Annals of Pornographie · How Porn Became Bad

In a groundbreaking reappraisal of European history, award-winning historian Brian M. Watson visits literature, art, photography, and historical figures you don’t learn about in school, to reveal, for the first time, the history of a subject that causes endless rage, anger, excitement and debate.

In an entertaining yet informative tone, Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad explains, well, the history of pornography, but also the history of sexuality, the creation of privacy (and public life), and the ‘invention of manners.’ It brings together the history of Western culture’s tortured and blissful relationship with erotic representation by tracing a history through the underside of Western culture, its art, literature, philosophy, sexology, psychology and their encounters with its law. It takes the reader through the underbelly of Western history, from the fifteenth century Renaissance all the way up to Playboy magazine and Hollywood.

Along the way, we meet a variety of colorful characters who do not get their usual historical due–from the ‘royal pimp,’ Lord Rochester, to the Renaissance ‘porn star’ Pietro Aretino, to the ‘unspeakable’ and flamboyant Edmund Curll (the first Hugh Hefner), to tax-dodging street pornographers and radicals in the streets of London and Paris, Rome and Amsterdam. We visit locations as far-flung as the hallowed halls of the Council of Trent, where Popes and kings fought over the future of the West, to a narrow alley in London filled with hack writers, aspiring poets, cheap bookstores, lovingly and disgustingly referred to as Grub Street, all the way up to alleyway pushers of dirty French pictures.

Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad reveals, for the first time, exactly why and how pornography became 'bad.' Because it wasn't always so.