Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present

How different really were early twentieth-century attitudes towards marital sex from those in the sixteenth and seventeenths centuries, where intercourse was seen as an essential part of a healthy, happy union in which partners should aim to please each other to sustain the marital partnership and to avoid adultery? To what extent did nineteenth- and early twentieth 6century concepts of degeneration evolve out of earlier ideas about loss of vital spirits? The authors in this book examine how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted over time, from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. Rather than reproduce narratives of change and progress 6 or liberation from repression 6 this collection aims to draw the reader's attention to the continuities in thinking about bodies and sex over the centuries 6 while concepts may change, they nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.