According to one authority, the first book of purely or mainly erotic content to be published in
Christian Europe
was the "Hermaphrodite" of Antonio Beccadelli, written in 1426. The Latin text
was reissued in 1892 with a
French translation by Isidore Liseux, the scholarly French publisher of erotica and the
literature of love.
Beccadelli, who wrote under the name of Panormita, was one of the group of men later called
humanist; he
modelled much of his work on the writings of the poets of antiquity. Wayland Young suggests
that Beccadelli,
like Martial, was half fascinated and half disgusted "by women and fucking."