Sex in the Renaissance

I've just been reading Brantome, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes, and a gentleman of the French court at a time when the Renaissance was shining its light on France. His 'Lives of Gallant Ladies' is racy stuff indeed; a book about sex, not to put too fine a point on it.

Brantome's voice is very personal, his way of tackling the subject driven by his own tastes, not by any desire to create some great theory of love. He sometimes breaks off and says, simply, 'That's enough of that, or 'But this is more interesting'.

His morality is difficult to define. He's not an out and out hedonist; the emotion he most often admits to himself is pity - pity for women murdered by jealous husbands, pity for lovers separated by death or fate. He genuinely seems to feel that happiness is the purpose of human existence; he comments on the complaisant old husband who allowed himself to suppose his wife's children might, after all, have been his - "so they lived happily, and had a fine family." Or the menage a trois where the husband was in love with his wife's lover; "Whence came a solution of the problem..." Brantome is unshockable. Or rather, only two things shock him; cruelty, and coldness.

Anyway, I found the most beautiful and poetic passage in his first discourse. (And this is something that sets Brantome apart from the regular canon of 'erotic' texts, like Fanny Hill and the Kama Sutra, or the Marquis de Sade for that matter; he has a sense of poetry, he's of the same generation as Ronsard and du Bellay.) He speaks of a Spanish lady

"who would have it to be winter when she loved, & her lover a fire, so that when she came to warm herself at him by reason of the great cold which she felt, he should have the pleasure of warming her, and she of absorbing his heat as she grew hot, and so little by little to expose herself thoroughly to his gaze...
And then she would desire the coming of spring, and her lover to be a garden full of blossons, wherewith she might crown her head, her fair throat and her shapely breasts, and loll among them with her sweet body all naked between the sheets.
And likewise following this she would wish for summer, with her lover a clear fountain or a shining brook, for to receive her in his fair fresh streams when she went to bathe and sport therein, that he at last might see her fully and touch, caress and handle her lovely wanton limbs.
Finally at the close she desired him in the autumn to return once more to his proper shape, that she might be a woman and her lover a man, so that they might both have the spirit, sensibility and reason to contemplate and recall all their past delights, and live again in those fair imaginings and reveries, and to consider and discuss between them which season had been most apt and delicious for their loves."

That's lovely. It's a riff on the old folk song (and fairytale motif) of the two magicians - performed by Steeleye Span on Youtube - the multiple transformations of the maiden and the seducer. But the way Brantome tells it, it has the gentle poetry of a Ronsard sonnet, rather than the boisterous rough and tumble of the ballad.

So I'm now wondering whether I can take this story of the seasons, and perhaps make it into a nice little erotica novella...