A fascinating glimpse into the history of sexual perversions and diversions including fetishism, cross-dressing, 'effeminate' men and 'masculinized' women, sodomy, tribadism, masturbation, necrophilia, rape, paedophilia, flagellation, and sado-masochism, asking how these sexual inclinations were viewed at a particular time in history.

Charting the construction of sexual perversions in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical, psychiatric and psychological discourse, Schaffner argues that sexologists' preoccupation with these perversions was a response to specifically modern concerns, and illuminates the role of literary texts in the formation of sexological knowledge.

In the period between 1650 and 1820 new worlds of sex opened up. This was a pivotal time when old religious beliefs and medical theories about sexuality and the body clashed with innovatory ideas emerging from natural science and philosophy. In addition, a burgeoning print industry fed a rapidly expanding reading public with erotica. With the breakdown of old community networks and increased urbanization, authorities reacted to increased sexual license with a raft of new regulations designed to curtail variations in sexual behaviour. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Enlightenment presents an overview of the period with essays on heterosexuality, homosexuality, sexual variations, religious and legal issues, health concerns, popular beliefs about sexuality, prostitution and erotica.

Encompassing the long 18th century, Amatory Pleasures examines a broad and enticing variety of topics in the history of sexuality in Georgian times. It includes discussion of sexual perversion, criminal conversation, erotic gardens, gentlemen's homosocial societies, flagellation, pornography, writings of courtesans and the world of female friendship, revealing the secret or hidden meanings circulating between mainstream and covert activities of the 18th century. Julie Peakman draws connections between these pieces and situates them within current debates and examines how Georgian sexual activity was integrated from low life and high places, from brothels to palaces. Aimed at anyone interested in gender, history of sexuality, sex, literature and 18th-century history, Amatory Pleasures is an invaluable collection of the work of a key scholar in the field.

Dominic Janes is at pains here to highlight the role played by Christianity in the history of homosexuality in Britain. His story deals not merely with genital relations but also with identities both embraced and refused. Necessarily, coded expressions of desire as well as creative blurrings between religious idealism and queer gender and sexuality are integral to Janes s account. A special focus for Janes is the way in which visual images and imaginary visions of suffering in ecclesiastical contexts were used to develop concepts of male same-sex desire that projected the self as dutiful and penitent rather than shameful. And so, a model (and in ways a substitute) for same-sex relationships was readily available in idealizations of the person and body of Christas unmarried queer martyr. Homosexual desires and identities prove to have unfolded in creative dialogue with religion during and since the 19th century. Various figures enter into Janes s history, from Cardinal Newman and Oscar Wilde to artists such as Simeon Solomon and Frederick Rolfe, and the plot thickens with forays into Victorian monasteries that functioned as queer families, with fascinating side trips into Rolfe s Christmas cards as expressions of queer aesthetic/identity. He brings the account full circle with a concluding chapter on the life and works of Derek Jarman. Janes uses this case to show that the experience of the AIDS epidemic led to a reconnection with older modes of queer self-expression specifically concerned with the endurance of suffering. The religious roots of queer creativity are a vital resource for modern churches and openly gay men and women to learn from."

An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

This book argues that rape as we know it was invented in the eighteenth century, examining texts as diverse as medical treatises, socio-political essays, and popular novels to demonstrate how cultural assumptions of gendered sexual desire erased rape by making a woman’s non-consent a logical impossibility. The Enlightenment promotion of human sexuality as natural and desirable required a secularized narrative for how sexual violence against women functioned. Novel biomedical and historical theories about the "natural" sex act worked to erase the concept of heterosexual rape. McAlpin intervenes in a far-ranging assortment of scholarly disciplines to survey and demonstrate how rape was rationalized: the history of medicine, the history of sexuality, the development of the modern self, the social contractarian tradition, the global eighteenth century, and the libertine tradition in the eighteenth-century novel. This intervention will be essential reading to students and scholars in gender studies, literature, cultural studies, visual studies, and the history of sexuality.