Sifilografía: A History of the Writerly Pox in the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World by Juan Carlos González Espitia (review)

Abstract

of Enlightenment polemic and exchange. By giving us a nuanced and detailed portrait of Bianchi as a medical and socio-cultural gadfly or rebel, she underlines the radicalism of his non-judgmental account of the Vizzani case, and by extension of his treatment of broader questions about the relations between the body, identity, and desire. One significant discovery Donato has made in this regard is the long-lost text of a Discorso on love between men that Bianchi delivered in Bologna to the curiously named Accademia dei Diffettuosi (Academy of the Defective) in 1719, twenty-five years before writing the Breve Storia. This “apology for same-sex love” (59), as Donato calls it, suggests that Bianchi’s interest in dissident or prohibited forms of desire, and the sexual or gender identities these may create or express, was not incidental but of long standing. Inasmuch as it has never been published, it would have been very useful to have included this text in full (in Italian and English translation) as a fourth appendix, especially as an entire chapter is devoted to it.