Paige Donaghy: Pregnant Women's Sexuality in Early Modern England, Gebunden

Klappentext

This book provides the first history of pregnant women's sexuality in England from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries, with some discussion of broader Northern European perspectives on pregnancy and sex. Pregnant women in the past had sex, yet, we know nearly nothing about their sexual desires or what people generally thought about sex during pregnancy. There is currently a dearth of research into ideas about pregnant women's sexual desires, or how pregnant women were perceived as erotic or desirable in this period. While we know much about the maternal body, research into sex and pregnancy is lacking. It explores a range of medical literature for descriptions of pregnancy and sexuality, particularly popular medical treatises and midwifery guides, as well as elite, Latin medical and scientific treatises. Alongside these medical texts, it considers a range of popular culture materials including novels, ballads, pornography, marital guides, and it examines diaries and correspondence. Drawing on methodologies from gender, sex, and queer histories, the book tries to locate examples of pregnant women's articulations of desire.

Revisiting pregnant women's sexuality across this period reveals the often paradoxical early-modern attitudes to sex and pregnancy; women's gravid sexuality was portrayed as natural and desirable, but also in terms of excess, as potentially dangerous and disruptive to the developing fetus. The book argues that this latter idea of pregnant women's sex, as harmful or risky, gradually became a dominant model over the eighteenth century, when sex during pregnancy was recast as immoral and reckless.