Children and Sexuality - (Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood) by G Rousseau (Hardcover)

About the Book

This book discusses the relationship between children and sexuality in the past in a series of case studies extending from the Greeks to the Great War.

Book Synopsis

Children and Sexuality probes the hidden relations between children and sexuality in case studies from the Greeks to the Great War. The lives reconstructed here extend from Greek Alcibiades to Lewis Carroll and Baden-Powell, each recounted with scrupulous vigilance to detail and nuance.

Review Quotes

'Anthropologists and other social scientists researching childhood will undoubtedly find in this volume extraordinary insights on the history of child-adults relations that will greatly enrich their own thinking.' - Jocelyn Boyden, University of Oxford, UK

'Starting with a controversial piece on ancient Athens and ending with a very fine nuanced account of contemporary Thailand, this absorbing collection then makes its way through Reformation Geneva and modern England, treating a startling subject with historical care, building in its own critical responses.' - Randolph Trumbach, author of Sex and the Gender Revolution

'Children and Sexuality is a courageous and timely book. The authors, who include historians, anthropologists and psychonalysts, dare to confront one of the most difficult social problems of our time and to view it from a historical and a comparative perspective.' - Peter Burke, Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, UK

'This is a book for the thoughtful person with vision that is both broad and deep. Merely take one look at the chapter headings and you will not be able to put it down.' - John T. Truman, Columbia University, USA

'Children and Sexuality is a bracing reminder that the young were eroticized long before paedophiles discovered the Internet. A haunting, meticulous and provocative book that places the modern anxiety about lost innocence in historical context and raises thorny questions about adult-child relations in every era.' - Carl Honoré, author of In Praise of Slow: How a Worldwide Movement is Challenging the Cult of Speed and Under Pressure: How The Epidemic of Hyper-Parenting is Endangering Childhood

About the Author

ELIZABETH ARCHIBALD Reader in Medieval Studies, University of Bristol, UK THOMAS BETTERIDGE Reader in Early Modern English Literature, Oxford Brookes University, UK ELLEKE BOEHMER Hildred Carlile Professor in English, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK DAPHNE NASH BRIGGS Child Psychotherapist and Honorary Research Associate, the School of Archaeology, Oxford University, UK RICHARD DELLAMORA Departments of English and Cultural Studies, Trent University, Canada NICHOLAS S. DAVIDSON Tutor in History and Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford, UK ELISABETH DUTTON Senior Research Fellow in Medieval English Literature, Worcester College, Oxford, UK STEFANO EVANGELISTA Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford, UK LAWRENCE GASQUET Senior Lecturer, the University Michel de Montaigne, Bordeaux III, France MARK HARRISON Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, University of Oxford, UK ALISON HENNEGAN Fellow Commoner and Director of Studies in English, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, UK JOSEPHINE MCDONAGH Professor of Victorian Literature, Oxford University, UK HEATHER MONTGOMERY Senior Lecturer in Childhood Studies, the Open University, UK ALFONSO MORENO Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History, Magdalen College, Oxford, UK WILLIAM G. NAPHY Senior Lecturer in History, the University of Aberdeen, UK JOSEPHINE CRAWLEY QUINN Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History, Worcester College, Oxford, UK GEORGE ROUSSEAU Co-Director of the Centre for the History of Childhood, the University of Oxford, UK LINDSAY SMITH Professor of English, the University of Sussex, UK MICHAEL VICKERS Professor of Archaeology, the University of Oxford, UK KATHERINE D. WATSON Lecturer in the Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, UK