'Tis Nature's Fault
Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment

This 1988 volume addresses sexual phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe that were outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability.

Robert Purks Maccubbin (Edited by)

9780521347686, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 29 January 1988

270 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.372 kg

"The work is well documented and indispensable for an understanding of the development of sexual, political and social attitudes and behavior during the enlightenment." The Eighteenth Century

The essays in this 1988 volume address sexual phenomena in eighteenth-century Europe that were for one reason or another outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability: most notably, unwed heterosexual domesticity, masturbation, prostitution, libertinism, homosexuality, and pornography. The contributors, drawn from England, France, Italy, Holland, and the United States, illustrate the range of unauthorized sexual expression during the Enlightenment. The essays take an important first step toward integrating sexuality into our general understanding of eighteenth-century culture.

1. Introduction Robert P. Maccubbin
2. 'The secrets of generation display'd': Aristotle's masterpiece in eighteenth-century England Roy Porter
3. Sexual imagination as revealed in the Traité des superstitions of Abbé Jean-Baptiste Theirs Jean Marie Goulemot, translated by Odile Wagner and Arthur Greenspan
4. Married but not churched: plebeian sexual relations and marital nonconformity in eighteenth-century Britain John R. Gillis
5. Moral values in 'la suite de l'entretien' Théodore Tarczylo, translated by James Coke and Michael Murray
6. Prostitution and reform in eighteenth-century England Vern L. Bullough
7. The properties of libertinism James G. Turner
8. Between the licit and the illicit: the sexuality of the king Jean-Pierre Guicciardi, translated by Michael Murray
9. The sublimations of a fetishist: restif de la bretonne (1734–1806) David Coward
10. Sodomitical subcultures, sodomitical roles, and the gender revolution of the eighteenth century: the recent historiography Randolph Trumbach
11. The priest, the philosopher, and the homosexuality in enlightenment France Michael Delon, translated by Nelly Stéphane
12. The pursuit of homosexuality in the eighteenth century: 'utterly confused category' and/or rich repository? G. S. Rousseau
13. Sodomy in the Dutch Depublic during the eighteenth century Arend H. Hudson, Jr.
14. Parisian homosexuals create a lifestyle, 1700–50: the police archives Michel Rey, translated by Robert A. Day and Robert Welsh
15. The censor censured: expurgating Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure Peter Sabor
16. Chathonic and pelagic metaphorization in eighteenth-century English erotica Paul-Gabriel Boucé
17. Modes of discourse and the language of sexual reference in eighteenth-century French fiction Robert J. Ellrich
18. The Mélange de poésies diverses (1781) and the diffusion of manuscript pornography in eighteenth-century France Robert L. Dawson
19. Obscence literature in eighteenth-century Italy: an historical and bibliographical note Armando Marchi, translated by James Coke and David Marsh.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]