Sex in History

History is full of sex, but up until fairly recently, history books avoided mention of the subject unless they really couldn't avoid it (as in the case of Abelard and Heloise).  Fortunately, historians are beginning to understand that information about people's sex lives is no more or less important than, say, their cultural or educational backgrounds, and is generally quite interesting to readers.  No longer is an historian's career endangered by making note of important sexual details recorded in source material. 

Since the early 1990's, Oxford University Press has even been publishing an outstanding series of monographs entitled Studies in the History of Sexuality. 

Gender studies and feminist perspectives have helped make historians more aware of a lot of information they used to ignore as irrelevant or "inappropriate" to the study of history.  New information and perspectives have therefore been published that would have been unthinkably shocking fifty years ago — a recent example is Michael Rocke's Forbidden Friendships : Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence which first appeared in 1996. 

For a short list of interesting books on sex in history, see our Links and Resources page.

Articles touching on sex in history

This section contains a few articles that provide helpful overviews or unusual perspectives on sexual subjects in history: 

• Ithyphallic Imagery and Sex in Ancient Athens:  Ancient Athens may not have had a very appealing sexual culture, but it certainly wasn't shy about hard-ons. 
• Sex, Religion & Magick: A Concise Overview:  Frater Faustus provides historical perspective for Aleister Crowley's spirituality. 
• Why Were Witches Burned?:  Yet another perspective on why common people may have feared and hated some of the women who were put to death in the 16th and 17th centuries. 
• Masturbation in History:  Solitary sex, often referred to as masturbation, has always been well-nigh universal, but until the early 18th century no one got very upset about it.  Once there was money to made from "curing" it, though, everything changed.