The histories of sex and sexuality have been fundamentally shaped by the idea that before the nineteenth century, and the scientific study of sexual behaviour undertaken by sexologists, there was little concept of sexual identities. As Kim Phillips and Barry Reay explain between ‘c. 1100–1800, there was sex but no sexuality. That is, modern preoccupations with the centrality of sexual habits, tastes or preferences (what are often termed “orientations”, “identities”) to one's true or inner self were yet to emerge’ (p. 7). The presence of homosexual ‘identities’ and sexualities has been frequently explored by historians of the premodern era. However, Sex before sexuality pushes the historical investigation of sexualities further, fundamentally challenging the implicit acceptance by historians of a heterosexual identity before 1900: ‘if homosexuality is no longer applicable as a taxonomic guide to premodern desires and actions, heterosexuality has outlived its usefulness’ (p. 41). The authors contend that because of heterosexuality's ‘ubiquity and invisibility’ it has resisted the deconstruction that homosexuality has undergone (p. 40). This challenge forms the main thrust of the book's argument alongside the call to abandon modern labels such as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘lesbian’.
To confront the implicit presence of ‘heterosexuality’ in studies of the premodern world the authors survey a wide variety of secondary literature, which will make this work an invaluable resource for students of the history of sexuality. The book examines several aspects of sexuality in the medieval and early modern worlds. The first chapter explores the role of sin in shaping understandings of sexual desire. Phillips and Reay demonstrate that the beliefs of Christianity were central to medieval and early modern erotic sensibilities but that the ideas of sin and sexual desire were never static or stable. Desire was always problematic, particularly in the face of ongoing discussions about the relative spiritual status of celibacy and marriage. Phillips and Reay also underline the importance of gender in medieval understandings of sin, charting for example the ways in which clerics had to negotiate a series of masculinities that incorporated sexual intercourse as the marker of a real man.
The second chapter investigates sex ‘Before Heterosexuality’. Fundamentally arguing that sexual practices and sexual desire were not inextricably linked, Phillips and Reay suggest that marriage before 1900 was not an absolute heterosexual category; it did not at any point entirely preclude homoerotic desires or attachments. This chapter explains how the premodern medical and social framework of sexual acts was focused on conception and fertility, and thus even acts that were ‘heterosexual’ could be condemned on the same level as ‘homosexual’ acts if they did not lead to procreative sex. As Phillips and Reay argue, ‘the fact that Renaissance men and women had sex with each other [does not] tell us anything about their sexual identity’ (p. 58) because sex between a man and a woman was not necessarily privileged as something good in itself.
Chapters 3 and 4 consider same-sex relations. In each of these chapters the authors present particularly interesting discussions of love and the expression of intense emotion. The evidence provided shows how men and women could express in the most ardent manner intimate emotional attachments to friends and lovers, but also the difficulties that face modern readers in categorising or understandings these sentiments. ‘Between Men’ explores the original definitions of the term ‘sodomy’ and demonstrates the commonality and openness of homoerotic encounters in everyday life. The authors then disentangle the complexities of male friendships and how they differed from and intersected with sexual desire. Finally the authors discuss effeminacy and dissect the perceived role of ‘mollies’ in the development of homosexual identities. Breaking the topic down in this way is very effective and allows ‘desire’ and ‘identity’ to be explored in detail. In ‘Between Women’ Phillips and Reay continue to challenge our assumptions about intimacy in the premodern world. They question the boundaries of the field of ‘lesbian’ scholarship and suggest that it may be best for scholars to adopt a broad approach that takes account of historical and individual diversity. Throughout this chapter the frameworks that rendered these relationships intelligible, including phallocentricism and hermaphrodism, are discussed, while the elements of premodern culture that complicate any straightforward reading of these sexual encounters as ‘lesbian’ are explored, such as medieval female mysticism. This chapter argues that ‘lesbianism’ should not be treated as a marginal aspect of the history of sexuality in contrast to a strongly fore-grounded heterosexuality; instead both concepts should be rejected in favour of a study of polymorphous and changeable sexual histories.
Chapter 5 considers the existence of explicit sexual materials ‘Before Pornography’. The authors summarise neatly the historiographical debates surrounding ‘what’ pornography is and does, and when modern discourses of pornography developed. They consider the range of purposes that sexually explicit material could have served and argue that in many ways premodern society was open to portrayals of sexual intercourse because they could be subversive. Finally, in a brief epilogue the authors discuss sexual encounters between Europeans and the indigenous peoples of the Pacific. They demonstrate that the sexual liberty of these nations evoked sexual fantasy, disgust and curiosity about both opposite-sex and male–male sexual activities. The epilogue is used effectively to recapitulate the central idea of the book, that sex and sexuality in the past are not easily understood and described when viewed from a modern perspective.
In bringing together the sexual histories of the medieval and early modern past this book makes a substantial contribution to this scholarship and will no doubt become essential reading for students and established researchers. The book effectively challenges us to reconceptualise the history of sexuality, how we endeavour to read the sources, how we categorise and label the behaviours we uncover and how we relate this to our own concepts of modern sexual identities.
