Julie Peakman is an Honorary Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian renowned for her work on the global history of sexuality. She is author of Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-century England (2003), Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (2004), The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (2013) and general editor of the six-volume A Cultural History of Sexuality (2010).

This book [is] very valuable ... There is revealing work here, on life stories of and by woman sex workers, and erotic gardens ... On botanical sexual metaphors in erotica, Peakman is at her most fruitful.

• 1. Introduction2. Bodily Anxieties in Enlightenment Sex Literature 3. Perverse Acts 4. Medicine, the Body and the Botanical Metaphor in Erotica5. The Eighteenth-Century Erotic Garden6. Initiation, Defloration and Flagellation: Sexual Propensities in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure 7. Blaming and Shaming in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Print Culture8. Memoirs of Women of Pleasure: The Whore Biography9. ‘The Best Freind in the World’ : The Relationship between Emma Hamilton and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples10. The History of Sexuality Debate BibliographyIndex

Julie Peakman is an Honorary Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, UK, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian renowned for her work on the global history of sexuality. She is author of Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-century England (2003), Lascivious Bodies: A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (2004), The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex (2013) and general editor of the six-volume A Cultural History of Sexuality (2010).

This book [is] very valuable ... There is revealing work here, on life stories of and by woman sex workers, and erotic gardens ... On botanical sexual metaphors in erotica, Peakman is at her most fruitful.

• 1. Introduction2. Bodily Anxieties in Enlightenment Sex Literature 3. Perverse Acts 4. Medicine, the Body and the Botanical Metaphor in Erotica5. The Eighteenth-Century Erotic Garden6. Initiation, Defloration and Flagellation: Sexual Propensities in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure 7. Blaming and Shaming in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Print Culture8. Memoirs of Women of Pleasure: The Whore Biography9. ‘The Best Freind in the World’ : The Relationship between Emma Hamilton and Queen Maria Carolina of Naples10. The History of Sexuality Debate BibliographyIndex