Introduction

Abstract

Historians of sexuality have had much to say about the late nineteenth century, no doubt due to the emergence of the discipline of sexology after 1850. But the ‘incitement to discourse’ that Michel Foucault has placed at the center of the Victorian experience of sexuality has often been quite narrowly understood by those who grapple with the results of that incitement.² Late-nineteenth-century discourses of sexuality do not stop at scientia sexualis: this is where they are simply most readily legible to late-twentieth-, early-twenty-first-century historians of sexuality; where they are most obvious; where they speak for themselves. A number of other, seemingly unrelated, developments impact emerging notions of sexuality in the Victorian era. These do not necessarily speak for themselves of sex: they support, they intimate, by indirection they let direction be found out. The present work describes just how aspects of two late-nineteenth-century phenomena, the revival of the Renaissance and the promotion of individualism, were braided not only into each other but also into contemporary discourses of sexuality.

In any gradual intellectual discovery of the essential characteristics of the Renaissance it is always the case that this period will hold great meaning for the present, that it will assist in the formation of our own moral and spiritual life, that it will mentally validate our own peculiar traits, and that it will be felt wherever a strong individualism emerges.

Walther Rehm, ‘Der Renaissancekult um 1900 und seine Überwindung’¹