ABSTRACT
When I first began writing about the history of sexuality I was fond of using a phrase from the American historian, Vern Bullough: that sex in history was a ‘virgin field’ [2]. This may have been a dubious pun but it was useful in underlining an important, if often overlooked, reality. ‘Sexuality’ was much talked about and written about but our historical knowledge about it remained pretty negligible. Those would-be colonizers who ventured into the field tended either to offer transcultural generalizations (‘the history of a long warfare between the dangerous and powerful drives and the systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them’) [3] or to subsume the subject under more neutral and acceptable labels (‘marriage’ and ‘morals’ especially). Sex seemed marginal to the broad acres of orthodox history.
