European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (review)

This book is a welcome addition to the current renaissance of historical interest in sexuality. Crawford, the author of Perilous Performances: Gender and Regency in Early Modern France (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), has written a work that is part synthesis of the scholarly literature and part an excavation of stories out of the primary sources.

The book's intent is to make recent controversies about the history of sexuality accessible to undergraduates. The last several decades of debate about the nature of companionate marriage in the past—the essentialist vs. the social-constructionist views of the history of homosexuality (did they consider themselves gay or not?), the history of masturbation, the role of the Church in the oppression of sexuality, and the nature of women's historical sexual experience—all find spaces in these pages. In each chapter, the main historical debates, or contributions in the absence of formal debate, are limned, followed by a hefty list of suggestions for further reading. (That the suggestions are all English-language books will only add to the preconception that the only language in the world worth bothering about is English.)

The organization of the book is thematic: A chapter on sexuality and the family incorporates demographic as well as literary evidence; a chapter on religion and sexuality provides an overview comprehensive enough for specialists to appreciate; a clever section discusses "the science of sex"—what in the early modern period was called the "natural philosophy" of such biological matters as when to get pregnant, how to avoid infertility, and whether gender was a distinguishing anatomical feature before the eighteenth century. Chapters on "sex and crime" and "deviancy," meaning mainly the history of homosexuality, conclude this useful little volume.

A book devoted mainly to debates among historians and summaries of their views could rapidly become tedious, but the extensive quotation from primary sources, mainly in English and French, gives these pages a sparkle. Crawford has read extensively in the literature of the day, and she wears her knowledge in a convincing but unpedantic manner.

No scholar trained within the last twenty years would likely be able to detach him- or herself from the view that sexuality is basically a matter of power relationships, rather than desire, and Crawford does not disappoint readers keen for this perspective: The thesis running through these pages is that sexual relations are yet another scheme that men have devised for brutalizing women. Women in history who responded positively to desire are few in this book, though numerous in the sources. The women whose behavior is described in the memoirs of Brantôme (Pierre de Bourdeille), those of Giovanni Giacomo Casanova, and those of Samuel Pepys simply do not appear in this book, either because Crawford has missed these writers in the impossible task of surveying all of the literature, or because they make sex sound (for women too) as something that is playful and delightful rather than just a source of oppression.

Two other criticisms: First, Crawford seems relatively incurious about what people actually did in bed. She spends much time writing about "social responses" and "cultural attitudes," important, to be sure, but tangential to sexuality in the way that a book about the history of railroading that failed to discuss trains would be wide of the mark. Second, things become "gendered" and "layered" far too often. The jargon of neo-deconstructionism does not infiltrate every page, but sentences like the following make me reach for my revolver: "Historians sympathetic to viewing sexuality as a primary cultural formation elaborated on normative and non-normative practices within family, religious, and state structures" (8). This statement will give undergraduates an interesting view of a profession that once prided itself on graceful, literate prose.