I discorsi di mistiche, malefiche e false sante tra eros e pornografia (secoli XVI-XVII)

This essay examines discourses on female sexuality between the 16th and 17th centuries. Approaching eros as a dimension of self-development, the analysis focuses on mysticism and witchcraft as sexual models. Mysticism and witchcraft, sometimes close, are complementary discourses: if witchcraft embodies abject sexuality, female mysticism may express eros as long as it is directed towards God. Thus the mystic can speak as a subject of desire, while the woman accused of witchcraft cannot: the authorities' discourse turns her into a pornographic object, incapable of using her own language to express (and recognise) desire. The strength of mysticism, then, lies in a language that resists the rhetoric of authority