual displays,
especially flagellant practices, processions, and spectacles, were
subjected to a criticism that sought to control the imagination. In
modern bourgeois life the practice, effects, and imagery of
flagellation became a central site of investigation into concerns
and anxieties about exercising emotional self-control and censoring
fantasy. Modern references to flagellant practice in the works of
Swinburne, Proust, and Joyce testified not only to a "decadent"
fascination with "medieval" cultures or "perverse sexuality," but
also to a fascination that nineteenth-century censorship, informed
by psychopathological discourses, had obliterated. Such evocations
of flagellation, Largier explains, were attempts to recover a
culture of stimulation and imagination-both erotic and
devotional-that transcended the modern boundaries of sexuality.
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