In Praise of the Whip

The emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual practices, is explored in religious, literary, and medical texts and images in In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal. This book offers a new history of voluntary flagellation in Europe, tracing its journey from medieval religious devotion to its presence in the modern pornographic imagination.

Niklaus Largier delves into a wide range of religious, literary, and medical texts and images to examine the emotional and sensual, religious and erotic allure of the whip. From early modern pornography to the works of the Marquis de Sade and the fantasies of Swinburne and Joyce, the whip has captivated the erotic and devotional imagination.

Largier investigates how the Reformation and Counter-Reformation challenged the medieval culture of arousal. The stimulating qualities of medieval visual displays, particularly flagellant practices, processions, and spectacles, were critiqued as part of efforts to control the imagination.

In modern bourgeois life, the practice, effects, and imagery of flagellation became a central topic of inquiry, reflecting concerns and anxieties about exercising emotional self-control and censoring fantasy. References to flagellant practice in the works of Swinburne, Proust, and Joyce illustrated not only a "decadent" interest in "medieval" cultures or "perverse sexuality," but also a fascination that nineteenth-century censorship, influenced by psychopathological discourses, sought to suppress.

Largier explains that such evocations of flagellation represent attempts to reclaim a culture of stimulation and imagination—both erotic and devotional—that transcends the modern boundaries of sexuality.