The Four Books on Architecture

In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal is a new history of voluntaryflagellation in Europe, from its invention in medieval religious devotion to its use in the modernpornographic imagination. Working with a wide range of religious, literary, and medical texts andimages, Niklaus Largier explores the emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of thewhip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual practices. From early modernpornography to the Marquis de Sade and the fantasies of Swinburne and Joyce, the erotic anddevotional imagination drew on the whip.Largier explores how the Reformation and Counter-Reformationproblematized the medieval culture of arousal. The stimulating qualities of medieval visualdisplays, especially flagellant practices, processions, and spectacles, were subjected to acriticism 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 aboutexercising emotional self-control and censoring fantasy. Modern references to flagellant practice inthe 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-centurycensorship, informed by psychopathological discourses, had obliterated. Such evocations offlagellation, Largier explains, were attempts to recover a culture of stimulation andimagination--both erotic and devotional--that transcended the modern boundaries ofsexuality.

Niklaus Largier is Professor of German Literature and Director of the Religious Studies program at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Zeit, Zeitlichkeit, Ewigkeit and Diogenes der Kyniker. He is also the editor of the selected writings of Meister Eckhart.