Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture by Julie Peakman (review)

This collection of essays on eighteenth-century sexuality is ambitious in breadth, convincing in evidence, and refreshingly light on theorizing and jargon. Peakman’s book is richly illustrated with thirty-five supplemental images, and covers an impressive variety of topics, including sodomy, bestiality, flagellation, rape, prostitution, venereal disease, sexual fluids, erotic gardens—and more. Along the way, Peakman uses archival evidence, literary works, autobiographies, and insights by other recent scholars to explain and understand attitudes toward sexuality and sexual writing during the era. She makes clear from the outset, with a nod to her former mentor Roy Porter, that her book will not be overtly theoretical in nature: “theories and conceptual analyses are, of course, important in their place, but straightforward language, stories of people, and the place and time of when, where and how things happened, I believe, are more important.” This approach serves her well, and the result is a highly readable work that does not disenchant students and emerging scholars with abstruse theorizing. It also does not plague seasoned scholars by making them slog through what they already know.

Peakman explains that her purpose is “to bring together a collection of disparate articles under one cover in order to make them more easily accessible.” The book consists of ten chapters, all authored by her, eight being reprinted here, so that only two are previously unpublished. The collection does more than fulfill the obvious purpose of showcasing her own research; it also draws heavily from the work of other prominent scholars on eighteenth-century sexuality. This approach yields little direct disagreement. Unlike the polemics sometimes seen in traditional monographs, Peakman acknowledges the contributions of those who came before her without undoing them in the process.

The value of the book is its ambitious breadth. One gains a broad sense of the variety of proclivities, fetishes, perversions, habits, and taboos of eighteenth-century Europeans. For instance, one may learn from her account when the sexualization of children in pornography first emerged, why female cross-dressing was not thought perverse in the way male cross-dressing was, why many writers turned to botany when writing about sex, and why whore biographies became so popular. Peakman is respectful of the many contexts that shaped (or were shaped by) attitudes toward sexuality during this era, including of the ways the law and the church impacted the issues of print availability, divorce, public shame, and children. In one recurring example, she makes an implicit argument that economic conditions were critical in shaping cultural attitudes toward sex. As a result, such topics as rates of migration to cities, changes in wages, and attitudes toward class difference, are shown to be relevant to sexual culture.

Of course, Peakman’s breadth risks sacrificing depth. There are certainly places where we are left wanting more, particularly concerning sexual attitudes outside of Europe— the topic is mentioned in passing in the introductory chapter but never revisited. Indeed, ironically, the seeming inclusivity of her study may invite the assumption that even more should have been discussed. If female friendship (chapter 7) and gardens (chapter 10) are fair game in this volume, why not include more on the even more overtly sexual and topical subjects like the vogue for Italian castrati singers in opera and the church? Other minor complaints can be leveled, such as occasional repetitions of commentary from one chapter to the next, as is seen in her repeated argument that “heterosexual procreative sex was promoted as both normal and ideal” and that sex acts not aimed at procreation were therefore often considered perversions.

Additionally, in a book that consistently and helpfully provides summative and concluding sections at the end of every chapter, it is surprising that it concludes as abruptly as it does, with no “Conclusion” but only with a rather flat sentence concerning erotic gardens: “The erotic garden had found its new, peculiarly British form of excitement in nose-gays and birches of the female...