Astrology and 'Le vice anglais'

Abstract

In an ''Appendix'' to Romantic Agony (La Carne, la Morte e il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Firenze 1930) Mario Praz discussed "Swinburne e 'le vice anglais'", ie records of sexual flagellation chiefly in XIX century French and English literature. Though marginally referring to Thomas Shadwell's comedy Il Virtuoso and to Otway's Venice Preserved for earlier instances of masochistic behaviour in Restoration drama, our Master of Quellenforschung and analyst of Anglo-Italian cultural cross-fertilisation does not appear to have come across, or if he did, to have made capital of, the unusual evidence of a peculiar form of that allegedly typical English perversion, in the work of the Renaissance humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.