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SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

SEXUALITY AND SEXUAL BEHAVIOR. Since the 1970s, new approaches to the history of sexuality have combined to transform understanding of early modern sexual practices and beliefs. Social historians began by recovering sexualized aspects of the life cycle such as marriage and childbirth. Historians of women and gender examined longstanding patterns of sexual socialization relative to such issues as coerced sex and arranged marriage and the patterns of community response to such sexually marked populations as prostitutes and nuns. Michel Foucault's Histoire de la sexualité (1978; History of sexuality) provided a new intellectual framework for sexuality studies by arguing that modern sexuality ought to be understood as discursively organized and marked by technologies of power. That is, patterns of language such as confession and silencing around sexual acts operate in complex ways within structures of power (such as the family, church, state, and science) to form sexual identity. Foucault's work stimulated and reformulated questions and approaches to the history of sexual behavior even as he was criticized both for the lack of historical specificity in his account of ancient sexuality and for contending that the beginning of the modern notion of sexuality was fundamental to identity in eighteenth-century Europe.

Since Foucault, much empirical historical work on sexuality has filled gaps in his chronology and challenged a number of his particular assertions. Nonetheless, the work of historians of sexuality on such issues as birth control, prostitution, pornography, and homosexuality remains indebted to Foucault for his insights regarding the patterns of meaning and significance with respect to sexuality and sexual behavior. What follows takes into account both the empirical and the discursive understandings of the history of sexuality and sexual practices in early modern Europe. For purposes of clarity, "sex" throughout refers to sex acts, while "biological sex" refers to male or female bodies. "Sexuality" refers to the complex of ideas associated with sex and often inflected by "gender," by which is meant the cultural meanings attached to biological sex.

SEXUAL PRACTICES

From the emergence of Catholic Christianity in late antiquity, suspicion of corporeal matters as detracting or distracting from the Christian's duty to focus on eternal salvation was especially strong with regard to sex. Procreation was permitted, but pleasure was generally frowned upon by the church. Persistent beliefs and strictures indicate that fears of sexuality remained very much in play throughout the Middle Ages. Theologians were adamant that sex was primarily procreative and ought to be confined to legitimate marriage. In general, any sort of sex in which procreation was impossible (anal, oral, homosexual) or even made difficult (by means of withdrawal, for instance) was regarded as "against nature." Although other factors were not entirely excluded, strictures regarding marital sex reflected the predominance of procreation to the exclusion of other factors. Couples were not supposed to have sex when the woman was already pregnant, since the sexual act could not possibly produce children. Men were supposed to be on top during the act in part because of the belief that if the woman was on top, the man's seed would spill out, preventing conception. As long as procreation was the aim and a reasonable expectation, sex was permissible.

Procreation as the goal did not eliminate the understanding that sex was an important form of marital intimacy. From St. Paul and medieval theologians, early modern Europeans inherited the concept of the marriage debt, which was seen as a crucial element in the maintenance of marriage. Tensions over the marriage debt are manifest in the extensive discussions about mutual obligation and exceptions to it. While both partners were expected to provide sex on demand, most assumed that men would be more demanding, despite the widespread cultural belief that women were the lusty sex because of their inferior capacity for reason. The marriage debt was enforceable, but it also could be evaded. Women resisted unwanted marital sex by observing church-defined days and periods of abstinence. Three days of abstinence were required on either side of participation in the sacrament of Communion. The penitential season of Lent was a period of sexual abstinence. Sexual relations were also forbidden before a woman was blessed by a priest after childbirth in a "churching" ceremony. These evasive strategies functioned in effect as birth control and supported the cultural climate that regarded sex as inferior to chastity and devotion to God.

Sex and medicine. Medical knowledge about sex was largely organized around procreation. The understanding and treatment of diseases of both men and women centered around making certain that their bodies were properly balanced for insemination, conception, and pregnancy. Ancient medical authorities remained a significant source of (often dubious) knowledge about sexuality in the early modern period. Greco-Roman humoral theory continued to dominate thinking about conception and pregnancy, with women described as cold and wet, while men were dry and hot. Following Galen in particular, early modern medical practitioners believed that failure to conceive was often the result of an imbalance in the fluids—blood, black bile, bile, and phlegm—that corresponded to the humors (hot-wet, cold-dry, hot-dry, and cold-wet, respectively). Medical intervention for complaints such as irregular menstrual cycles, improper configuration of the womb for conception, and lack of sperm of the proper consistency and potency was organized around making certain that the humors were properly balanced within each partner and between the partners. While historians have been careful for lack of direct evidence, Roy Porter and Lesley Hall have argued that sex advice was used both positively and negatively. An explanation of the best conditions for conception, for instance, implied that the converse might prevent conception. Advice to prevent miscarriages by avoiding spicy foods, heavy lifting, and jumping suggested what exactly to do in order to induce a miscarriage.

Humoral theory was combined with assumptions about gender hierarchy inherited from the ancients as well. From elaborate potions and poultices to reminders that women should lie on the right side and avoid sneezing after intercourse, advice manuals, herbal recipe books, and medical texts were replete with ways to facilitate conception. Since Aristotle had defined male qualities as superior, and because men were generally considered more valuable and of higher status than women, many questions about sex revolved around making certain that proper humoral balance would result in male children. Failure to conceive, in the Aristotelian tradition was entirely the woman's fault, but popularizers of medical knowledge in the Renaissance were not so certain. Experts contended that factors such as uterine environment, physical conditions during intercourse, and frequency of intercourse could influence the biological sex of the child. While medical writers such as Laurent Joubert (Erreurs populaires [1578; Popular errors]) and Giovanni Marinello (Delle medicine partenenti all'infermità delle donne [1563; Medicine for the infirmities of women]) debated who was responsible for the biological sex of the offspring, they accepted the Aristotelian claim that only men produced seed thought to produce the infant's soul. Women were thought to provide only the matter necessary to produce the baby. Others agreed with Galen that women provided a necessary seed of their own that joined with the male seed to form a fetus.

Information about dysfunction was abundant; consensus was not. Consider impotence, a topic of central importance, as family lineages depended on successful reproduction. Causes and cures of impotence, male and female, filled thousands of pages of commentary. Numerous, exceedingly complicated recipes claimed to help men enhance desire, sustain erections, and produce high quality sperm. Following humoral theory quite literally, some thought excessive coldness or dryness in a man caused impotence, and advised adding heat or moisture. If the specified imbalance was corrected and the impotence remained, perhaps the problem was a penis either too short or too long. For the latter condition, the advice was to choose a tall bride. No advice was forthcoming for the man with a small penis. Others looked to the Malleus Maleficarum (c. 1486; The hammer of witches), blaming witchcraft for male impotence. For women too, the range of possibilities was vast. Diets, baths, and douches in a bewildering array were prescribed for sterile women. If these remedies were unavailing, one might try remedies to alter the shape or orientation of the uterus. Issues of sexual mood and timing mattered as well: if the woman was not sufficiently aroused, her seed would not be released. The husband was advised to engage in foreplay to make certain that this did not happen. The air of desperation in the range of remedies was in part because failure to reproduce disrupted social norms. But the remedies themselves—both in their complexity and their vast number—only increased anxiety about sex.

Indeed, the failure of medical authorities to reach consensus contributed to the development of scientific efforts around sexual issues. While physicians like Leonardo Fioravanti in his 1564 Dello specchio di scientia universale (Mirror of universal science) started publicly rejecting the established medical wisdom about sex, others sought to utilize debate to further sexual knowledge. Anatomists, for instance, engaged in controversies, particularly over female sexual anatomy: whether the womb was stationary or mobile; if it could be influenced by smells; whether the hymen existed; and also whether the penis was made of ligaments, muscles, or cartilage. As strictures on dissecting human bodies loosened, such questions could increasingly be answered by reference to empirical evidence. Gradually, such empirical efforts started to replace the medieval and Renaissance habit of fitting observed data into predetermined frameworks formulated by ancient authors and shaped by the need to reconcile pagan knowledge with Christianity.

One key idea that shifted with the development of science was about the relationship of the biological sexes. Thomas Laqueur has argued that medieval Christians generally accepted the Aristotelian hypothesis of one sex—male—with women as inferior and inverted versions of men. Anatomists and physicians beginning in the early modern period increasingly allowed that men and women were sexually distinct. Some contended that men and women constituted two sexes designed to complement each other. This more egalitarian image of sexual biology competed with the older, hierarchical model until the Enlightenment, and even then, remnants of the one-sex model remained. Laqueur's account has been criticized as overly schematic. But as with other aspects of sexual knowledge, the lack of fixity about sexual difference prompted investigations that increased the information available about male and female sexual anatomy.

Disease and adultery. The gradual increase of knowledge about sex and sexuality was slow to allay everyday sexual anxieties and ambiguities. While sex was believed to have positive effects—doctors allowed that sex combated melancholy and stimulated the senses—commentators were in rare agreement that too much sex was harmful. Frequent intercourse supposedly drained a man of his vital fluids, resulted in weak or degenerate offspring, and even caused death. For women, too much sex could contribute to excessive moist, cold humors. There was, however, little consensus on what was meant by "frequent." Similarly, old people were told to avoid sex for the most part, but texts rarely agreed on what constituted "old" and varied on whether sex ought to stop entirely or just happen less often. With the emergence of syphilis in the late fifteenth century, anxiety about venereal disease ran high as well. As the origins of syphilis were unclear, national groups blamed each other for the disease (the French called it the "Neapolitan pox," and the Italians, the "French pox"), and some claimed women who mixed the seed of several men in their wombs were responsible for the disease.

By far the most prominent anxiety was the fear of adultery. Fictional texts, legal tracts, and abundant case law warned that uncontrolled female lust could destroy the household: the wife would exhaust her husband, and then seek her pleasures elsewhere. Early modern commentators maintained the story from Hippocrates that women imprinted what they saw on the child developing in the womb. A woman could get pregnant by any man and pass the child off as her husband's as long as she thought about her husband during intercourse. As the jurist Jacques Buchereau noted in his 1580 commentary on the Institutes of Justinian (Les Institutes imperiales de Justinian), adultery provisions in legal codes typically penalized adultery with confiscation of goods, corporal punishment, and banishment. These penalties weighed more heavily on women, however, because of their more limited resources. Jurists considered the disproportional punishment of women to be reasonable because women could introduce illegitimate offspring into the family lineage.

GENDER ASYMMETRY

That the penalties for male cheating were rarely so severe points to the enormous asymmetry in power relations between men and women where sex was concerned. Seemingly benign manifestations included the tendency to sequester women in the home, with greater seclusion for women of higher socioeconomic status. In Venice, respectable middle-class and noble women left their homes to go to church, but otherwise hardly at all. Lower-class women could move more freely but were often subject to sexual violence. In some Italian cities, gangs of young men raped unprotected women, and isolated peasant women in the countryside were similarly vulnerable to sexual violence. Sexual honor for women centered on chastity and sexual fidelity, while (in addition to factors such as prowess in war) male honor included acquiring and maintaining sexual mastery over women. Sexual insults, even if completely untrue, could destroy a woman's reputation and make her effectively unmarriageable. Slander cases often included disputes over one party calling a woman a whore or a slut. Sexual honor, lost through words or deeds, might be regained if a woman could prove she had been tricked into sexual relations, but generally only if the man married her. Men lost some sexual honor if they were thought to be out of control sexually or if they allowed themselves to be treated as the passive partner. A man who was thought a cuckold was regarded as having failed to control, or worse, having failed to satisfy his wife sexually. These were serious complaints, but where sexual honor was primary to a woman's reputation, it was only one of several components of male identity.

The combination of cultural anxiety, increased availability and spread of information, and lack of consensus about sex figured prominently in the early modern organization of families. Freedom in terms of choosing marriage partners was virtually nonexistent for men, but was especially unavailable for women. As Christiane Klapisch-Zuber noted regarding Renaissance Florence, men defined membership in "houses," or families. This was true throughout Europe, as male family members controlled most aspects of economic, legal, and political life. Women brought goods into the family lineage in marriage, managed the household, and were necessary for reproduction, but the family lineage passed through husbands and fathers to sons, rather than to daughters, who married into other families. One implication of this configuration was the sharp difference in age of marriage: men were often in their late twenties or thirties, while women were usually in their teens when first married. Men had to be relatively secure financially to start a new household, while the desire to be certain of chastity and purity made early marriage more likely for women. Women who survived childbirth were often widowed, and often while still young and with small children because of the age differential at marriage. Whether a woman could remarry was determined by negotiation between her marital family and her family of birth. Especially if she had children, the marital family would try to keep the woman and her dowry within their family, but the birth family might return her to the family home and seek a new marital alliance with another lineage.

The sexual pressures on women were in many ways far more extensive than those on men. A woman could lose her sexual honor even if she was raped, especially if she got pregnant: common belief held that conception was only possible if the woman felt pleasure. Finally, female sexuality was heavily subject to familial strategies organized by male family members, often throughout a woman's life cycle.

DISCIPLINE AND DEVIANCE

Catholics and Protestants alike measured sexual transgressions against a combination of theological and communal standards upheld by church courts, the family, and state institutions. Together these loci of power defined sexual behavior in such a way that non-normative sexual behavior was subject to scrutiny and even criminal penalties.

Catholic theology as confirmed at the Council of Trent (1545–1563) retained marriage and holy orders as sacraments, and the notion that marriage was the best state for those who did not take vows of celibacy remained implicit in Catholic belief. Protestants rejected both holy orders and marriage as sacraments on the grounds that they lacked scriptural warrant, but the main Protestant groups (Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans) continued to emphasize marriage as a means of controlling sexuality. More radical sects (such as Anabaptists) were sometimes persecuted because of their rejection of the dominant sexual mores. Catholic ecclesiastical courts and Calvinist consistory records are among the richest sources regarding regulation of sexuality. Fornication was especially prominent in these records, but issues surrounding marriage, illegitimacy, and sexual violence also appear regularly.

The immediacy of the parish in the life of virtually all Europeans meant that religious courts and strictures had much more influence than state efforts to regulate sexuality, but states engaged in efforts to control sexuality as well. The patriarchal and hierarchical structure of society meant that state legislation and jurisprudence tended to uphold paternal power in matters of sexuality. The most common areas of state intervention were around clandestine marriage, adultery, rape, fornication, and prostitution. Across Europe, parental consent was generally required for marriage. The French monarchy produced a series of ordinances against clandestine marriage, beginning with Henry II's 1556 edict condemning it as a crime against God and king. In 1579, the penalty was changed from disinheritance to death for those convicted of "rapt" (abduction or seduction of a minor for purposes of clandestine marriage). Ordinances in 1639, 1697, and 1730 upheld the state's interest in marriage, utilizing the language of the king's sacred authority, even as the monarchy encroached on areas traditionally reserved to the church and its courts.

State intervention in cases of rape and fornication tended to vary by social status, marital status, and reputation. Seduction of a woman of high status typically received greater penalties than if the woman was of lower status. Virginity raised the stakes, with jurisdictions often willing to force the man either to marry the deflowered woman or provide her with sufficient dowry to enable her to marry respectably. Monetary penalties in many Italian cities were graded explicitly by social status, with the most vulnerable population—female servants—virtually unprotected. State authorities generally did not intervene when men attacked women who were at a comparative social disadvantage.

The efforts of the state with respect to prostitution were often complicated by the mixed inheritance from the Middle Ages and the practical needs of particular jurisdictions. While the church regarded sex as distracting from salvation, it grudgingly allowed unmarried men recourse to prostitutes on the grounds that fornication under controlled circumstances was less sinful than allowing sexual urges to spill over into violence. Because women were regarded as lustier by nature than men, prostitutes were often seen as women indulging their carnal desires. Few recognized the economic pressures on poor women. Many municipalities, moreover, regarded brothels as revenue sources. Brothels and prostitutes were regulated by such measures as special clothing to distinguish prostitutes from "respectable" women, limits on access to prostitutes, and bans on freelance prostitution. As Reformation and Catholic Reformation rhetoric about morality took hold, municipal brothels gradually disappeared, while religious foundations to redeem repentant prostitutes, such as the Convertite House in Venice (founded in 1552) and the Magdalen Hospital in London (founded in 1758), sprang up.

State attempts to control prostitution were generally ineffective. The focus on the prostitute as a fallen moral agent rather than on the economic problems that produced prostitution, combined with the inattention to male customers, ensured that prostitution flourished. The major change resulting from state antipathy was the decline in management of prostitution by women and the rise of the pimp. This made prostitutes increasingly vulnerable to violence and economic exploitation. States often accepted more or less open prostitution in less respectable parts of towns. To satisfy moral crusaders such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded in the early 1690s in London), states engaged in or allowed occasional raids of such areas, but generally allowed business as usual, as long as order was not routinely disrupted. Higher class prostitutes (courtesans) were often prominent culturally as mistresses of kings and courtiers. Vulnerable to the vagaries of favor, such women were hardly subject to state pressure. By the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789), prostitution was much more "illegal" than it had been at the beginning of the Renaissance, but it remained a prominent feature of the sexual landscape.

Cross-dressing, infanticide, and sodomy were also subject to state regulation. While early modern jurists did not use the vocabulary of gender, these crimes were all violations of gender norms. Cross-dressing threatened the social hierarchy that presumed that men and women were in a stable relation to each other by virtue of biology. Men who cross-dressed were deemed effeminate, while women who did so were regarded as unnatural and were pressured to conform. By the eighteenth century, cross-dressing men who frequented private clubs, notably in London, were subject to police harassment and prosecution. Prison terms, fines, and periods of standing in the pillory were often the penalties for those caught and convicted. Infanticide was punishable by death, but lesser penalties (fines, banishment) were often substituted. Women accused of infanticide were regarded as unnatural mothers who violated the primary purpose of their sex. Statutes required unmarried women to declare their pregnancies or risk being charged with infanticide if the baby died. Many women convicted of infanticide had tried to hide their pregnancies with the help of clandestine networks in larger European cities.

Sodomy was more complicated in that it meant a number of things. Sodomy was "sinning against nature," and it encompassed nonreproductive sexual techniques such as masturbation, sex between two men, between human and animal, or between a man and woman in such a way that conception was impossible. Sodomy was associated with weakness, and passive male sodomy was often seen as resulting from a deficiency of proper male gender characteristics. But male homosexual sodomy, as Michael Rocke has argued, was a significant mode of political socialization in Renaissance Florence, and the efforts to prosecute it suggest that it was widely practiced. Officially, sodomy often carried the death penalty, but this seems to have been carried out primarily against socially disadvantaged individuals. By the eighteenth century, the state occasionally attempted to disrupt the meeting places of "sodomites," particularly when pressured by moral crusaders. The social pattern of prosecutions persisted as members of the elite caught in raids were usually fined, while harsher penalties were reserved for poorer men.

While Foucault asserted that sexual identity categories only developed in the nineteenth century, historians such as Alan Bray have argued that the earlier emergence of identifiable homosocial institutions such as "molly houses" (private residences where men could meet other men for sex) created a sense of sexual difference. Where Foucault contended that Europeans thought in terms of sexual acts rather than identities marked by systematic sexual preferences, his critics argue that institutional settings, linguistic practices such as pet names for those "in the know," and sartorial indicators formed basic elements of sexual identity. In the face of official hostility, deviant practices had some organizational structures that made it easier for those who participated in them to recognize themselves as different from the dominant sexual ethos.

THE MEANINGS OF SEX

Both church and state maintained that sex was procreative in purpose, but sex had a number of other meanings. The infusion of classical texts in the Renaissance increased the prominence of secondary meanings. Over the course of the early modern period, these additional ideas threatened aspects of the religious and cultural hegemony of Christianity.

The association of sex with pleasure was not new in the early modern period, but the idea that pleasure was a positive good received several endorsements, beginning in the Renaissance. The revival of Plato, especially by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and his followers, suggested that sexual pleasure was an important aspect of love. Since Neoplatonic theory held that love was the means to salvation, carnal love had a significant role to play. While most Neoplatonists tried to downplay the corporeal elements, every important thinker who advocated Neoplatonic notions of love addressed pleasure as an element of sex and love. Protestants such as Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans allowed that sexual pleasure within marriage created stronger emotional ties between husband and wife. Rather than distracting from salvation, in Protestant thought sexual pleasure facilitated harmonious relations that enabled men and women to focus on matters of grace, faith, and scriptural knowledge. The Protestant rejection of non-biblical sources of doctrine downplayed the ascetic tradition that regarded pleasure as dubious.

The printing revolution was crucial to Renaissance humanism and the Protestant Reformation, but it also played a significant role in disseminating ideas regarding sexual pleasure. Sexual poetry and prose were not invented in the Renaissance, but both the recovery of ancient writers of sexually explicit material such as Catullus and Juvenal and the development of hermeneutical techniques that allowed for new readings of old texts brought the issue of pleasure to the fore. Ovid's Metamorphoses had been read allegorically before Renaissance humanists developed critical techniques to situate ancient texts in context and recover the range of explicit sexual behavior in antiquity. Figures like Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), notorious for sexually explicit poetry and ribald dialogues, took advantage of the openness of humanist culture to ancient sexual ideas and texts. Aretino utilized the print medium to disseminate erotic and pornographic materials, and generations of imitators produced images and texts in the same vein. "Aretino's Postures" (c. 1524)—sexually explicit engravings by Giulio Romano based on ancient images to which Aretino appended even more explicit, very raunchy sonnets—took the "high culture" of humanism and put it in the comparatively accessible format of the cheap print. Often regarded as a precursor to modern pornography, Aretino's work loomed large throughout Europe as the paradigm of sex emphatically devoted to pleasure. Audience demand for explicit sexual material grew to such an extent that novels like John Cleland's Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748–1749) remained perennial popular sellers despite official censorship.

The valorization of pleasure had proponents whose ideas expanded into a full-scale challenge to Christian orthodoxy, with sexual pleasure as a core element. Libertines as described by Molièreinhis 1665 play Don Juan were amoral and atheistic. The title character married or promised to marry women indiscriminately, and left one as soon as another caught his eye. Don Juan's pursuit of pleasure leads to his death in Molière's play, and more famously in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni (1787). Libertine men who rejected the notion of familial domesticity in favor of homosocial gatherings that celebrated sexual pleasure often also rejected Christian sexual mores. Groups like Sir Francis Dashwood's Dilettanti Society (established in 1732) were organized ostensibly to share research about ancient Greece and Rome. Members of the society undertook to reconstruct the supposed rites of Priapus, a minor Roman deity famous for his oversized, perpetually erect penis. Libertine organizations remained small in size, but their ideas about sexual pleasure in place of marriage and advocacy of pagan sexual ideas over Christian ones impressed and shocked mainstream European society. The fear of libertine influence often made their ideas more prominent because of their shock value.

The early Enlightenment libertines like Dashwood still drew on Renaissance modes of producing meaning. That is, they looked to the ancients for information and for authority for their own ideas. Later Enlightenment libertinism, partly in reaction to the growing popularity and hegemony of sentimental domesticity, advocated most famously by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Émile, 1762), made a rather different case for libertine sexual ideas. Following the lead of materialist philosophers like the physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie (L'homme machine [1747; Man a machine]), pornographers increasingly described sex through reference to materialist philosophy, which posited that everything, including human beings, was simply matter. The extreme version of this tendency is exemplified in the works of the Marquis de Sade. His Philosophy of the Bedroom (1795) took Enlightenment language about reason and nature to the logical extreme. Any form of pleasure, even if it involved pain or death, was justified as reasonable and natural. Because pleasure was naturally occurring, Sade explicitly rejected any other criteria for evaluating sexual acts. Sade was, and to many still is, outrageous for his exploitative view of human behavior and sexual violence, in part because he effectively yoked sexual pleasure to reason and nature within an Enlightenment intellectual scheme.

The significance of libertine discourse in early modern Europe underscores the shift between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment in terms of the meanings of sex. In keeping with the larger cultural understandings of the production of knowledge, Renaissance advocates of pleasure as a central meaning of sex looked to the ancients. Enlightenment thinkers, generally dubious about tradition as well as religious belief, framed sexual pleasure in terms of reason and nature. Sade's version was extreme to be sure, but the notion that pleasure was a natural part of sex permeated much Enlightenment thinking.

The other side of Enlightenment thinking about sex—the association of sexuality with gender roles in ways that presume men to be sexually aggressive and women passive—has remained more prominent. The Enlightenment inheritance has in fact included both the assumptions about gender roles and the multiple logics that resulted from the application of reason to nature and sexuality. The family, church, state, and science were not replaced by Enlightenment reference to reason, but rationality, largely envisioned on a personal level, shifted assessments of sexual behavior to the individual. Sexuality as a matter of preference or desire could then much more easily be imagined as integral to the self. But modern sexual identity was, and is, clearly built on the structures and habits of early modern European society.

See also Biology; Divorce; Enlightenment; Family; Gender; Homosexuality; Humanists and Humanism; Marriage; Medicine; Pornography; Prostitution; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; Sade, Donatien-Alphonse-François de; Sexual Difference, Theories of; Women.

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KATHERINE CRAWFORD