Part of Series
"Sexuality" may be an eighteenth-century coinage, but as this new study by award-winning historian Louise Foxcroft shows, it has fascinated and frightened us for millennia. From proscription to prescription, and from humour to anxiety, All That Matters explores the vast sex-scape of experience and response over time. Looking at authorised and unauthorised works on sexual knowledge, from scientific, religious, medical, philosophical and political ideas, to letters, diaries, court cases and medical histories, it reveals popular and orthodox assumptions as well as individual experiences, and reminds us of just how complex we really are. This accessible book will appeal both to students and general readers, giving a compelling introduction to sexuality - and to what matters most about it.
Author
Louise Foxcroft read History at the University of Cambridge as a mature student in the early 1990s. In 2007 she published an academic title, The Making of Addiction: The ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain (Ashgate), which developed the research of her PhD thesis. This was followed by her first general book, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (Granta, 2009) which ranked as Amazon’s No.1 History of Medicine title for some weeks. Broadly as Medical Historian, she has specialised in medical perceptions of the human body and at the way these are related to present day, personal, human experience - this makes for some really in-depth questions and analyses, not to mention the absurdities, of how we live our lives now. An occasional supervisor at the University of Cambridge, Louise Foxcroft has also written for The London Review of Books, The Guardian, New Humanist, Erotic Review, Daily Mail and The Times, and has been a guest on several BBC Radio programmes. As a Non-Alcoholic Trustee on the General Service Board of Alcoholics Anonymous GB since 2006 she has been working on AA literature, and speaking at conferences and press events, both national and international.
