More on sexual knowledge, sexual history

The project’s focus is the question of how discussions about sex and human nature in any era, whether popular or academic, have both been informed by and helped to shape ideas about past cultures, or the interpretation of their material and textual legacies. The project’s timeframe is open-ended. A key period for the establishment of ancient civilizations as important reference points for thinking about sex, is that of the 18th and 19th centuries, when the boundaries between expert and amateur knowledge were drawn less clearly than they are today, and where artefacts and literature from different cultures were brought into direct comparison with each other through the collections of men such as Sir Henry Wellcome, William Hamilton and Charles Townley.

From the end of the 19th century, (thanks to such congruences as John Addington Symonds influence on Havelock Ellis, the work of Freud, Kinsey’s close perusal of the work of Hans Licht) and especially since the publication of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s, the Classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome have had a prominent position in academic debates about the history of sexuality.

The Sexual Knowledge, Sexual History project will broaden the scope to include comparative studies of sexually explicit material such as Greek vase-paintings, medieval European church carvings, Indian temple sculptures and the “Kama Sutra” tradition, examining how these and other aspects of the cultures of ancient Persia, India and China, have been invoked and discussed as "evidence" about human history and sexuality.