Erotic poetry - photo 1
Erotic poetry - photo 2

Erotic poetry

Lot 64
12.12.2022 00:00UTC +00:00
Classic
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£ 4 788
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 869466
Lot 64 | Erotic poetry
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
Erotic poetry
Erotic verses, in Latin heroic couplets, manuscript on vellum [France, 13th century].
13th-century erotically-charged Latin verses from an apparently unidentified work on the dangers of women, wet dreams (‘nocturna pollutio’), and sexuality.

c.180 x 244mm. A bifolium. 30 lines in a neat, rounded gothic script, the verses in heroic couplets, the text beginning ‘Surgens g[audi]o fruar dulci mulieris amore’, verse paraphs in margins, the verses on one leaf marked ‘iii’, ‘iiii’ and ‘quinta’, marginal annotations summarising the subject of the poem (‘q[ui]b[u]s de causis noct[urn]a pollutio p[er]veniat’) (reused as a binding fragment, two leaves browned, sewing holes visible, some creasing).

Provenance:
(1) Reused as binding for a 16th-century French book: the title ‘Remontrance a la reine mere’.
(2) James Stevens Cox (1910-1997), F.S.A., with his pencilled number '16936'; his substantial collection was dispersed through Maggs Bros, London; this cutting was in their Catalogue 1376, Continental Books and Manuscript Leaves (2005), no 16.
(3) Colker MS 517.

The present text seems to be unpublished and unidentified. Colker described it as ‘verses on priestly conduct and sexuality’; the 2005 Maggs catalogue describes it simply as ‘Latin verse advocating morality’. Certainly the author is pushing an androcentric view where women are deemed a danger to moral and religious living: ‘Femina dissolvit rigidos laxatq[ue] severos / Infatuat doctos co[n]taminatq[ue] bonos / Femina mitificat senos dilatat avaros / Duros mollificat indomitosq[ue] domat’ (‘A woman loosens the stiff and relaxes the strict / She beguithe learned and contaminates the good / A woman mollifies the old and makes the miserly expansive / She softens the tough and brings the indomitable to heel’). He proclaims that women cannot be trusted and they should be avoided: ‘Sit bona sit ve mala mulierem dico cavenda[m]’, and ‘fugito mulieres’. But the content is much more risqué: there is a whole, vividly described section on ‘nocturnal pollutions’, where unsolicited visions of ‘femineas formas’, womanly forms, leads to ‘insompnis adhibet, sic genitale movet / Hinc delectam[enta?] sequit[ur] fluidum q[uo]q[ue] sem[en].’
Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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28.11.2022 – 12.12.2022
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