Exciting reads: how the ideal of romantic love shaped the sexual desires of Paolo Mantegazza’s female readers

Abstract By reconstructing the boundaries of a ‘community’ that shared the same emotional horizon when it came to love, this article explores the role that concepts of romantic love played in the development of modern ideas of sexuality, with a specific focus on the relationship between women, sexual desire and pleasure. After a brief description of the Italian historical and cultural context in which Paolo Mantegazza developed his sexual science and the role that romantic love played within it, I analyse his Fisiologia dell’amore to show how, even without explicit references to sexual acts, the book clearly alludes to sexual desire and pleasure. I then examine a selection of letters from Mantegazza’s female readers to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the book. Finally, I show how ideas of romantic love and the introspective enquiry prompted by reading Mantegazza also affected women’s awareness of themselves as sexed beings capable of and entitled to experiences of pleasure.