Reading Pleasures: Experiencing the Early Modern Erotic

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My project explores C17 reading as an erotic act, analysing C17 reading pleasures and redefining the relationship between sex and text. Historians largely focus on 'active' scholarly reading, banishing pleasure to the periphery of studies. My thesis reconstructs the identity of the 'pleasured reader' by considering the pleasurable experience of reading and how this was embodied. It explores less overtly-erotic texts and challenges notions of a hegemonic pornographic genre, drawing on autobiographical and didactic accounts of reading, marginalia and a variety of printed texts to uncover sexual and sensual early modern reading experiences.