Sex, Knowledge, and Receptions of the Past

by Kate Fisher (editor), Rebecca Langlands (Editor)

how should we do it, when should we do it, and with whom? How should we talk about and represent sex, what social institutions should regulate it, and what are other people doing? Throughout history human beings have searched for answers to such questions by turning to the past, whether through archaeological studies of prehistoric sexual behaviour, by reading Casanova's memoirs, or as modern visitors on the British Museum LGBT trail.

In this ground-breaking collection, leading scholars show that claims about the past have been crucial in articulating sexual morals, driving political, legal, and social change, shaping individual identities, and constructing and grounding knowledge about sex. With its interdisciplinary perspective and its focus on the construction of knowledge, the volume explores key methodological problems in the history of sexuality, and is also an inspiration and a provocation to scholars working in related fields - historians, classicists, Egyptologists, and scholars of the Renaissance and of LGBT and gender studies - inviting them to join a much-needed interdisciplinary conversation.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2015

Reviews

[Alex Combs]

The main theme of this collection is that, when writing about the past, we often tend to reveal more about our own values and cultural context than we reveal about the historical subject of study. It’s important that those of us currently studying, interpreting, and writing about the history of sexuality, make efforts to observe and question our own motives and assumptions in the ways we interpret historical sources.