Before 1800: Flagellation, Courtly Submission and the Libertines

The word BDSM is roughly two centuries away at the start of this period, and so is everything the word implies: a community, an ethic, a set of terms people apply to themselves. What exists before 1800 is a scatter of practices, texts and reputations that later writers assembled into an ancestry. Some of that assembly is honest. A good deal of it is not.

Penance, and its secular drift

Ritual whipping has a long documented life inside Christianity. Self-flagellation was pressed as private penance by eleventh-century reformers, Peter Damian among the most insistent, and it settled into monastic discipline. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it went public: processions of flagellants moved through Italian and then northern European towns, most dramatically during the plague years of 1348 and 1349, until Clement VI condemned the movement in October 1349. The stated purpose throughout was penitential. Treating it as erotic requires evidence the record does not supply, and the honest answer about what individual penitents felt is that nobody knows.

The link between the religious and the secular runs instead through medicine. Early modern physicians took seriously the idea that striking the lower back and buttocks warmed the blood and stirred desire, and the standard reference for that view was a short Latin treatise by the German physician Johann Heinrich Meibom on the use of rods in venereal matters, printed in 1629. It was reprinted and translated for the next two hundred years. A doctor recommending flogging as a remedy for impotence is not describing a subculture. He is describing a practice common enough to require a treatise, which is a different kind of evidence and a firmer one.

The English vice, before it had a name

By the eighteenth century London had a commercial flagellation trade. The evidence for it is uneven but real. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, the annual directory of prostitutes that began appearing in the late 1750s, records women who offered birching among their services, and it was written for customers rather than for posterity, which is what makes it useful. The famous named flagellation houses of Georgian London are much shakier ground. Almost everything repeated about them descends from Victorian bibliographers writing a century after the fact and enjoying themselves considerably.

The reputation travelled faster than the evidence. Le vice anglais was established across the Channel as a joke about English schoolrooms well before anyone attempted to show that the English did it more than their neighbours. Nobody ever has. The claim survives because it is a good story about a rival nation, and because the birch really was standard in English schools, which gave the joke somewhere to point.

Three texts that carry the period

John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, published in two volumes in 1748 and 1749 and known since as Fanny Hill, contains an extended flogging episode between the narrator and a client. Cleland was arrested and the book suppressed, which did nothing to stop it circulating; it stayed in print underground for two centuries. The scene matters less for what it depicts than for how it is written. Cleland assumes his readers already know what this is. In 1748, a paying English audience recognised flagellation as a distinct erotic subject requiring no introduction.

Rousseau’s Confessions, published after his death in 1782 and 1789, supplies the period’s most useful single document: a first-person account of being beaten as a child by his guardian’s sister, and of discovering that the punishment had produced something other than shame. Rousseau states the fact, connects it to his adult desires, and cannot explain it. Nothing else from this era comes close. It is the only testimony in which someone describes their own formation and attempts to account for it.

Then Sade. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom in the Bastille in 1785 and published Justine anonymously in 1791. His fiction is not about negotiated exchange and never claims to be. Its subject is violence without limit, applied to victims who do not consent and largely do not survive, in the service of an argument about nature and law. His own criminal record involved real people who made real complaints against him. His entry here sets out what he was actually imprisoned for, which is not what most short accounts report.

What the period hands forward

The inheritance is this. A body of religious and medical writing that treated whipping as meaningful. A trade in London with a documented paper record and a largely undocumented oral one. A literary tradition running from the courtly love poets, whose lovers address their ladies in the language of feudal service, through to the libertine novel, which made dominance and submission available as literary subjects. And one imprisoned writer whose surname would be turned into a diagnosis by a psychiatrist working seventy years after his death.

What the period does not hand forward is any of the things that constitute a subculture: shared vocabulary, agreed limits, mutual recognition, an argument about ethics conducted between participants. All of that arrives later, and the order it arrives in is set out on the timeline. The nineteenth century supplies the words. The twentieth supplies the people who use them about themselves.

The temptation with a period this thin is to fill it in. Resisting that is most of the work.