SOURCE: “Satiric Representation of Venereal Disease: The Restoration Versus the Eighteenth-Century Model,” in The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, edited by Linda E. Merians, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996, pp. 183-95.

In the essay below, Zimbardo considers the cultural views on venereal disease as represented in the popular fiction of the Restoration Period and the eighteenth century, noting its transition from public and comical to private and immoral.

The Restoration period in England (1660-1700) is what the philosopher Hans Blumenberg calls a “zero point,” a moment in cultural history when an epistemology is collapsing and simultaneously a new epistemology is arising: “the zero point of the dissolution of order and the point of departure of the construction of order.”¹ For the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the center of reality is the mysterious still center of the turning world: God. Each creature, like each...