Abstract

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Western countries witnessed a growing interest towards sexuality. Believing that sexuality had a crucial role in people’s lives, many intellectuals participated in the emergence of a discipline that aimed to study human sexual behaviours scientifically. In post-unification Italy, Paolo Mantegazza, known as the father of Italian anthropology, was one of the most important authors of scientific discourses about sexuality. Unlike other important scientists such as the psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, Mantegazza was not interested in the medicalisation or pathologisation of the so-called sexual perversions but aimed at studying sexuality form every point of view, putting sexual pleasure at the centre of his inquiry.

The aim of this research is to investigate Mantegazza’s contribution to the emergence of sexual science and to rethink the Foucauldian historiographical approach that has closely associated the development of sexual science with the field of psychiatry. Combining the history of science and cultural history, in this thesis Mantegazza's intellectual production on sexuality is placed in the broader context of the culture of the time and of the emergence of the new discipline.

Reflecting Mantegazza's anthropological method, this work has been divided into four main thematic areas, corresponding to the different roots of Mantegazza's sexual science: medicine and hygiene, anthropology, love feeling, eroticism and pornography.

Chapter II analyses Mantegazza’s early interest in human sexuality developed in the context of marital hygiene, with a particular focus on positive discourses concerning both male and female sexual pleasure. The aim is to show the importance that the genre of marital sexual advice had in the construction of the modern conception of sexuality.

Chapter III investigates Mantegazza's anthropological method as the basis of his sexual science. In the Italian context, his particular approach to the discipline shows the existence of a tradition different from psychiatry to which Lombroso belonged.

Chapter IV analyses the influence of the ideal of romantic love on Mantegazza’s thought. Little considered by historians, this new emotional paradigm had a key role in his sexual science, as it constituted the framework that allowed him to give a legitimate place to sexual pleasure within the marital relationship.

Chapter V focuses on the interconnections between Mantegazza’s sexual science and the pornographic literature of the time and questions the epistemological boundaries between the disciplines. In fact, the analysis shows that because of their popular dimension, Mantegazza's discourses on sexuality cannot be univocally defined as scientific or literary.

The final chapter analyses the sexual themed objects of Mantegazza’s Psychological Museum. Organised around the concept of pleasure as a key element of human sexuality, this collection can be considered as the empirical translation of Mantegazza's sexual science.