The first development was a growing presumption that men were inevitably rapacious. The idea that they might have strong sexual urges was, of course, not new. It was a commonplace of Christian doctrine that lust was an elemental drive, part of the fallen nature of both sexes. The rape and seduction of women had therefore […]

The question of how this transformation came about is almost never asked.1 Instead, historians, literary critics, philosophers, legal theorists, and other scholars routinely take it for granted, and focus instead on its consequences, often supposing that the change was the result of new scientific ideas. Particularly influential in cementing this presumption has been the work […]

Of women’s unnatural, insatiable lust, what country, what vil-lage doth not complain? [Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 541 Why should women have more invention in love than men? Itcan only be, because they have more desires, more sollicitingpassions, more lust, and more of the devil. William Wycherley, The Country-Wife (1675), Act IV scene […]

The rise of sexual freedom was not unique to England, but part of the general European Enlightenment. Because it has been so little studied, it is difficult to know to what extent its ideals had spread in other countries by the end of the eighteenth century, though it seems clear that they were advancing everywhere. […]

Taylor was even more explicit in imagining his ‘womb’ being pene­trated and impregnated by ‘the spermadote’ of Christ: O let thy lovely streams of love distill Upon myself and spout their spirits pure Into my vial, and my vessel fill With liveliness. . . The huge prestige attached to classical literary models similarly gave rise […]

More notable still was the gradual extension of sexual liberty to homosexual acts. This was a development that would have been inconceivable to most early advocates of sexual licence, whose inten­tion was often precisely to prevent sodomy,1 and it remained anathema to mainstream opinion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and for most of the […]

To survey the rise of sexual liberty up to 1800 is to contemplate a momentous ideological upheaval. The conventional justification for sexual discipline had been that immoral actions, even immoral beliefs, were dangerous. They corrupted individuals and undermined the well­being of societies; it was therefore legitimate, indeed imperative, to punish them. By the end of […]

The gradual separation of personal morality and public affairs around the dawn of the eighteenth century also paved the way for a still more radical challenge. This was the idea that allowing sex outside mar­riage could actually benefit the public good. Some sexual licence was therefore to be tolerated, even encouraged. This notion directly contradicted […]

The question was complicated by disagreements over how to define natural law, and how to conceive of human understanding. Essen­tially, though, there were two poles of opinion. The orthodox view throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that the law of nature was entirely consistent with the moral law laid down in the Bible. All […]

The most corrosive idea of all was that unchastity was not always harmful or wrong. As we have seen, this was an age-old challenge to the enforcement of sexual discipline. Yet throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance, sexual freedom had been only weakly and implicitly defended. Most of the time it had been advanced […]