An examination of how bodies and sexualities have been constructed, categorised, represented, diagnosed, experienced and subverted from the fifteenth to the early twenty-first century. It draws attention to continuities in thinking about bodies and sex: concept may have changed, but hey nevertheless draw on older ideas and language.

FERNANDA ALFIERI Researcher, the Bruno Kessler Foundation, Centre for Italo-Germanic Studies, Trento, Italy
PETER CRYLE Professor of French and Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses, the University of Queensland, Australia
LISA DOWNING Professor of French Discourses of Sexuality and Director of the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Sexuality and Gender in Europe (CISSGE), the University of Exeter, UK
KATE FISHER Senior Lecturer in History, the University of Exeter, UK
FRANCISCO VÁZQUEZ GARCÍA Professor of Philosophy, the University of Cadiz, Spain
MARGARETTA JOLLY Director, the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, the University of Sussex, UK
JENNIFER JORDAN Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the Department of History, University of Plymouth, UK
ALISON MOORE Postdoctoral Researcher, the University of Queensland, Australia
ALISON ORAM Professor in Social and Cultural History, Leeds Metropolitan University, UK
ELIZABETH STEPHENS ARC Research Fellow and Deputy Director of the Centre for the History of European Discourses, the University of Queensland, Australia
SARAH TOULALAN Senior Lecturer in Medical History, the University of Exeter, UK
ANDREW WELLS Teaching Fellow in the History of Ideas, the University of Edinburgh, UK

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction; S.Toulalan PART I: BODIES AND DIFFERENCE 'That ere with Age, his Strength is Utterly Decay'd': Understanding the Male Body in Early Modern Manhood; J.Jordan Confusion Embodied: Epistemologies of Sex and Race in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-9) and the Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804); A.Wells The Hermaphrodite, Fecundity and Military Efficiency: Dangerous Subjects in the Emerging Liberal order of Nineteenth-Century Spain; R.Cleminson  & F.Vazquez Garcia Touching Bodies: Tact/ility in Nineteenth-century Medical Photographs and Models; E.Stephens 'Farewell to Frocks', 'Sex Change' in Interwar Britain: Newspaper Stories, Medical Technology and Modernity; A.Oram 'Perversity to Match the Curtains': Queering the Life Story with Grayson Perry; M.Jolly PART II: BODIES, SEX AND DESIRE 'Unripe' Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern England; S.Toulalan Urge without Desire? Confession Manuals, Moral Casuistry, and the Features of Concupiscentia between the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Centuries; F.Alfieri On the Unsteadiness of Sexual Truth in Eighteenth-Century France; P.Cryle 'Lay back, Enjoy it and Shout Happy England': Marital Duty and Sexual Pleasure; K.Fisher Eros and Thanatos in European and American Sexology; L.Downing Sadism as Social Violence: From fin-de-siècle Degeneration to the Critiques of Nazi Sexuality in Frankfurt School Thought; A.Moore