This publication examines the ways in which women in differing national and social contexts negotiated the cultural terrain of emergent modernity. The volume presents essays on women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation.
The essays in this book examine how 'the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”(sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation) along with others that approximated the unnatural (hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. )