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9781474226431

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This book [is] very valuable ... There is revealing work here, on life stories of and by woman sex workers, and erotic gardens ... On botanical sexual metaphors in erotica, Peakman is at her most fruitful. Times Literary Supplement [A] survey of the many diverse ways in which sex was presented in medical, erotic and pornographic writing. If you want to know when the dominant female flagellant became common in English pornography and which medical ideas were taken up in erotica, this book will tell you. Times Higher Education Amatory Pleasures comments on the enduring fascination of both the English Georgians and their diverse and exotic sexual practices. This convergence of 'Era and Eros' feels as fresh today as it did when the recalcitrant Victorians, in shock, began to retrieve the bawdy eighteenth century and its Hogarthian sexual underbelly. George Rousseau, University of Oxford, UK Julie Peakman in her new book of entertaining and informative essays, Amatory Pleasures, shows once again that she is the supreme mistress of eighteenth-century pornographic and erotic writing. Peakman in her previous books has provided new editions of crucial writing on the lives of prostitutes. She has offered three volumes of analysis of these materials. And she has organized contributions from groups of other scholars on the history of sexuality, not least in a six volume Cultural History of Sexuality also now published by Bloomsbury. The essays in Amatory Pleasures are organized into three sections. The eighteenth-century material (on which the modern western sexual system is founded) is first placed in the long-term history of worldwide developments. A second part concentrates on the lives of prostitutes and mistresses, high and low, including the story of Emma Hamilton and the Queen of Naples. The final group of essays sets the pornographic material in the contexts of medical developments and the history of gardens. A very rich feast of pleasure indeed! Randolph Trumbach, City University of New York, USA, and author of Sex and the Gender Revolution Amatory Pleasures is like a great Renaissance historical canvas: monumental in scale while at the same time rich in its detailed accounts of sexual pleasures, literatures and relations. There is no better account of the strangely distant yet eerily familiar world of eighteenth century sexuality in all its dazzling variety. Thomas W. Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley, USA

Amatory Pleasures comments on the enduring fascination of both the English Georgians and their diverse and exotic sexual practices. This convergence of 'Era and Eros' feels as fresh today as it did when the recalcitrant Victorians, in shock, began to retrieve the bawdy eighteenth century and its Hogarthian sexual underbelly. George Rousseau, University of Oxford, UK Julie Peakman in her new book of entertaining and informative essays, Amatory Pleasures, shows once again that she is the supreme mistress of eighteenth-century pornographic and erotic writing. Peakman in her previous books has provided new editions of crucial writing on the lives of prostitutes. She has offered three volumes of analysis of these materials. And she has organized contributions from groups of other scholars on the history of sexuality, not least in a six volume Cultural History of Sexuality also now published by Bloomsbury. The essays in Amatory Pleasures are organized into three sections. The eighteenth-century material (on which the modern western sexual system is founded) is first placed in the long-term history of worldwide developments. A second part concentrates on the lives of prostitutes and mistresses, high and low, including the story of Emma Hamilton and the Queen of Naples. The final group of essays sets the pornographic material in the contexts of medical developments and the history of gardens. A very rich feast of pleasure indeed! Randolph Trumbach, City University of New York, USA, and author of Sex and the Gender Revolution Amatory Pleasures is like a great Renaissance historical canvas: monumental in scale while at the same time rich in its detailed accounts of sexual pleasures, literatures and relations. There is no better account of the strangely distant yet eerily familiar world of eighteenth century sexuality in all its dazzling variety. Thomas W. Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley, USA

Author Information

Julie Peakman is an Honorary Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian renowned for her work on the global history of sexuality. She is author of Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-century England (2003), Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (2004), The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (2013) and general editor of the six-volume A Cultural History of Sexuality (2010).

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