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From the bedroom to the courtroom-a riveting history of the law of sex. The "raging frenzy" of the sex drive, to use Plato's phrase, has always defied control. However, that's not to say that every civilization has not tried, using its most powerful weapon: the law. At any given point in history, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly, jump back or forward a century or two, or cross a Border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and Punishment tells the story of the struggle to regulate the most powerful engine of human behavior.
Introduction 1
1 Channeling the Urge: The First Sex Laws 10
2 Honor Among (Mostly) Men: Cases From Ancient Greece 56
3 Imperial Bedrooms: Sex and the State in Ancient Rome 86
4 The Middle Ages: A Crowd Condemned 123
5 Groping Toward Modernity: The Early Modern Period, 1500-1700 174
6 The New World of Sexual Opportunity 251
7 The Eighteenth Century: Revelation and Revolution 273
8 The Nineteenth Century: Human Nature on Trial 328
Overview
From the bedroom to the courtroom-a riveting history of the law of sex. The "raging frenzy" of the sex drive, to use Plato's phrase, has always defied control. However, that's not to say that every civilization has not tried, using its most powerful weapon: the law. At any given point in history, some forms of sex were condoned while others were punished mercilessly, jump back or forward a century or two, or cross a Border, and the harmless fun of one society becomes the gravest crime in another. Sex and ...