Kim M. Phillips & Barry Reay 
Sex Before Sexuality 
A Premodern History

Sexuality in modern western culture is central to identity but the
tendency to define by sexuality does not apply to the premodern
past. Before the ‘invention’ of sexuality, erotic acts and desires
were comprehended as species of sin, expressions of idealised love,
courtship, and marriage, or components of intimacies between men or
women, not as outworkings of an innermost self. With a focus on c.
1100-c. 1800, this book explores the shifting meanings,
languages, and practices of western sex. It is the first study to
combine the medieval and early modern to rethink this time of sex
before sexuality, where same-sex and opposite-sex desire and
eroticism bore but faint traces of what moderns came to call
heterosexuality, homosexuality, lesbianism, and pornography.

This volume aims to contribute to contemporary historical theory
through paying attention to the particularity of premodern sexual
cultures. Phillips and Reay argue that students of premodern sex
will be blocked in their understanding if they use terms and
concepts applicable to sexuality since the late nineteenth century,
and modern commentators will never know their subject without a
deeper comprehension of sex’s history.

Table of Content

Acknowledgements.

List of Images.

Introduction: Sex Before Sexuality.

1. Sin.

2. Before Heterosexuality.

3. Between Men.

4. Between Women.

5. Before Pornography.

Epilogue: Sex at Sea?

About the author

Kim Phillips is senior lecturer in history at the University
of Auckland.



Barry Reay is professor of history at the University of
Auckland.