Meanings of sex differences in the Middle Ages: medicine, science, and culture

thinking about sexuality. Yes, we must reject a naturalistic approach to sexuality; certainly, we need to challenge the worst excesses of those who see the nineteenth century as a period of sexual darkness: certainly we must explore the relationship between sexuality and power. Yet, there was, they suggest, a real darkening of the sexual climate in the Victorian period (thus challenging Foucault's rejection of the "repressive hypothesis"); the "confessional" urge to speak of sex incessantly that Foucault explores is not an appropriate trope for understanding Protestant Britain; and there have been real reforming breakthroughs in this century, not just a switch in the mode of controlling bodies and their pleasures through shifts in the modalities of discourse and power. Things do change, in fact sexual mores change all the time, and sometimes for the better, in the direction of greater freedom and individual choice. But perhaps the most important contribution of this book is to remind us again that to understand sexuality at any particular period, we have to understand how it is thought. For, as the American historian Jonathan Katz suggested some years ago, when we explore the world of sexuality we have to remember that nature (or Nature) has very little to do with it. Which is why understanding how sexual knowledges are created is so important for understanding the murky history of sexuality.