Enfilade

From Norton:

Rebecca Davis, Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024), 480 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-1631496578, $35.

From an esteemed scholar, a richly textured, authoritative history of sex and sexuality in America—the first major account in three decades.

Our era is one of sexual upheaval. Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022, school systems across the country are banning books with LGBTQ+ themes, and the notion of a ‘tradwife’ is gaining adherents on the right while polyamory wins converts on the left. It may seem as though debates over sex are more intense than ever, but as acclaimed historian Rebecca L. Davis demonstrates in Fierce Desires, we should not be too surprised, because Americans have been arguing over which kinds of sex are ‘acceptable’—and which are not—since before the founding itself.

From the public floggings of fornicators in early New England to passionate same-sex love affairs in the 1800s and the crackdown on abortion providers in the 1870s, and from the movements for sexual liberation to the recent restrictions on access to gender affirming care, Davis presents a sweeping, engrossing, illuminating four-hundred-year account of this nation’s sexual past. Drawing on a wealth of sources, including legal records, erotica, and eighteenth-century romance novels, she recasts important episodes—Anthony Comstock’s crusade against smut among them—and, at the same time, unearths stories of little-remembered pioneers and iconoclasts, such as an indentured servant in colonial Virginia named Thomas/Thomasine Hall, Gay Liberation Front cofounder Kiyoshi Kuromiya, and postwar female pleasure activist Betty Dodson.

At the heart of the book is Davis’s argument that the concept of sexual identity is relatively novel, first appearing in the nineteenth century. Over the centuries, Americans have shifted from understanding sexual behaviors as reflections of personal preferences or values, such as those rooted in faith or culture, to defining sexuality as an essential part of what makes a person who they are. And at every step, legislators, police, activists, and bureaucrats attempted to regulate new sexual behaviors, transforming government in the process. The most comprehensive account of America’s sexual past since John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman’s 1988 classic, Intimate Matters, Davis’s magisterial work seeks to help us understand the turmoil of the present. It demonstrates how fiercely we have always valued our desires, and how far we are willing to go to defend them.

Rebecca L. Davis is professor of history at the University of Delaware and author of Public Confessions: The Religious Conversions That Changed American Politics and More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. She lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

From Penguin Random House in the UK, with publication forthcoming (2025) in the US:

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (London: Allen Lane, 2024), 688 pages, ISBN: 978-0241400937, £35 / $40.

The Bible observes that God made humanity “for a while a little lower than the angels.” If humans are that close to angels, does the difference lie in human sexuality and what we do with it? Much of the political contention and division in societies across the world centres on sexual topics, and one-third of the global population is Christian in background or outlook. In a single lifetime, Christianity or historically Christian societies have witnessed one of the most extraordinary about-turns in attitudes to sex and gender in human history. There have followed revolutions in the place of women in society, a new place for same-sex love amid the spectrum of human emotions and a public exploration of gender and trans identity. For many the new situation has brought exciting liberation—for others, fury and fear.

This book seeks to calm fears and encourage understanding through telling a 3000-year-long tale of Christians encountering sex, gender, and the family, with noises off from their sacred texts. The message of Lower than the Angels is simple, necessary and timely: to pay attention to the sheer glorious complexity and contradictions in the history of Christianity. The reader can decide from the story told here whether there is a single Christian theology of sex, or many contending voices in a symphony that is not at all complete. Oxford’s Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church introduces an epic of ordinary and extraordinary Christians trying to make sense of themselves and of humanity’s deepest desires, fears, and hopes.

Diarmaid MacCulloch is a fellow of both St Cross College and Campion Hall, Oxford, and emeritus professor of the history of the church at Oxford University. His books include Thomas Cranmer: A Life, which won the Whitbread Biography Prize, the James Tait Black Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize, and Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, a New York Times bestseller that won the Cundill Prize in History. He has presented many highly celebrated documentaries for television and radio and was knighted in 2012 for his services to scholarship. He is an ordained deacon of the Church of England. He lives in Oxford.

From Penguin Random House:

Tim Blanning, Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco (London: Allen Lane, 2024), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0241705148, £30.

From the acclaimed author of The Pursuit of Glory and Frederick the Great, a riotous biography of the charismatic ruler of 18th-century Poland and Saxony—and his catastrophic reign.

Augustus is one of the great what-ifs of the 18th century. He could have turned the accident of ruling two major realms into the basis for a powerful European state—a bulwark against the Russians and a block on Prussian expansion. Alas, there was no opportunity Augustus did not waste and no decision he did not get wrong. By the time of his death Poland was fatally damaged and would subsequently disappear as an independent state until the 20th century. Tim Blanning’s wonderfully entertaining and original new book is a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance. Augustus’s posthumous sobriquet ‘The Strong’ referred not to any political accomplishment, but to his legendary physical strength and sexual athleticism. Yet he was also one of the great creative artists of the age, combining driving energy, exquisite taste, and apparently boundless resources to master-mind the creation of peerless Dresden, the baroque jewel of jewels. Augustus the Strong brilliantly evokes this time of opulence and excess, decadence, and folly.

Until age-dictated retirement in 2009, Tim Blanning was Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. He remains a Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and has been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1990. His major works include The French Revolution in Germany, The French Revolutionary Wars, The Power of Culture and the Culture of Power, The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815, and The Triumph of Music. He has written biographies of Joseph II, Frederick the Great, and George I.

From National Museums Scotland:

Stephen Jackson, Scottish Furniture, 1500–1914 (Edinburgh: NMSE Publishing, 2024), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1910682487, £40.

Scotland’s furniture evolved against a background of social and cultural change that included religious reformation, civil war, union with England, and participation in rapidly expanding commercial empire. The contribution of the country’s finest workshops has been overlooked in general histories of British furniture and sever decades of scholarly research is represented here to a wider public for the first time. From the beguiling and fragmentary woodwork of the sixteenth century to the blossoming of new art movements in the years around 1900, Scottish Furniture explores a form of material culture that was central to both everyday life and the expression of status and identity. The careers of prominent cabinet-makers such as Francis Brodie and William Trotter are explored in depth, while over sixty others from all regions of the country are represented among the 340 illustrations. Well-known designers such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh are considered alongside the firms which made their furniture.

Stephen Jackson is Senior Curator, Furniture and Woodwork at National Museums Scotland.

From Rizzoli:

Robert O’Byrne, photographs by Luke White, The Irish Country House: A New Vision (Ne York: Rizzoli, 2024), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-0847832835, $65.

A unique presentation of Irish country house interiors, combining well-preserved historic estates with adventurous contemporary restorations, celebrating some of the most characterful houses in Ireland.

Forgoing the criteria of stateliness and opulence, this book is an exploration of the most captivating and unusual interiors in Ireland. Whether in the transformation of a derelict estate, the preservation of an historic hunting lodge, or the re-creation of a Gothic fantasy, each of the homes in this extraordinary book reflects a renewed vitality in the contemporary approach to Irish country houses.

Rich in detail and varied in scope, the houses reveal a refreshing dynamism in their decoration by equally diverse owners—from the ornate refurbishment of a castle by a Mexican financier to the bold palette of a contemporary artist’s renovation to an Elizabethan Revival house. The sparse interiors of a mansion in Westmeath reflect its painstaking restoration by descendants of the original owners, and at Coollattin—Ireland’s largest country house, part restored, part still in disrepair—the building’s baroque splendor is amplified by its raw, unfinished state. Accompanying photography of the houses made specially for the book, the author guides readers through fifteen exceptional spaces, elucidating the remarkable aspects of each—and in doing so celebrates the unexpected eclecticism and reinvigorated spirit of Ireland’s historic interiors.

Robert O’Byrne is a writer and lecturer specializing in the fine and decorative arts. He is the author of more than a dozen books, a former columnist for Apollo magazine, and has written for both The Burlington Magazine and the Irish Arts Review. He authors the award-winning blog The Irish Aesthete. Luke White is a British photographer of portraits, interiors, and architecture.