Framing Premodern Desires: Sexual Ideas, Attitudes, and Practices in Europe ed. by Satu Lidman et al. (review)

This is a collection of twelve papers that contribute to the history of sexuality in Europe over a quite long period, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century. While nearly all of the chapters have a narrow historical and geographical focus, that apparent restriction proves to be a scholarly virtue—as it so often does. It allows individual contributions to provide appropriate detail without proving inaccessible to readers who have only limited specialist knowledge of those times and places. The ten chapters that make up the body of the text are framed by a thoughtful and erudite introduction by Garthine Walker (13–26) and an edifying epilogue by Lois Leveen (233–49). Walker explicitly addresses some of the difficult issues raised by attempts to historicize desire. On behalf of the essays as a set, she claims that they engage with the subject of premodern desire from a variety of perspectives. Her sophisticated introduction raises important questions that are not always resolutely pursued in the essays that follow, even as she herself notes the dangers of presentism in work of this kind and invites readers of the collection to make sense of it in historicist terms. She makes the key point that even where, under Foucault's influence, "sexuality" is circumscribed and relativized, desire can still be misleadingly taken as universal. At the other end of the collection, Leveen's bracing epilogue asks taxing questions about what it is to know and teach history, offering examples from her own historical fiction.

In between the two framing contributions stands a somewhat uneven set of essays. Two of them certainly deserve mention. Bonnie Clementsson's "Incest between In-Laws" examines two cases of incest tried in Sweden at the very beginning of the eighteenth century, cases that had quite different outcomes (65–81). By carefully considering differences between them that came to prove significant despite their prima facie similarity, Clementsson provides a nuanced analysis of the kinds of shared knowledge and beliefs underlying the legal decisions. This is an intellectually elegant and enlightening piece that draws the conclusion—likely to be surprising for many historians of sexuality in the modern period—that in this context incest could not be officially excused on the grounds of love or passion but was in fact considered to be aggravated by these factors. "The Lame Man Makes the Best Lecher," by Kaye McLelland, is another fine contribution (189–209). McLelland examines a range of texts, from the writings of a Calvinist cleric to literary texts by Spenser and Shakespeare, in order to understand attitudes to disabled sexuality in early modern England. She takes the opportunity to reflect about the place of the sexual in disability studies while at the same time showing that the period under examination has something distinctive to contribute to a longer history of disability, especially through the figure of the "lecherous cripple." One other contribution should be mentioned if only because, as Walker notes in the introduction, it is decidedly out of step with the others in its interpretive ambition and its historical sweep (20–21). Farmerz Dabhoiwala's "The First Sexual Revolution" is conceived on a much broader scale than the more modest studies that precede and follow it (103–28). The very sweep of its generalizations is likely to raise difficulties for readers of this journal who have themselves engaged in specialized studies of the various periods Dabhoiwala discusses, from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Dabhoiwala's essay amounts to a longue durée history, albeit a compact one, of sexual liberation, and it is told against the grain of Foucault's deconstruction of that historical metanarrative in the first volume of his History of Sexuality. It makes a case that many readers are likely to find unpersuasive, but it does so vigorously and with some degree...