Category: primary source reading

I Modi is the first published book to be censored by order of the Catholic Church. It wasn’t so much its sexual explicitness that drew the ire of the Pope, but the book’s joyful celebration of sex without procreation, among other things. Support the show on Patreon here to hear it.

Source Read: Romano, Giulio; Raimondi, Marcantonio; Aretino, Pietro; and Waldeck, Count Jean-Frederic-Maximilien. I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, An Erotic Album of the Italian Renaissance, trans. and ed. Lynne Lawner (Northwestern University Press, 1988).

For The Episode: The Erotic Publication That Scandalized Renaissance Europe

In 1524, the peasants of Stühlingen came up with 62 written articles of complaint to be submitted to the imperial courts of the Holy Roman Empire. This articles represented, though, grievances peasants across Germany had with the clergy and the nobility, which would explode into the German Peasants’ War. Support the show on Patreon to hear it here.

Source read: The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents, eds. Tom Scott and Bob Scribner (Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991).

For the episode: The German Peasant Who Almost Started a Revolution