A pioneering survey of the social and cultural history of sexuality in early modern Europe.

Transcending the traditional categories of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ to analyse pan-European attitudes and behaviours, Sex and Sexuality in Europe, 1100–1750 provides students with a grounding in the history of sexuality by supplying both a detailed analysis of the existing historiographical debates but also analysis of the primary sources such as autobiographies and contemporary literature. Offering an accessible overview that places sex and sexuality within the historical context of the time period, it creates a deeper understanding of connections and differences across Europe. An interdisciplinary work, it draws on cultural, social, religious, philosophical, literary, economic and scientific ideas while incorporating theory from within the field to broaden perspective of the history of sexuality. Challenging the separation of the medieval and early modern ‘periods’, this volume highlights a great deal of continuity between 1100 and 1750 across Europe, with change occurring more notably towards the eighteenth century. Key interventions on the role of the passions, the imagination, the ‘two worlds’ motif and subordination are made across the work. Moreover, it questions the belief that the ‘Middle Ages’ was one of sexual repression and highlights a second ‘world’ in which sex was a natural, even celebrated part of life and engages with the belief that the eighteenth century saw a ‘sexual revolution’. This book is essential reading for students, scholars and the general public interested in the history of sexuality.

An examination of how Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge transformed notions of sex and sexuality in France.

Thoroughly updated edition of a best-selling, acclaimed book, placing early modern European history in a global and environmental context.

A new edition of a seminal work--one that explores crucial changes within Europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century The early modern period was one of profound change in Europe. It was witness to the development of science, religious reformation, and the birth of the nation state. As Europeans explored the world--looking to Asia and the Americas for new peoples and lands--their societies grew and adapted. Eminent historian Henry Kamen explores in depth the issues that most affected those living in early modern Europe--from leisure, work, and migration to religion, gender, and discipline--and the way in which population change impacted the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, and the poor. The third edition of this pioneering study includes new and updated material on gender, religion, and population movement. Richly illustrated, this is essential reading for all those interested in early modern European society.

In Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, Andrea Pearson charts the moralization of human bodies in late medieval and early modern visual culture, through paintings by Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, devotional prints and illustrated books, and the celebrated enclosed gardens of Mechelen among other works. Drawing on new archival evidence and innovative visual analysis to reframe familiar religious discourses, she demonstrates that depicted topographies advanced and sometimes resisted bodily critiques expressed in scripture, conduct literature, and even legislation. Governing many of these redemptive greenscapes were the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, archetypes of purity whose spiritual authority was impossible to ignore, yet whose mysteries posed innumerable moral challenges. The study reveals that bodily status was the fundamental problem of human salvation, in which artists, patrons, and viewers alike had an interpretive stake.

Historians of sexuality have often assumed that medieval people were less interested in sex than we are. But people in the Middle Ages wrote a great deal about sex: in confessors' manuals, in virginity treatises, and in literary texts. This volume looks afresh at the cultural meanings that sex had throughout the period, presenting new evidence and offering new interpretations of known material. Acknowledging that many of the categories that we use today to talk about sexuality are inadequate for understanding sex in premodern times, the volume draws on important recent work in the historiography of medieval sexuality to address the conceptual and methodological challenges the period presents. A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages 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.

Drawing on the methods of a wide range of academic disciplines, this volume shifts the focus of the history of the body, exploring the many different ways in which its physiology and its fluids were understood in pre-modern European thought.

Michel Foucault’s seminal The History of Sexuality (1976–1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality—a field in which the German case has been traditionally central. In many diverse ways, the Foucauldian intervention has governed the formation of questions in the field as well as the assumptions about how some of these questions should be answered. It can be argued, however, that some of these revolutionary insights have ossified into dogmas or truisms within the field. Yet, as these contributions meticulously reveal, those very truisms, when revisited with a fresh eye, can lead to new, unexpected insights into the history of sexuality, necessitating a return to and reinterpretation of Foucault’s richly complex work. This volume will be necessary reading for students of historical sexuality as well as for those readers in German history and German studies generally who have an interest in the history of sexuality.

Winner of the 2023 Prose Award in Cultural Anthropology and SociologyFinalist for the 2023 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction A sweeping history of Indigenous traditions of gender, sexuality, and resistance that reveals how, despite centuries of colonialism, Two-Spirit people are reclaiming their place in Native nations. Reclaiming Two-Spirits decolonizes the history of gender and sexuality in Native North America. It honors the generations of Indigenous people who had the foresight to take essential aspects of their cultural life and spiritual beliefs underground in order to save them. Before 1492, hundreds of Indigenous communities across North America included people who identified as neither male nor female, but both. They went by aakíí’skassi, miati, okitcitakwe or one of hundreds of other tribally specific identities. After European colonizers invaded Indian Country, centuries of violence and systematic persecution followed, imperiling the existence of people who today call themselves Two-Spirits, an umbrella term denoting feminine and masculine qualities in one person. Drawing on written sources, archaeological evidence, art, and oral storytelling, Reclaiming Two-Spirits spans the centuries from Spanish invasion to the present, tracing massacres and inquisitions and revealing how the authors of colonialism’s written archives used language to both denigrate and erase Two-Spirit people from history. But as Gregory Smithers shows, the colonizers failed—and Indigenous resistance is core to this story. Reclaiming Two-Spirits amplifies their voices, reconnecting their history to Native nations in the 21st century.