num_pages: 384
description: Aretino's Dialogues have long been regarded as classics, but have not been available in their entirety to English-Language readers partly because no one has been able to translate them successfully and accurately and partly because until recently the subject matter was considered too shocking.In the time of the Renaissance there were three occupations open to women. A woman could be a wife, a whore, or a nun. In these frank, boisterous dialogues, Aretino, with tongue in cheek, describes the advantages and disadvantages, the perils and pleasures, of all three professions as viewed by two women who have experienced them all.In his preface, the translator Raymond Rosenthal writes: "Aretino's eroticism has the vigor and health of a public spectacle -- a sort of morality play for the populace -- which thereby divests it of any perverse or sickly intention. Not only was it the first erotic book in the Christian world to be written in the vulgar tongue of ordinary speech -- the speech which, as De Sanctis, the great Italian critic, said, was to become that of all educated Italians -- it was also, paradoxically, the last erotic book to describe the 'filth' of commercial love without itself being filthy or depraved. Indeed this is Aretino's true genius -- the sheer capacity for sensual good spirits which somehow touches his most revolting scenes with freshness and charm."
language: English
title: Aretino's Dialogues
titlecomplete: Aretino's Dialogues
genres: Literature, Classics, Italian Literature, Italy, Erotica, Fiction, Academic
ratings_count: 89
series: Ragionamenti
publisher: Stein and Day