Sexuality: All That Matters

"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, Sexuality: 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.

Louise Foxcroft is an award-winning Cambridge-educated historian. Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause (Granta, 2009) won the Longman/History Today Book of the Year Award 2009. Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2,000 years was published last year by Profile, to rave reviews. Her writing appears in The Times, Independent, Guardian, New Scientist, Daily Mail, LRB, Erotic Review and New Humanist, and she has also been a guest on Woman's Hour.