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COPYRIGHT 2005 Indiana University Press
ANTONIO VIGNALI, La Cazzaria / The Book of the Prick. Ed. and Trans. Ian Frederick Moulton. New York: Routledge, 2003. 181 pp. $18.95
La Cazzaria, a Sienese dialogue written sometime between 1525 and 1527, is a dirty little book. As indicated by the English translation of its Italian title, this is a book about sex, though not just about the male member. It is also about assholes, cunts, and balls (to use the rude expletives translated from the Italian), about their relationship to one another and their relationship to church and state. Ian Frederick Moulton, author of Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2000) and editor and translator of Vignali's text, writes of his initial encounter with the dialogue: "There is no shortage of erotic writing from sixteenth-century Europe, but nothing in my experience of early modern texts prepared me for La Cazzaria.... [I]n both tone and content it is unique" (3). Even coming from Moulton, this can only be an understatement. La Cazzaria is raunchy, anti-clerical, misogynistic, elitist, parodic, and deeply invested in both Sienese politics and philosophical debates over proper objects of scholarly study. It is also startlingly open in its veneration of sodomy, though its erotic focus cannot be reduced to acts between members of the same sex. Vignali's...
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