416 cecilia cristellon and silvana seidel menchi
have appeared to be an extraordinarily effective means of control: what did
the obligation of annual confession have to do with supernatural realities?
Was it not evident that it was a means of attaining an all-encompassing
social control?94 in this context, the figure of Christ as legislator-impostor
stimulated the imagination to the point of creating imitators, figures who
gained quick notoriety as promoters of messianic movements, and found
a following as such.95
one of the predominant themes in the works of ferrante Pallavicino
and his fellow Incogniti was the legitimation of the sexual impulse as
something ever-present in nature. The restrictions imposed by Catholic
morality on the exercise of sexuality went against nature and thus against
god, creator of that nature. This conviction found expression both in state-
ments of principle, making use of the natural philosophy of giulio Cesare
Cremonini, and in the flowering of a genre of erotic or lascivious litera-
ture which reached its height in 17th-century Venice.96 Both categories of
testimony promoted an ethics of instinct that legitimated every type of
sexual desire, including homosexual, inasmuch as they were inborn in the
human constitution, and claimed a space for their expression.
The degree to which religious control over sexual morals had slack-
ened by the 18th century may be glimpsed in a phenomenon that has
recently (and rightfully) attracted the attention of historians. Venice was
one of the principal theaters for a practice that spread at this time among
nobles of the italian states, the cicisbeato. This term indicated the specific
relationship that formed between a married woman, her knight-servant
(or cicisbeo) and her husband. With the full consent of the latter, the
cicisbeo, a man often but not always celibate, took the husband’s place
at the wife’s side for all the occasions of 18th-century sociability—in the
carriage, on walks, at theater, banquets, and balls—and was regularly
received in the home of the married women, with whom he would spend
hours in private. This triangular configuration of the family core enjoyed
full social legitimacy. The noblewomen’s spiritual advisors and many a
preacher warned that this intimacy between the dame and her cicisbeo
had to respect certain limits, but it was well known that respect for such
94 indeed, confession had been placed at the service of the inquisition as a tool for
eradicating the Protestant movement in italy; see Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della cosci-
enza. Inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin, 1996).
95 Barbierato, Politici e ateisti, pp. 113–37.
96 spini, Ricerca dei libertini; Muir, Culture Wars.