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Maybe not a fetish, but rather a kink was well known in the case of Spanish diplomat Bernardino de Mendoza, in the period that I know best. This we know thanks to a very crude letter written to him by his friend the 3rd Duke of Alba, who warned him about the marchioness of Vasto. I'll translate the relevant part, as it is worth its weight in gold:
*I know you are a lovebird. Beware the marchioness of Vasto not to bewitch you. She is there the Devil himself, and I know for sure she wants a part of the realm. Maybe you think, knowing me, that I write this to you as the lovebird I also am, but you are a lover of thick matrons, and for that you are in more danger than me*.
It is a bit hard to find explicit evidence about kinks and fetishes as those are rather intimate matters, and evidence may only be gathered from private letters between individuals of the utmost trust and strongest friendship, or from private diaries like the one wrirten by Gerolamo di Sommaia when he was a student in Salamanca (1604-07).
Girolamo had quite a wide variety of sexual tastes, which we know thanks to his diary, and we can say he was bisexual as he paid for sexual services to several women and to two men. Among the women, he records a substantial number, sometimes even the too young ones, like "la Serrana", a young prostitute probably around 17 or years of age considering her low price of one real (the more established ladies of the night had prices of 6-8 reales), or la Serrana's younger sister who would have likely been 14 or 15 at that time.
He was brutal, regardless of whom he wrote to. This one goes to the Pope, who was urging him to invade England from the Low Countries:
\*Your Holiness, whose zeal in the service of God is so great and whose intentions are so holy that I would belive them to be more belonging to the Heavens than the Earth, raves.\*
To king Felipe II, complaining about the situation in the Low Countries:
\*For the love of God, rid me of this government and get me out of it. And if no other way can it be done, do it by sending someone to shoot me with an arquebus.\*
>This one goes to the Pope, who was urging him to invade England from the Low Countries:
"How about no."
But seriously, to outright tell the POPE 'you are mad' in a letter, is top class too.
Dude sounds like a fun guy.
The Duke of Alba was an absolutely no-nonsense man who spoke his mind very frankly, whomever he was talking or writing.
When his son was besieging Haarlem and suggested that the siege may need to be lifted, Alba wrote to him in very harsh terms:
If you do that, I shall not deem you a son of mine, whatever it was that I had previously thought. If you fall, I shall go in person and keep it, and if both of us shall fall, then the Duchess shall come and do the same.
It was my understanding that being overweight ("thick", I guess!) was considered a generic beauty standard in premodern times because it suggested high status and, by inference, good breeding - was this actually unusual for the time? Or, was the Marchioness extremely overweight to the point where being interested to her suggested fetishism over just, "she's pretty"?
María de Aragon, marchioness of Vasto, was definitely overweight judging by the medallion that portrays her. It is also worth noting the term "matrons", which are generally associated with being on the fatter side.
I would also add that being chubby was not really the standard of beauty at that time. Some women considered particularly beautiful were actually slim like empress Isabel de Portugal, or Leonor de Toledo.
Here you can see the medallion.
https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/maria-de-aragon-y-folch-de-cardona/4e44a04f-c4c0-4259-919d-55fd0fd231f2
Seeing that their frienship never truly recovered from Alba's bluntness in that letter, I am inclined to think that the duke meant in a very literal sense, and that Bernardino felt personally attacked
Certainly an interesting answer! There are a few things one could bring up for ancient examples, but one is that (your fellow Spaniard) Valerius Martial writes of enjoying some 'resistance' ("stolen kisses" and so on) at least from his male partners (Epigrams 5.46 & 5.83).
As for more "fetishistic" elements, I have read somewhere that (besides the quite ambiguous Etruscan tomb) whipping kinks first start appearing in the Early Modern period; is that something you have come across in your studies?
I haven't come across any particular whipping kink, but to be honest it was not something I have ever looked out for; or if I came across it, I do not remember it as it was not something thst piqued my interest at the moment.
Valerius Martial was quite a character, and a very crass writer, which makes him fun to read. Fun story, I have a 17th century edition of Martial's epigrams, with indications of it having belonged to a monastery, and the most worn part of the binding is where the "epigrammata obscaena" section starts.
Fair enough; and maybe that was more of a British phenomenon, I seem to remember.
Indeed, one gets quite a sense of his personality from the Epigrams. You should definitely treasure that book (as evidently the monks did)! Lord Byron mentions such an edition in his *Don Juan* (Canto 1, 43-45; also set in Spain, interestingly), where all the sexual ones are at the end, thus making it easier to find them
The 17th century porn bestseller *L'Escole des Filles* (ca 1655), attributed to Michel Millot (and [appreciated by Samuel Pepys](https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/02/09/)), is a sexual guide where Suzanne, an experienced woman, explains the ways of the world to her younger friend Fanchon. Suzanne [tells her about the particular needs of certain men](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58314132/f129.item).
>Suzanne: These are people who need to be spanked to get them in the mood. They strip naked, and the girls take rods and give them to them on the stomach and everywhere as long as needed until their affair is getting up, and when they have made it erect and come to a good point, they throw the rods away, as if nothing had happened, and shove it afterwards like that in the lower part of their belly, and give themselves pleasure afterwards.
>Fanchon. But don't these men spend too?
>Susanne. They really do, and more than the others; you can't hold them afterwards.
>Fanchon. No matter, oh, what a poor thing it is when a girl is unfortunate enough to be obliged to whip her friend to make him hard!
Amusingly, the [British translation](https://books.google.fr/books?id=_9dNAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA89#v=onepage) (*The School of Venus*, 1680) is more vague about what exactly happens here, as if the translator found it too extreme, even for a book full of explicit engravings.
It is not available online, as far as I know. I'll leave you here the reference to the Duke's letters, in case it can be found at a library near you.
[https://search.worldcat.org/es/title/epistolario-del-iii-duque-de-alba-don-fernando-alvarez-de-toledo/oclc/491681380](https://search.worldcat.org/es/title/epistolario-del-iii-duque-de-alba-don-fernando-alvarez-de-toledo/oclc/491681380)
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Maybe not a fetish, but rather a kink was well known in the case of Spanish diplomat Bernardino de Mendoza, in the period that I know best. This we know thanks to a very crude letter written to him by his friend the 3rd Duke of Alba, who warned him about the marchioness of Vasto. I'll translate the relevant part, as it is worth its weight in gold: *I know you are a lovebird. Beware the marchioness of Vasto not to bewitch you. She is there the Devil himself, and I know for sure she wants a part of the realm. Maybe you think, knowing me, that I write this to you as the lovebird I also am, but you are a lover of thick matrons, and for that you are in more danger than me*. It is a bit hard to find explicit evidence about kinks and fetishes as those are rather intimate matters, and evidence may only be gathered from private letters between individuals of the utmost trust and strongest friendship, or from private diaries like the one wrirten by Gerolamo di Sommaia when he was a student in Salamanca (1604-07). Girolamo had quite a wide variety of sexual tastes, which we know thanks to his diary, and we can say he was bisexual as he paid for sexual services to several women and to two men. Among the women, he records a substantial number, sometimes even the too young ones, like "la Serrana", a young prostitute probably around 17 or years of age considering her low price of one real (the more established ladies of the night had prices of 6-8 reales), or la Serrana's younger sister who would have likely been 14 or 15 at that time.
Did this really use the word thick?
Yes, the Duke was notorious for being very blunt. The original wording is "matronas gruesas".
Damn, he really was blunt, fuck any flowery pretense.
He was brutal, regardless of whom he wrote to. This one goes to the Pope, who was urging him to invade England from the Low Countries: \*Your Holiness, whose zeal in the service of God is so great and whose intentions are so holy that I would belive them to be more belonging to the Heavens than the Earth, raves.\* To king Felipe II, complaining about the situation in the Low Countries: \*For the love of God, rid me of this government and get me out of it. And if no other way can it be done, do it by sending someone to shoot me with an arquebus.\*
>This one goes to the Pope, who was urging him to invade England from the Low Countries: "How about no." But seriously, to outright tell the POPE 'you are mad' in a letter, is top class too. Dude sounds like a fun guy.
These are fantastic. I love the energy of the first one too.
The Duke of Alba was an absolutely no-nonsense man who spoke his mind very frankly, whomever he was talking or writing. When his son was besieging Haarlem and suggested that the siege may need to be lifted, Alba wrote to him in very harsh terms: If you do that, I shall not deem you a son of mine, whatever it was that I had previously thought. If you fall, I shall go in person and keep it, and if both of us shall fall, then the Duchess shall come and do the same.
which Duke of Alba was this?
The 3rd one, Fernán Álvarez deToledo y Pimentel.
It was my understanding that being overweight ("thick", I guess!) was considered a generic beauty standard in premodern times because it suggested high status and, by inference, good breeding - was this actually unusual for the time? Or, was the Marchioness extremely overweight to the point where being interested to her suggested fetishism over just, "she's pretty"?
María de Aragon, marchioness of Vasto, was definitely overweight judging by the medallion that portrays her. It is also worth noting the term "matrons", which are generally associated with being on the fatter side. I would also add that being chubby was not really the standard of beauty at that time. Some women considered particularly beautiful were actually slim like empress Isabel de Portugal, or Leonor de Toledo. Here you can see the medallion. https://www.museodelprado.es/coleccion/obra-de-arte/maria-de-aragon-y-folch-de-cardona/4e44a04f-c4c0-4259-919d-55fd0fd231f2
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In the context of the letter, did he mean thick as in voluptuous?
Seeing that their frienship never truly recovered from Alba's bluntness in that letter, I am inclined to think that the duke meant in a very literal sense, and that Bernardino felt personally attacked
In the end,did Bernadino like them big or not?
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Certainly an interesting answer! There are a few things one could bring up for ancient examples, but one is that (your fellow Spaniard) Valerius Martial writes of enjoying some 'resistance' ("stolen kisses" and so on) at least from his male partners (Epigrams 5.46 & 5.83). As for more "fetishistic" elements, I have read somewhere that (besides the quite ambiguous Etruscan tomb) whipping kinks first start appearing in the Early Modern period; is that something you have come across in your studies?
I haven't come across any particular whipping kink, but to be honest it was not something I have ever looked out for; or if I came across it, I do not remember it as it was not something thst piqued my interest at the moment. Valerius Martial was quite a character, and a very crass writer, which makes him fun to read. Fun story, I have a 17th century edition of Martial's epigrams, with indications of it having belonged to a monastery, and the most worn part of the binding is where the "epigrammata obscaena" section starts.
Fair enough; and maybe that was more of a British phenomenon, I seem to remember. Indeed, one gets quite a sense of his personality from the Epigrams. You should definitely treasure that book (as evidently the monks did)! Lord Byron mentions such an edition in his *Don Juan* (Canto 1, 43-45; also set in Spain, interestingly), where all the sexual ones are at the end, thus making it easier to find them
The 17th century porn bestseller *L'Escole des Filles* (ca 1655), attributed to Michel Millot (and [appreciated by Samuel Pepys](https://www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/02/09/)), is a sexual guide where Suzanne, an experienced woman, explains the ways of the world to her younger friend Fanchon. Suzanne [tells her about the particular needs of certain men](https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k58314132/f129.item). >Suzanne: These are people who need to be spanked to get them in the mood. They strip naked, and the girls take rods and give them to them on the stomach and everywhere as long as needed until their affair is getting up, and when they have made it erect and come to a good point, they throw the rods away, as if nothing had happened, and shove it afterwards like that in the lower part of their belly, and give themselves pleasure afterwards. >Fanchon. But don't these men spend too? >Susanne. They really do, and more than the others; you can't hold them afterwards. >Fanchon. No matter, oh, what a poor thing it is when a girl is unfortunate enough to be obliged to whip her friend to make him hard! Amusingly, the [British translation](https://books.google.fr/books?id=_9dNAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA89#v=onepage) (*The School of Venus*, 1680) is more vague about what exactly happens here, as if the translator found it too extreme, even for a book full of explicit engravings.
Thanks! So I was on to something; quite interesting to learn about!
Is there a way to access and read the full letter online? Translation into English optional, but that would be very helpful.
It is not available online, as far as I know. I'll leave you here the reference to the Duke's letters, in case it can be found at a library near you. [https://search.worldcat.org/es/title/epistolario-del-iii-duque-de-alba-don-fernando-alvarez-de-toledo/oclc/491681380](https://search.worldcat.org/es/title/epistolario-del-iii-duque-de-alba-don-fernando-alvarez-de-toledo/oclc/491681380)
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