This volume is the second to come out of a series of Wellcome-funded conferences run by the Exeter University Centre for the History of Sexuality. The first, Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by F. and S. Toulalan, appeared in 2011. This book repeats some of the features of the earlier conference and volume, and you can see why the Wellcome Foundation looked kindly upon the project. The series crosses over disciplinary chronologies and national histories (though entirely focused on early modern and modern Europe and America), and unites major scholars with postdocs, students and those working outside the academy in museums and education. Part of the Centre's effort, also directed by F. and L., was to develop an ‘impact’ on education for sexual health, and to this end it has developed outreach projects in which schoolchildren discuss the history of sexuality through a series of objects. That project won an award for impact from Exeter University. In that sense, the project as a whole exemplifies the way in which research is supposed to work in the modern British university. All of this might be calculated to send grant committees into ecstasies, and make REF impact panels explode with delight, not to mention crushing the all-important league tables, but what about the ‘outputs’?

The aim of the book, according to the editors, is to explore how sexual desires, attitudes and practices since the eighteenth century have been made sense of by using historical examples, principally those from the ancient world. The past plays three different functions in these historical accounts: first, as a resource for making identity; second, as part of a story of progress or decline; and third as a counterpoint to the present condition of morality – either negatively or positively. The past, then, turns out to be ‘central to most moral and ideological claims about … sex and sexuality’ (p. 5). The editors also assert that the book highlights the dilemmas of historians more generally, and that therefore it is ‘a significant intervention into historiography beyond the history of sexuality’ (p. 16). In particular, they say, the essays reveal the perennial tension between the quest for impartiality in historical inquiry and the need for those accounts to have contemporary relevance.

The essays begin, as have so many histories of sexuality, with the ancient world, and its uses in early sexology. A. Blanshard argues that writers like John Addington Symonds used accounts of Greek homoeroticism to develop what he calls an ‘aesthetics of love’, a third way between homophobic criminology of the Lombrosian type and the historically ignorant sexology of Moreau and Krafft-Ebing. D. Challis of London's Petrie Museum provides a report from the front line of education, specifically showing the ways in which LGBT history can be taught by using objects from the classical world such as clay phalluses and erotic statuary. This kind of exhibition, Challis argues, is a way of establishing a bridgehead for gay and lesbian history in the museum, and for challenging standard depictions of the ancient world. P. Cryle, who appeared in the first edited volume, again gives us an account of French libertinism of the eighteenth century, this time seen through the eyes of the Goncourt brothers in the mid-nineteenth century. This essay addresses the editors’ historiographical mission by arguing that some kind of anachronism in sexuality studies is unavoidable. Following Foucault, Cryle says that the very notion of ‘sexuality’ as a distinct domain of knowledge is a modern creation, so that looking for ‘sexuality’ in the past is automatically anachronistic. Instead of merely abandoning the study of sex and the body in the past though, Cryle calls for ‘productive anachronism’ that allows us to see how history was used explicitly for the purpose of contrast with the present. His example is the way in which the Goncourt brothers consciously imagined the libertine literature of eighteenth-century France as a refreshing contrast to what they saw as the hypocritical morals of the mid-nineteenth century. F. and L.'s own contribution is an account of the display and recording of the famous statue of Pan having sex with a goat found in Pompeii in 1752. The object was interpreted in different ways. Sir William Hamilton saw in it a parallel between the phallic worship of the ancient world and contemporary Catholicism, which was also found to venerate wax phalluses even in 1781. Enlightenment revolutionaries used the statue in their attack on contemporary morals, arguing that it showed that more relaxed attitudes to morals had once existed. These changing interpretations are used to show that the meaning of an object is contained in the deployment of it. In this case, as in others, F. and L. say, ‘there is no possibility of a definitive knowledge’ about the statue. J. Funke's essay on the travels of Magnus Hirschfeld shows how his exploration of ‘primitive’ cultures informed his sexology, but also that sexology of this type had, by the early 1930s, already been superseded by more rigorous forms of inquiry. Sexology clearly belonged to a period of advocacy, and was only quasi-scientific at best. J. de Groot examines the ‘Terminal Essay’ on pederasty of Richard Burton and his climatic/regional theories of sexual difference. Moving away from classical reception studies and the ancient world, L. Hall traces the paradoxes contained in recent representations of the Victorian past. While ‘Victorian’ is still a living synonym for sexual repression (an idea that was first given form, Hall says, in J.A. Froude's 1903 account of the Carlyles’ marriage), ‘Neo-Victorian’ pastiche like the novels of Sarah Waters or Michel Faber reasserts the view that the underneath it all the Victorians were a very sexy lot, though there was often quite a perverse tinge to that sexiness. The nineteenth century was also, not coincidentally, a key moment in the investigation (and perhaps invention) of prehistory and its sexual customs. C. Manias’ account of how this sexual history was created in the nineteenth century demonstrates how sexual revolutions – the creation of the incest taboo from the chaos of primitive incest and marriage by capture, matriarchy and patriarchy – were seen by nineteenth-century historians as crucial moments in evolutionary history. S. Matzner shows how Karl Ulrichs relied heavily on classical texts – notably, Ovid, Martial and Aesop – in his attempt to overthrow Prussian laws against homoerotic behaviour. A. Moore shows how eclectic the theories of early Freudians were by examining the use of evolutionary theory in the work of Spanish endocrinologist Gregorio Maraňon and the French psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte. K. Sellberg ticks off early-modernists like Stephen Greenblatt for uncritically buying in to Thomas Laqueur's ‘one-sex’ model of sexual anatomy, though seemingly without realising that this interpretation was thoroughly critiqued by Joan Cadden in 1993. Finally, in probably the best essay, C. Waters shows how the memory of Oscar Wilde was reconstructed at his centenary in 1952. Waters shows that many writers sought to rehabilitate Wilde, although given the circumstances, they were mostly unwilling to examine his homosexuality in much detail. Wilde was an equivocal hero to those, like Peter Wildeblood, who argued for the legitimacy of homoerotic desire, but only from the point of view of a non-effeminate, respectable and discreet subjectivity.

As this volume was put together from conference papers, the editors were clearly dependent on the efforts and interests of other scholars. However, as a document describing the state of the art in the history of sexuality, several things strike the reader. First is the appearance (or reappearance) of a very familiar cast of characters and subjects from the sexologists to Freud and Richard Burton. Second is the almost total absence (one essay from both volumes) of religion as a context for understanding sexual behaviour. Both seem rather curious, not to mention worrying if we are concerned about the intellectual vitality of what is now regarded as a subject eminently worthy of large grants.