Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History by Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay (review)

Few subjects have excited as much attention on the part of historians as sex, gender, sexuality, and sexual deviance. Over the last three decades in particular, the treatments of sex and sexuality have become increasingly more sophisticated and more attuned to complexities. The very words “sex” and “sexuality” have come under scrutiny and have often been damned as reflecting a modern, and thus ahistorical, view or even a “heteronormal” one. Queer theory, literary criticism, post-modernism, and especially the work of Michel Foucault have exerted profound influences on scholars (and not only historians) and had a transformative effect on scholarship. Sex before Sexuality is by no means the first book to survey this vast literature and marshal it into a clear narrative, but it is one of the most subtle and informed.

Several characteristics make Sex before Sexuality an especially useful contribution to historical writing. Its two authors, Kim M. Phillips, a medievalist, and Barry Reay, mostly a modernist but one whose work has a broad chronological sweep, form a very good team: both have written extensively on sex and sexuality and are completely at home with the relevant theoretical approaches while retaining a healthy skepticism about the ability of any single theory to answer all questions. The authors carefully compare and contrast the positions and arguments treated in a vast range of literature. The book is also an extended, and basically well-done, historiographical essay that might have been more readable in places had that structure been more successfully concealed.

The chronological choices the authors decided on are especially important because they lie at the very heart of the argument. “Sex before sexuality” treats the medieval and early modern periods; the subtitle declares it a “premodern history.” Clearly, the authors intend their work to advance a position rather than merely appraise a field. A short description on the back cover maintains that “this volume runs counter to the assumptions of many historians, art historians and literary critics.” Who those “many” may be is a bit unclear as much of the material, and even the interpretations, discussed here will not seem strange in their outlines to those who already possess a good command of the relevant literature. Most medievalists and early modernists writing at the beginning of the twenty-first century are well aware that sex and sexuality, like love, body, gender, emotions, and a whole range of other topics, are socially and historically constructed; indeed, most current literature has built explicitly on that very appreciation. The anticipated audience may be a different one, however. Sex before Sexuality is a recent addition to the series, “Themes in History,” that has addressed topics such as mass literacy, childhood, terrorism, and witch hunts. The works are to be ““written in a way … suitable for non-specialists” and serve as texts for students who should learn to “think about historical problems in a conceptual and comparative way.”¹ While the writing is certainly accessible to the literate general reader, the level of discourse may well perplex many American undergraduates. Yet, and on the other hand, the richness of examples and the careful dissecting of positions will surely interest more advanced scholars.

Still, this is not to suggest that the authors merely replow old furrows or have simply crafted an “accessible synthesis” for the neophyte. While Phillips and Reay stress throughout the volume the “great diversity of erotic responses” (99), the book by no means merely piles difference upon difference or obsessively catalogs the strange. Fascinating material abounds but is turned to the purpose of comprehending what we might otherwise consider an oddity or grotesque. The “obviously pornographic” pilgrim badges or the peculiar frequency of “autonomous sexual images,” free-standing (!) vulvas, anuses, and “bottoms,” are not trotted out to indicate either the slyness of medieval humor or an easy familiarity with the less-seen parts of the human body. Rather, the authors draw out the complexities and ambiguities of such images and...