Kelly A. Ryan On January 11, 1779, Nabby Whitmore, a white single woman from Royalston, Massachusetts, confessed to Justice of the Peace Abel Wilder that she was pregnant with a child that “was likely to be born a bastard.” Whitmore told Wilder that the father of her child was William […]
Tag: early modern sexuality
The Origins of Sex: An Interview With Faramerz Dabhoiwala
Interview by Katherine Harvey with Jennifer Evans A sweeping history of changing sexual attitudes and behaviours in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Faramerz Dabhoiwala’s The Origins of Sex explores the history of the ‘first sexual revolution’. The book traces the transformation of western approaches to sexuality during the Age of Enlightenment. Dabhoiwala detects […]
365 Notches: (re)marks on our 1st anniversary
It’s hard to believe that we are celebrating one year of Notches! On 6 January 2014, with the support of the Raphael Samuel History Centre, we launched a new blog with the goal of getting folks inside and outside the academy to think critically about histories of sex and sexuality across […]
Carnivalesque #107
Katherine Harvey Welcome to Carnivalesque #107! Carnivalesque is an interdisciplinary blog carnival dedicated to pre-modern history (to c. 1800 C.E.), and NOTCHES is delighted to be hosting the final edition of 2014. If you are already a NOTCHES reader, then fear not, there is plenty of material on the history […]
Queering de Sade
Gert Hekma Over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the “divine marquis” influenced literature, philosophy, and artistic and social movements such as Surrealism, Situationism, and Provo. His name became a byword for cruelty and sexual perversion in popular culture, and, as his work was forbidden until the 1960s, for a long time […]
Sexual Curiosities? Aphrodisiacs in early modern England
Jennifer Evans The word aphrodisiac conjures images of oysters and chocolate, or perhaps peppers to ‘spice things up’. Nearly everyone knows that these foods have a long history of being considered aphrodisiacs. Yet it is worth devoting a little more attention to how these foods were described in the past […]