'Is He a Licentious Lewd Sort of a Person': constructing the child rapist in early modern England

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from University of Texas Press via the DOI in this recor

‘Elderly years cause a Total dispaire of Conception’: old age, sex and infertility in early modern England

This is a freely-available open access publication. Please cite the published version which is available via the DOI link in this record.This article examines early modern ideas about old bodies, sex and reproduction. The old body in early modern thought was particularly connected to barrenness and sterility: it was understood that old women were barren while old men were invariably increasingly less fertile. Consequently, sexual activity was regarded as inappropriate for the old and, as a result of the physical changes of ageing, very likely difficult to achieve and unsatisfactory. At a time when the primary – albeit not the only - aim of marriage and sexual intercourse was procreation, with the production of offspring essential for the preservation of family and state, inheritance, social and economic stability, regulation of sexual behaviour was important in western European societies. The ridiculing of old men and women’s sexual behaviour that permeated contemporary culture in stories, ballads and jokes, alongside medical literature that characterised old bodies as sexually unappetising as well as unreproductive, carried the message that sexual activity was not for the old. This article further demonstrates the centrality of fertility to early modern thinking about bodies and sex and therefore about who were considered to be unsuitable sexual partners. It also adds to recent scholarship that argues for age as an important category of historical analysis, in this instance specifically in the histories of the body and sexuality.British AcademyWelcome Trus

"The Act of Copulation being Ordain'd by nature as the ground of all Generation": fertility and the representation of sexual pleasure in seventeenth century pornography in England

To a modern reader pornography and the representation of reproduction are mutually exclusive, despite their common subject matter: sex. But seventeenth-century pornographic texts do not conform to modern ideas about the nature of pornography. Sexual intercourse is defined as for the purpose of procreation with cataclysmic consequences resulting from its avoidance. In this period the pleasures of sex represented in the pornographic text are intimately entwined with ideas about reproduction and conception, and an understanding of the body which is temporally and culturally specific: sexual pleasure was understood as not complete pleasure if it did not have the possibility of conception. The connection between the sexual act and its reproductive function is emphasised through metaphors that connect the body and the state, or the land, emphasising that early modern social and economic stability depended on reproductive ability

Bodies, sex and sexuality

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Routledge via the DOI in this recordThis chapter explores women’s bodies, sex and sexuality in relation to the stages of their reproductive lives: infancy and childhood to sexual development at puberty; the potentially reproductive years post-puberty; and older age following the cessation of reproductive possibility at menopause. It has been observed that contemporary divisions of the stages of life were predicated on the male body and life cycle as the norm, deploying traditional numerical divisions which were not necessarily coterminous with women’s lives and bodies. The classical humoral model of the body underpinned medical ideas about sexual development as well as sexual differentiation. Western European medical authors were consistent in their assessment of older women’s sexual bodies as undesirable, both because the physical ‘decay’ of the ageing body meant that older women were regarded as lacking in beauty or physical attraction, but also because the sexual parts of the body changed so that they were no longer so suitable for the act of sex

Female Barrenness, Bodily Access and Aromatic Treatments in Seventeenth-Century England

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.Scholars examining medical practice in early modern England have often remarked upon the complexities of the relationship between male physicians and female patients. It has been noted that ideas of female modesty and concern about the potential erotic nature of contact between patients and practitioners could affect the treatment of certain disorders. This paper contributes to this on-going discussion by examining the use of pungent substances to diagnose and treat female barrenness. Diagnostic tests included in medical treatises could rely upon the woman’s ability to perceive a particular substance. These tests thus put women at the centre of the diagnosis of their disorders and allowed them to negotiate access to their reproductive bodies. Similarly medical practitioners included a range of treatments for infertility that involved the fumes of certain substances entering the womb or surrounding the body. These treatments may have allowed women, and perhaps their medical practitioners, to choose a method of remedy that did not involve the application of external lotions to the genitalia. Thus by considering the multi-sensory nature of medical treatment this paper will highlight that the diversity of remedies advocated in early modern medical texts would perhaps have allowed women to restrict access to their reproductive bodies, while still obtaining diagnosis and treatment.Peer reviewe

‘He would by no means risque his Reputation’: patient and doctor shame in Daniel Turner's De Morbis Cutaneis (1714) and Syphilis (1717)

This article offers a historical corollary to the examination of shame in medical practice by considering the negotiation of shame in the treatment of a stigmatised disease at a time in which surgeons themselves occupied a highly ambivalent social position. It will focus on case studies provided by Daniel Turner (1667–1741), prominent surgeon and later member of the College of Physicians, in his textbooks De Morbis Cutaneis. A Treatise of Diseases Incident to the Skin (1714) and Syphilis. A Practical Dissertation on the Venereal Disease (1717). Turner demonstrates an awareness of the precarious position of both the surgeon and the syphilitic, and devotes significant portions of his text to advising the trainee surgeon on how to manage patients' reticence over disclosure of symptoms, expectations for cure and impudence towards medical authority. In turn, the trainee must manage his own reputation as a moral and medical authority who can treat all distempers, yet without condoning or facilitating the shameful behaviours associated with a sexual disease. Furthermore, shaming plays a key role in enabling Turner to fashion an ideal patient whose successful cure will both respond to and build the surgeon's medical authority and that of the medical field in general

Manhood and masculinity in early modern England

This article provides an overview of some key developments in the historiography of manhood and masculinity in early modern England in the last decade, focusing in particular on how ideals of manhood and masculinity were shaped by ideas about the body and sexuality, as well as experiences and practices of fatherhood, sociability and politics in England between the mid-16th and mid-18th centuries. The article argues that the history of manhood and masculinity is a vibrant area but that some questions relating to manhood and masculinity remain underexplored, especially in relation to politics. It also questions whether enough effort has been taken to consider the 17th century as a whole, with much work on the history of manhood and masculinity continuing to focus on the periods before 1640 or after 1660, reiterating earlier calls for more attention to be paid to thinking about continuities and changes in manhood and masculinity across the early modern period in England

Gender and release from imprisonment: Convict licensing systems in mid to late 19th century England

This paper draws on the research undertaken into the lives and prison experiences of around 650 male and female convicts who were released on licence (an early form of parole) from sentences of long term imprisonment (three years to life) in England in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Our project confirmed the patterns of offending seen in other studies of female and male offending, namely, that women were committed to periods of long-term imprisonment overwhelmingly for crimes of larceny and sometimes low-level violence (or their criminal backgrounds indicated this type of low-level disorderly behaviour) and only in the minority for crimes of serious interpersonal violence. Similarly, the majority of men were also committed to the convict system for larceny. Yet how male and female offenders were treated by the prison licensing system did differ significantly. The vast majority of all prisoners, male and female, were released early on licence from their prison terms, even those who had committed very serious offences. All licences had several conditions in them and licence-holders were free so long as they met these conditions. Any breach of the above conditions meant that the individual would be returned to prison to serve out the remainder of their sentence.However, a proportion of female offenders were released slightly earlier than their male counterparts, though not directly into the community but on a conditional licence to Female Refuges. Out of the 288 women researched in our project, 200 of them were released in this manner; under further confinement in a refuge. Women stayed in such refuges for on average between six and nine months, before their final release was then approved by the Directors of the Convict Prisons

"Monstrous and indefensible"? Newspaper accounts of sexual assaults on children in nineteenth-century England and Wales

This material has been published in Women's Criminality in Europe, 1600–1914 edited by Edited by Manon van der Heijden, Marion Pluskota, Sanne Muurling, https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108774543. This version is free to view and download for private research and study only. Not for re-distribution or re-use. © 2020 Cambridge University Press.Popular crime reportage of sexual violence has a long history in England. Despite the fact that from the 1830s onwards newspapers and periodicals – and sometimes even law reports – were increasingly liable to skim over the reporting of sexual offences as ‘unfit for publication’, this does not mean that such reportage vanished entirely. Instead, certain linguistic codes and euphemisms were invoked to maintain a respectable discourse. Given the serious problems with gaps in the surviving archival record for modern criminal justice, newspapers remain an essential tool for understanding the history of sexual violence in nineteenth century England and Wales. Using keyword searches in digitized newspaper databases such as the British Newspaper Archive and Welsh Newspapers Database, this chapter examines the continuities and changes in the reporting of sexual violence against children between 1800 and 1900, and explores what these euphemisms and elisions reveal about attitudes to gender and crime in nineteenth-century England and Wales.Peer reviewe

Technologies of contraception and abortion

Soon to turn 60, the oral contraceptive pill still dominates histories of technology in the ‘sexual revolution’ and after. ‘The pill’ was revolutionary for many, though by no means all, women in the west, but there have always been alternatives, and looking globally yields a different picture. The condom, intrauterine device (IUD), surgical sterilization (male and female) and abortion were all transformed in the twentieth century, some more than once. Today, female sterilization (tubal ligation) and IUDs are the world's most commonly used technologies of contraception. The pill is in third place, followed closely by the condom. Long-acting hormonal injections are most frequently used in parts of Africa, male sterilization by vasectomy is unusually prevalent in Britain, and about one in five pregnancies worldwide ends in induced abortion. Though contraceptive use has generally increased in recent decades, the disparity between rich and poor countries is striking: the former tend to use condoms and pills, the latter sterilization and IUDs. Contraception, a term dating from the late nineteenth century and since then often conflated with abortion, has existed in many forms, and techniques have changed and proliferated over time. Diverse local cultures have embraced new technologies while maintaining older practices. Focusing on Britain and the United States, with excursions to India, China and France, this chapter shows how the patterns observed today were established and stabilized, often despite persistent criticism and reform efforts. By examining past innovation, and the distribution and use of a variety of tools and techniques, it reconsiders some widely held assumptions about what counts as revolutionary and for whom. Analytically, it takes up and reflects on one of the main issues raised by feminists and social historians: the agency of users as patients and consumers faced with choice and coercion. By examining practices of contraception alongside those of abortion, it revisits the knotty question of technology in the sexual revolution and the related themes of medical, legal, religious and political forms of control