Book review: Sex before Sexuality
How do we approach the sex lives of our forebears? In much of contemporary esoteric literature, there’s a tendency to assume that the identity categories we are so familiar with nowadays are universal and can be applied unreflexively to premodern cultures in Europe and beyond. Indeed, there is a trend towards looking for evidence for the existence of those same sexual identities in the past, in order to legitimise them – and to argue that “the ancients” for example, were really, just like us. There has been a considerable amount of scholarship contesting such assumptions of course, but its not always accessible to a non-academic reader. Sex before sexuality: A Premodern History (Polity Press, 2011, 200pp, p/bk) provides a useful introduction to contemporary theories on the interpretation of attitudes to sex in the premodern period. Continue reading »
