Before romance had tropes or censorship had categories, Renaissance erotica dared to laugh at lust, power, and pretense. But what if those confessions from the 1500s sound more familiar than we’d like to admit? In Pietro Aretino’s Dialogues, nuns flirt, courtesans strategize, and wives complain with the precision of a group chat. It’s messy, clever, and uncomfortably human. Exactly why I can’t stop reading it aloud. Perhaps the real scandal isn’t what they did behind closed doors. It’s how much hasn’t changed since.
To find out why, we have to step into their world.
Rome and Venice: Two Faces of Desire
Forget gondolas and gelato for a moment.
To understand Pietro Aretino, picture Italy in the 1530s. A place where beauty and blasphemy lived side by side, and temptation dressed itself up in velvet and Latin.
In Rome, holiness was business, indulgence was currency, and sin was always a confession away. Priests and poets shared the same mistresses. Painters worked for popes by day and drank with courtesans by night. The Church preached restraint while commissioning art that made saints blush. Rome was less a holy city and more a divine contradiction: all incense and intrigue, where a clever man could rise faster with gossip than with prayer.
Farther north, Venice shimmered like the Renaissance’s most elaborate mask: silk, gold, secrets. If Rome was the confessional, Venice was the afterparty. Imagine the 16th-century version of Las Vegas: gondolas instead of limos, masked balls instead of blackjack, courtesans instead of influencers. A place where reputation and ruin were both earned by dawn.
And in between these two moral extremes (one preaching salvation, the other selling fantasy) lived Pietro Aretino, a man who somehow managed to scandalize both.
Image via Walks of Rome.
Meet Pietro Aretino: Satirist, Scandal-Monger, Survivor
Born in Arezzo in 1492—the same year Columbus went astray looking for India—Aretino’s life could have been a morality play if it weren’t such a comedy. The son of a shoemaker and a courtesan, he learned early that words could be both armor and currency.
In Rome, he honed them into weapons. Aretino wrote flattering poems for the powerful. And if they failed to tip him well, he’d turn his pen around and use it like a dagger. His enemies called him “the Scourge of Princes”; his friends just called him dangerous.
By the time he reached Venice, he’d mastered the art of reinvention: part journalist, part court jester, part extortionist. But underneath the bravado, Aretino was a survivor. He knew that power corrupts, religion represses, and lust always finds a loophole.
His great contribution? The Dialogues. Six scandalous conversations between women that somehow managed to be erotic, philosophical, and funny all at once. A cornerstone of Renaissance erotica that redefined how desire could be written.
On the surface, they read like Renaissance gossip. Bawdy tales of nuns, wives, courtesans, and widows sharing secrets that would make a confessor faint. But beneath the laughter runs something sharper: an anatomy of power, hypocrisy, and survival. All filtered through the female voice.
What Is Renaissance Erotica? Inside The Dialogues
Imagine a Renaissance version of a group chat. But instead of emojis and side-eye reactions, you get quills, candor, and confessions sharp enough to draw blood.
The Dialogues (or Ragionamenti) aren’t novels in the modern sense. They’re conversations. Six bold, bawdy, and startlingly human exchanges between women who, in most of Aretino’s world, wouldn’t have been allowed to speak so freely. These are not demure ladies or idealized saints. They’re nuns, wives, courtesans, and widows, sitting together and talking about everything polite society pretended didn’t exist.
Their discussions weave between love and lust, survival and hypocrisy, laughter and fatigue. There’s no moral sermon tucked neatly at the end. Only the messy, unfiltered truth of experience. And that’s what makes Aretino’s work so alive. (Also, why I chose it to begin my podcast.)
It’s not about shock value. It’s about recognition. Even now, nearly five centuries later, you can almost hear these women’s voices echoing in modern equivalents—podcast panels, dinner parties, or the half-whispered confidences between friends who trust you enough to be real.
In “The Life of Nuns,” Aretino begins not with temptation in the streets, but with temptation behind stone walls. Convent walls don’t stop longing. They simply redirect it. Desire becomes devotion. Curiosity hides behind confession. The women talk about pleasure as though it were prayer, mixing guilt with laughter, innocence with audacity. What should feel profane ends up feeling human—even holy in its honesty.
In “The Life of Wives,” we see another mask slip. Women trapped in marriages that are business deals with better linens. They gossip, complain, and reveal how much emotional labor has always gone unpaid. Beneath their sharp wit lies exhaustion, the centuries-old art of smiling through sacrifice. (Something women still do today.)
And in “The Life of Courtesans,” an older woman, Nanna, teaches her daughter how to navigate the trade of seduction. Not as sin, but as survival. She talks about the politics of desire, the art of manipulation, the theater of pleasure. It’s witty, cutting, and more strategic than salacious—proof that for women, power has often come disguised as play.
Each conversation turns the confessional upside down. Instead of whispering their sins to a priest, these women share them with each other—with humor, with irony, with astonishing self-awareness.
What Aretino did (and what his censors feared) was give women the one thing they weren’t supposed to have: a public voice.
🎧 Reflection on Episode 1: The Life of Nuns (Part I)
When I first read “The Life of Nuns” aloud for the podcast, I didn’t expect to laugh. But I did, loudly. It all felt so familiar. Five centuries later, desire and denial still make for the same punchlines.
Aretino takes the holiest of settings—a convent—and turns it into a microcosm of human contradiction. It’s not a parody of faith; it’s a revelation of humanity. The nuns in his story are curious, naïve, manipulative, and sincere all at once. Their lust isn’t vulgar. It’s vivid. Their curiosity about the body mirrors their longing for connection, for something beyond the cloistered rules imposed on them.
As I read, I could almost see the flickering candlelight in the dormitories, hear the rustle of fabric as whispers turned into confessions. These women were cloaked in prayer but pulsing with life.
And here’s the part that still resonates: five hundred years later, women are still taught to separate body from spirit, to justify desire instead of inhabit it. We police our own pleasure. We apologize for curiosity.
But in “The Life of Nuns,” desire becomes dialogue. And that’s what I love most about Aretino’s rebellion—he doesn’t shame curiosity, he sanctifies it through conversation.
Why The Dialogues Shocked (and Survived)
Let’s be honest: Sex didn’t shock people. Agency did.
When The Dialogues appeared, the Catholic Church was already panicking about the printing press. Words had power, and now they could multiply faster than censors could burn them. Aretino used that power with gleeful precision.
His women talked about sex, yes, but they also talked about choice. They questioned vows, contracts, confessions. They joked about hypocrisy, traded tricks, pointed out the absurdity of male virtue. That was the true obscenity—not what they did, but what they noticed.
And Venice, for all its supposed openness, was not immune to scandal fatigue. Booksellers were fined. Manuscripts went underground. But the words still spread. They were copied, hidden, smuggled, and whispered about at salons and taverns. Much the same way controversial art and banned stories circulate on the internet today.
In a sense, Aretino invented viral content before hashtags existed.
And just like now, controversy only made it more irresistible. Even in the Renaissance, people understood what we still do: When you tell a woman to be quiet, she’ll just find another way to be heard.
🎧 Reflection on Episode 2: The Life of Nuns (Part 2)
If the first episode of “The Life of Nuns” flirts with temptation, this one walks straight into it. We’ve left the whispered confessions behind and stepped inside the convent walls, where holiness and hunger share the same bed.
Aretino turns the sacred into something startlingly human. Through Nanna’s stories and Antonia’s wide-eyed questions, we glimpse women trapped between vows and desires, painting their own theology of pleasure. The conversation meanders from art and legend—Pyramus and Thisbe, Saint Nafissa, even the marble grin of Marforio—to the raw, bodily truth that no rule or rosary can repress what’s alive inside them.
Reading it aloud, I kept laughing at how outrageous it is—and then, just as quickly, feeling that sting of recognition. The tension between who we’re told to be and what we secretly want hasn’t vanished with the centuries. We may have traded convents for cubicles, but the walls are still there.
What Aretino understood—long before Freud or feminism—is that confession and desire are cousins. And sometimes, the only honest sermon is laughter.
Even centuries before Aretino, storytellers were already using forbidden love to test the boundaries of faith, fate, and flesh.
Pyramus & Thisbe: The Lovers Who Whispered Through Walls
They fell in love through a crack in the wall—literally. Two neighbors, forbidden to meet, whispering their dreams between bricks until words weren’t enough. They planned a secret rendezvous under a mulberry tree, but fate, as usual, had a flair for drama. A lioness appears, a cloak is torn, and Pyramus assumes the worst. One sword later, two lives end, and the mulberries turn red from grief.
The tale comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a Roman myth that traveled across centuries to inspire Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet—proof that doomed lovers never really go out of style.
Even now, we chase our own versions of Pyramus and Thisbe: love constrained by distance, timing, or fear of what others might say. Maybe the only thing that’s changed is the wall—from stone to screen, from silence to hesitation.
Why Renaissance Erotica Still Matters Today
I would like to believe we’ve evolved past this. That women’s voices are finally free. But censorship wears new clothes now: algorithms, judgment, internalized shame. The words have changed, but the silencing hasn’t.
I’d love to hear how this resonates with you. What feels familiar, uncomfortable, or still true today. I’m 56 now, and dating isn’t what it was before COVID. The rules, the rhythm, even the language have changed. But I’m still here, still curious, still rewriting the script on what connection looks like. Are you struggling to find your footing too? Leave a comment or share your thoughts on social; the conversation is what keeps history (and maybe hope) alive.
When Aretino let his characters speak, he wasn’t just writing erotica; he was writing resistance. He made women the narrators of their own experience. Something literature, even centuries later, still struggles to do consistently.
That’s why I wanted to start Lust Through the Ages here. Not with a modern story, not with a neat moral, but with something messy and alive (plus a little risqué 😉). Human sexuality has always been more than pleasure. It’s protest, curiosity, connection.
Aretino’s women may have been fictional, but the conversations they started are still unfinished.
Closing Reflection: The Salon Awaits
Venice wore its secrets behind masks. Rome wrapped them in scripture. We wrap ours in politeness and irony. Different century, same dance.
Every episode of Lust Through the Ages is a chance to peel back one more layer. To ask why we hide what’s human. Why we’re still afraid of seeing ourselves fully.
That’s what our Salon is for.
Each month, we’ll gather (virtually or otherwise) to talk about what these stories awaken in us. The discomfort, the curiosity, the laughter that bubbles up when something feels too true.
Our first Salon opens in December so stay tuned for details. Until then, tell me what struck you most about Aretino’s world. What felt familiar, what surprised you? Drop a comment or share your thoughts on social with #LustThroughTheAges. Conversation is half the fun.
Because history doesn’t just live in dusty books. It lives in us. Our first Salon opens in December so stay tuned for details. Until then, tell me what struck you most about Aretino’s world. What felt familiar, what surprised you? Drop a comment or share your thoughts on social with #LustThroughTheAges. Conversation is half the fun.
If you’re new to the series, start with the Introduction to Lust Through the Ages, where this journey into Renaissance erotica first began.
Because history doesn’t just live in dusty books. It lives in us. And if Renaissance erotica teaches us anything, it’s that honesty has never learned to whisper.
Follow Along With the Reading
If you’d like to read The Dialogues alongside the podcast, you can find an English translation on Amazon. This is the one I’m reading from. And it’s not just a book but a time capsule of wit, rebellion, and Renaissance mischief.
Affiliate note: purchases made through this link may earn me a small commission, which helps keep the candles lit and the stories flowing for Lust Through the Ages.
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