This is exxxxactly my field!! I'm so excited! To answer this I will draw from a few blog posts (that will be chapters in my book).
The simple answer is that it was not until the late 1800s, with the Obscene Publications Act in England, the Comstock Laws in America, and laws against obscene work in France and parts of Germany. But this ignores the fact that sexual works have a loooooong history, and kinda makes you think that there were no bad sexual works before 1850. Not true!
So, in the beginning, all sorts of works that we would consider as obsene, sexual, or pornographic circulated around Europe. For example, here is a bit from the Ragionamenti of Pietro Aretino, published in 1536. The text concerns a woman, named Nana, who is trying to decide if she should raise her daughter to be a wife, a nun, or a whore, and as she has been all three, she decides to describe (in, uh, great detail) her adventures as a nun, wife, and whore. At the age of 16 she is forced into a convent by her father, and on her first night there she peeks through a crack in a wall and sees
four sisters, a general, and three milky-white and ruby-red young friars who were taking off the reverend father and putting him in a velvet coat [like a prince]… meanwhile the sisters removed their habits and the friars took off their tunics. The latter put on the sisters robes, and the sisters put on the friars, except one, who put on the reverend father’s cassock, seated herself pontifically, and began to imitate a superior laying down the law for the convent
If this was not shocking enough to the “sweet and innocent” Nanna, the reverend father ordered the friars to strip him, and “grabbing ahold of the youngest, prettiest nun, threw her tunic over her head…then, deliberately prying open the leaves of her asshole Missal, contemplated her crotch. [Then] he placed his paintbrush, which he first moistened with spit, in her tiny color cup, and he made her twist, as women do in the birth throes or the mother’s malady [period].” At the same time, Nanna watched as another friar took the reverend father in the behind, and the other two priests “pound the sauce in the mortar” of the other two sisters. Being so ‘innocent’ Nanna of course “began rubbing my dear little monkey with my hand like cats in January rub their backsides on a roof.”
After describing great number of sexual adventures (which I talk about here and here, as a nun and then a wife and then a whore in Rome, she asks her friend Antonia what she should do with her daughter Pippa. Antonia says:
My opinion is that you should make a whore of your Pippa. The nun betrays her sacred vows and the married woman murders the holy bond of matrimony, but the who violates neither her monastery nor her husband. Indeed, she acts like the soldier who is paid to do evil…go there freely with Poppa and make a whore of her right off, and afterward, with the petition of a little penance and two drops of holy water, all whorishness will leave her soul. Moreover, from what I have understood of your talk, a whore’s vices are really virtues.
Seems pretty damn sexual, and pretty damn obscene, doesnt it? You would expect this to be considered as obscene, sexual, and bad, but, in fact, Aretino's work was insanely popular with every level of society, from the Pope, to kings (he once blackmailed Francis I of France and Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire) and down into the literate middle classes. In fact, these sorts of sexual works were permitted and allowed, even though their purpose was to critique the Church (whorish nuns), society (cheating wives), and politics (hypocritical men who paid for prostitutes).
So what changed? Well, the Reformation changed everything. The Reformation, set off by Martin Luther embraced these stereotypes of lecherous friars and whorish nuns in order to point out how corrupt the Catholic Church was (and I talk about how Luther used scat porn to mock the Pope here). The Reformation resulted in a Council known as The Council of Trent, which created the institution that would become known as the Inquisition (nobody expects the spanish inquisition!). The Inquisition was charged with ferreting out authors and political figures that criticized the Church, State, or Society, and put an end to them. The Council was very clear on what was offensive:
Books which professedly deal with, narrate, or teach things lascivious or obscene are absolutely prohibited, since not only the matter of faith but also that of morals, which are usually easily corrupted through the reading of such books must be taken into consideration, and those who possess them are to be severely punished by the bishops.
This would pretty clearly target obscene and pornographic writing. However, the rule did not end there:
Ancient books written by heathens may by reason of their elegance and quality of style be permitted, but may by no means be read to children.
The exception for Ancient Greek and Roman texts that are ‘elegant’ and have ‘quality of style’ gives us the evidence that the Church was not necessarily targeting or offended dirty books–they were targeting the use of the erotic to criticize religion, society and politics by individuals such as Aretino. Catullus of the “I will sodomize you and face-fuck you” (full poem here) was still allowed–in Latin, of course, as were Virgil and other poets that would be considered questionable, obscene, and never translated until the twentieth century. In fact, the use of Latin would allow writers such as Casanova, Theodore de Beze and others to pass their books off as “ancient and elegant” and allowed under the Tridentine rules.
It was, in fact, books in the vernacular that got you decapitated, like, for example, a book by Ferrante Pallavincio or the ridiculously obscene School of Venus (discussed here) and has such great lines as:
Frances: How can you imagine otherwise? You may see there are more ways then one to put a Prick into a Cunt, sometimes my Husband gets upon me, sometimes I get upon him, sometimes we do it sideways, sometimes kneeling, sometimes crossways, sometimes backwards… sometimes Wheelbarrow, with one leg upon his shoulders, sometimes we do it on our feet, sometimes upon a stool, and when he is in Hast he throws me upon a Form, Chair or Floor, and fucks me lustily, so these ways afford several and variety of pleasures, his Prick entering my Cunt more or less, and in a different manner, according to the posture we Fuck in.
or
Mr. Roger gave me a Visit one Night, as we were dancing with some few of our Neighbors, he being a little flustrated with Wine set himself on a Chair, and whilst others danced, feigned himself a sleep; at last he pulled me to him, and sat me down on his knees…with a little Pen-knife he pulled out of his Twesers [Trousers], he made a hole in [my dress], and thrust his Prick into my Cunt, which I was very glad of; we went leasurely to work, for we durst not be too busie for fear of being caught
The publishers of this book lost all of their property, were chased out of France and condemned to death. But still, these books weren't offensive because of their sexual content, they were offensive because they questioned morality, society, or religion. The judges of the time were very clear about this--when Edmund Curll (my favorite historical person ever) appeared in front of a judge for printing a book known as Venus in the Cloister, they decided (after a three-year trial!) that Curll’s book was libel and therefore punishable “peace may be broken in many instances without an actual force. 1. If it be an act against the constitution or civil Government; 2. If it be against religion; and, 3.If against morality.”
The third point, though pornography would seem to match the definition of being “against morality,” still referred to Christian morality, as the judges explication point three made clear: “Christianity is part of the law, arid why not morality too?” The fact that the genre of pornography was just beginning to take shape proved to be the key argument that saved Curll from a worse fate in the hands of the Kings Bench.
So here we are in 1728, having covered nearly 200 years of European history and culture and we still haven't gotten to "when did they start banning books for sexual content?" The answer to that still doesn't come around for a century, until the 1857 Obscene Publications Act, which I'll write about in the next post ;)