In the last several years, and partly in the wake of Michel Foucault's argument that we need to abandon a categorical approach to human sexuality, a body of scholarship has, with increasing subtlety, investigated sexualitties. The present volume addresses sexual phenomena that during the 18th century were for one reason or another outside the legal or sanctified systems of acceptability — most notably unwed heterosexual domesticity, masturbation, prostitution, libertinism, homosexuality, erotic literature (from the metaphorically indirect to the explicitly obscene). To place the unauthorized phenomena into a focusing context, the volume is prefaced by Roy Porter's exposition of Aristotle's Master-piece, a sexual primer for married couples that, whether a compilation of vernacular practice or medical wisdom, is an encomium to marriage and procreation. It contains nothing about the behaviors addressed by the other authors in this volume, and its exclusiveness is its importance.

The two essays which follow Porter's reveal tensions within the heterosexual domestic world. J. M. Goulemot finds in the abbé Thiers' Traité an earnest attempt to discriminate between orthodox sexual practices and those that were purely superstitious and magical, especially those concerned with overcoming impotence and infertility; and John Gillis, in investigating such phenomena as massive noncompliance with the 1753 Marriage Act, outlines an “historical anthropology of marriage that takes into account class and gender variation, and thereby calls into question the evolutionary perspective that has so dominated our thinking about the history of heterosexuality.”