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In contemporary English the word obscene has connotations of strong disapproval, even disgust. For some, any depiction of sexual activity or the sex organs is by definition pornographic, for others it is a legitimate, morally neutral branch of art, ''erotic'' art. In this entry the term is construed to refer to all sexual acts, gestures, and exposures that for most of European medieval and post-medieval history have been perceived or received as offensive (scatological obscenity is beyond the purview of this entry). However, the notion of obscenity is culturally relative, and chronologically relative even within the same culture: autres temps, autres moeurs.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, when the traveler John Fryer visited a Hindu temple in Madras in the 1670s, his reaction to the erotic figures carved there was predictable: ''On the Walls of good Sculpture were obscene Images, where Aretine might have furnished his Fancy for his Bawdy Postures.'' This may have been the era of Rochester and the bawdy excesses of the court of Charles II, but Fryer knew obscenity when he saw it. The ''Bawdy Postures'' of the carved temple figures he interpreted as obscene images similar to the frankly pornographic and notorious modi (positions for intercourse, known in contemporary English as the Postures) engraved by Raimondi to illustrate Aretino's sonnets, a work that was publicly burned in Venice in 1527 and became synonymous with sexual obscenity for the early modern English.

In Adam de la Halle's thirteenth-century play, Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion, searching for some means of entertaining themselves, one of the adult actors asks, ''Faisons un pet pour nous esbatre?'' (Shall we fart to amuse ourselves?) a suggestion accepted with, we may think, surprising alacrity. Obscenity cannot be accidental but must be intentional--by which definition, neither of these instances qualifies as obscene: the offense taken by Fryer was certainly accidental--contemporary Indians would not have been offended--and the medieval French farters entered into their game without giving it a second thought.

However, it is in this very propensity to offend that the power of the obscene lies. When obscenity is not accidental but ostentatious, what is its function? One obvious function is to promote sexual arousal regardless of whether such art or writing is labeled pornographic or erotic. Such deliberate incitement began in postclassical times with the Aretino/Raimondi I Modi (Lawner 1988) and continues in the present era via ''girlie'' magazines and Internet porn sites.

Bibliography:

Hunt, Lynne. 1993. The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800. New York: Zone Books.

Jones, Malcolm. 2002. The Secret Middle Ages. Westport, CT: Praeger.

Lawner, Lynne, ed. and trans. 1988. I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures: An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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