Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Culture

Description

Encompassing the long 18th century, Amatory Pleasures examines a broad and enticing variety of topics in the history of sexuality in Georgian times. It includes discussion of sexual perversion, criminal conversation, erotic gardens, gentlemen's homosocial societies, flagellation, pornography, writings of courtesans and the world of female friendship, revealing the secret or hidden meanings circulating between mainstream and covert activities of the 18th century. Julie Peakman draws connections between these pieces and situates them within current debates and examines how Georgian sexual activity was integrated from low life and high places, from brothels to palaces. Aimed at anyone interested in gender, history of sexuality, sex, literature and 18th-century history, Amatory Pleasures is an invaluable collection of the work of a key scholar in the field.

Julie Peakman is an Honorary Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian renowned for her work on the global history of sexuality. She is author of Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-century England (2003), Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (2004), The Pleasure's All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (2013) and general editor of the six-volume A Cultural History of Sexuality (2010).

This book [is] very valuable ... There is revealing work here, on life stories of and by woman sex workers, and erotic gardens ... On botanical sexual metaphors in erotica, Peakman is at her most fruitful. * Times Literary Supplement * [A] survey of the many diverse ways in which sex was presented in medical, erotic and pornographic writing. If you want to know when the dominant female flagellant became common in English pornography and which medical ideas were taken up in erotica, this book will tell you. * Times Higher Education * [A] handy volume aimed at anyone studying the history of sexuality in the context (mostly) of women's lives and women's history. ... On whore biographies, on the memoirs of courtesans and 'women of pleasure' and in her comments on flagellation and defloration ... [Peakman] is a sure guide. * Literary Review * Peakman's extensive work on eighteenth-century erotica makes for a book packed with detail both entertaining and edifying. * Journal of the History of Sexuality * Peakman has published widely on many of the subjects that arise in this collection of essays, and they serve as an excellent introductory text to those wishing to know more about English erotica in the eighteenth century ... The reader is ultimately furnished with a good understanding of the key issues in questions, as well as some knowledge of material for further reading. * The British Society for Literature and Science * An eminently readable exploration of the links between material culture and lived reality, too often seen as distinct cultural histories. * The Year's Work in English Studies * Amatory Pleasures comments on the enduring fascination of both the English Georgians and their diverse and exotic sexual practices. This convergence of 'Era and Eros' feels as fresh today as it did when the recalcitrant Victorians, in shock, began to retrieve the bawdy eighteenth century and its Hogarthian sexual underbelly. * George Rousseau, University of Oxford, UK * Julie Peakman in her new book of entertaining and informative essays, Amatory Pleasures, shows once again that she is the supreme mistress of eighteenth-century pornographic and erotic writing. Peakman in her previous books has provided new editions of crucial writing on the lives of prostitutes. She has offered three volumes of analysis of these materials. And she has organized contributions from groups of other scholars on the history of sexuality, not least in a six volume Cultural History of Sexuality also now published by Bloomsbury. The essays in Amatory Pleasures are organized into three sections. The eighteenth-century material (on which the modern western sexual system is founded) is first placed in the long-term history of worldwide developments. A second part concentrates on the lives of prostitutes and mistresses, high and low, including the story of Emma Hamilton and the Queen of Naples. The final group of essays sets the pornographic material in the contexts of medical developments and the history of gardens. A very rich feast of pleasure indeed! * Randolph Trumbach, City University of New York, USA, and author of Sex and the Gender Revolution * Amatory Pleasures is like a great Renaissance historical canvas: monumental in scale while at the same time rich in its detailed accounts of sexual pleasures, literatures and relations. There is no better account of the strangely distant yet eerily familiar world of eighteenth century sexuality in all its dazzling variety. * Thomas W. Laqueur, University of California at Berkeley, USA *