Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World is the first global survey of such for the early modern period. Merry Wiesner-Hanks assesses the role of personal faith and the church itself in the control and expression of all aspects of sexuality. The book ranges over developments within Europe and beyond to the European colonies including Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and Goa, which were establishing themselves around the world. Christian missionaries and rituals and structures accompanied all of the imperial powers and the control of the sexuality of both indigenous peoples and colonists was an essential part of policy.
The book is introduced with a clear, original and engaging account of the central concepts in the study of sexuality in Christianity, such as shame, sin, the body, marriage and gender. Drawing on diverse evidence including literary, medical and historical the following sections chart changes in Western Christianity in the Late Middle Ages, Protestantism and Catholicism in Europe, Orthodoxy in Eastern Europe and Russia, and finally the Spanish, Portuguese, English and Dutch Colonies. Merry Wiesner-Hanks exciting book covers both the ideas and effects in each period.
Christianity and Sexuality in the early Modern World includes discursive bibliographies which discuss major books and articles at the end of each chapter.

Genres: Religion, History, Nonfiction, Theology, Christianity, Christian History

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 1999

About the author

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) taught first at Augustana College in Illinois, and since 1985 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is currently UWM Distinguished Professor in the department of history. She is the coeditor of the Sixteenth Century Journal and the author or editor of more than twenty books, most recently The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds and Gender in History. She is the former Chief Reader for Advanced Placement World History.

Reviews

[Rebecka]

It would be fun to count the number of mentions of the word "adultery" in this book, it is bound to be huge. Having finished it, I am pretty much left with the impression that Christianity is all about adultery - or about ruining people's lives and societies in general, and women's lives in particular - but that probably has something to do with the focus of this book.

It's fascinating and shocking how afraid people and law makers continuously have been of human sexuality. So much thought and effort has gone into regulating it (i.e. controlling women). Luckily for me, I have two more books in the same genre on my shelves, and I can't wait to read them.

This book does not discuss ALL groups of people EVERYWHERE at EVERY time period (I would have loved some insight into Viking society structures, for examples), but it does give an overview over quite a lot of various geographical areas and their approach to sexual morality prior to and subsequent to the arrival of Christianity. The picture painted is pretty depressing, the before and after pictures being equally bleak. The only societies that kind of make sense are some Indian tribes, and Russia under Peter the Great. So… seriously, humanity, you have always been incredibly messed up.


There's so much to quote from this book, and all the quotes can pretty much be summed up with "WTF!", but here's one example at least, dealing with the law codes in New England:

"Included in these were adultery, defined as intercourse with a married or engaged woman, and rape, defined as forced sexual relations with a married or engaged woman, or with a single woman under the age of ten. Forced intercourse with an unmarried woman over age ten was excluded from definitions of rape in some colonies, as was any intercourse that resulted in pregnancy."

There's also this one case with a 7 year old rape victim, where the court gives the verdict that the mother should discipline the child more and make her show more "grace" and "grief". Enough said.

[Emma Nordin]

Possibly the best historian I’ve ever read. A must read if you’re interested in this time period

[Valorie Dalton]

In Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks examines how Christian and Protestant ideas altered and defined sexuality and sexual behavior. The geographical focus of Wiesner-Hanks extends beyond the European continent. She writes about the colonial experience of Europeans bringing Christianity into Latin America, Asia, Africa, and North America, all of which were already inhabited by groups possessing their own native beliefs about sexuality, the changing of which was not done without challenge and compromise. Reconstructing the pre-colonial world of Latin and North American presents a problem, as Wiesner-Hanks notes, because documents are scarce, and as a result she cannot give a complete description of native beliefs. The first three chapters of the book are loosely chronological within topically based chapters, beginning with Christianity before 1500, then moving on to Protestantism, and finally to Christianity and Eastern Orthodoxy. The final three chapters shift to the overseas colonies discussed above.

In investigating sexuality, Wiesner-Hanks looks at how earlier civilizations influenced later ideas of early Christian writers, and then in turn how these Christian writers shaped opinions on marriage, divorce, fornication, prostitution, sodomy, and witchcraft, to name a few. As Wiesner-Hanks traces how these ideas evolved over time, she also compares them to one another, letting readers see not only how ideas shifted over time, but how Catholicism differed from both Protestantism and Orthodoxy. The chapters are short and succinct, but detailed enough that in every case there is a clear picture of the time and group change. The book is more than a mere generalized overview even though its length is small, though some generalization is necessary and involved, because Wiesner-Hanks looks at specifics and fills her pages with one detail after another. As a result, very little space is given to stories or narratives, which perhaps would have been a nice addition to break up her dense fact-based approach. In fact, it is all too easy to get lost or confused within the barrage of facts and details as, for example, Wiesner-Hanks moves from infanticide to women's bodies to unmarried women and men to craft guilds all in the same two page spread. That being said, there is a lot that Wiesner-Hanks does not say or does not explain, which leaves one with many questions. For instance, when Wiesner-Hanks discusses the Roman model of marriage and sexuality, she fails to mention that the Romans too had their own form of spiritual virginity in the Vestal Virgins, which would be an interesting parallel to Catholic convent life. In another part of the book, Wiesner-Hanks states that religious wars increased the number of people, both men and women, who worked in prostitution (89). Yet she does not explain how that link is made. In many places she describes a situation or a law but then finishes up with the note that the event was rare or the law was rarely enforced, which makes one wonder why it was ultimately significant to mention. It would be a lot to expect one writer to include every detail or point, so the unstated or unanswered in no way mitigates what a good book Wiesner-Hanks has written on the topic of sexuality and religion.