Overview

This remarkable book traces the development of sexual knowledge and guidance in Britain over three centuries. An absorbing, shocking, and often moving narrative, it investigates how views on sexual activities, sexual disorders, sexual pleasures, and sexual proprieties evolved through the years. Roy Porter and Lesley Hall explore the moral, religious, scientific, medical, domestic, social, and cultural backgrounds of various periods in which sexual information was received. They assess, for example, the impact of literature on sex on the legal regulation of prostitution, the control of contagious diseases, gender relations in and out of marriage, social purity movements, and social hygiene concerns. They describe the emergence of evolutionist and laboratory discourses on sexuality, the origins of sexual surveys, debates about marriage and free love, and associated revelations of personal sexual experiences. Examining texts that range from Nicolas Venette's Mysteries of Conjugal Love Reveal'd, written near the close of the seventeenth century, to Marie Stopes's Married Love, a famous tract of the twentieth century, Porter and Hall show how these texts established and authorized sexual knowledge and sexual practices. They describe the authors of these texts, their careers, and the motives for involvement in medico-moral campaigns that were often thought unsavory and commonly led to criticism and censure. Challenging and overturning common assumptions and historiographical traditions-from hoary myths of the Victorians to the work of Michel Foucault-the book adds a great deal to our understanding of the origins of sexual mores and knowledge.

Full Product Details

Author:   Roy Porter ,  Lesley Hall
Publisher:   Yale University Press
Imprint:   Yale University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 0.40cm , Length: 23.50cm
Weight:   1.007kg
ISBN:  

9780300062212

ISBN 10:   0300062214
Pages:   428
Publication Date:   20 March 1995
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Undergraduate ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Out of stock  
The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available.

Table of Contents

"Part 1 From the restoration to Victoria: introduction - histories of sex; contexts - from the restoration to the accession of Queen Victoria; medical folklore in high and low culture - ""Aristotle's Masterpiece"". Appendices: editions of ""Aristotle's Masterpiece""; contents of ""Aristotle's Masterpiece""; contents of ""Version 2"" of ""Aristotle's Masterpiece""; contents of ""Version 3"" of ""Aristotle's Masterpiece""; doctors and the medicalization of sex in the enlightenment; masturbation in the enlightenment - knowledge and anxiety; quackery and erotica. Part 2 The Victorians and beyond: introduction - towards Victoria; the Victorian polyphony, 1850-85; from the primeval protozoa to the laboratory - the evolution of sexual science from 1889 to the 1930s; the authority of individual experience and the opinions of experts - sex as a social science; ""Good Sex"" - the new rhetoric of conjugal relations; public faces in private places - sex, law, politics and pressure groups; silent stares, smut, censorship and surgical stores - the makings of popular sexual knowledges."

Reviews

Author Information

Roy Porter is professor in the social history of medicine and Lesley Hall is senior assistant archivist, Contemporary Medical Archives Centre, at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London. Porter has written or contributed to over fifty books and is a regular reviewer and broadcaster in England. Hall is the author of Hidden Anxieties: Male Sexuality, 1900-1950. 

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions