First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

First published in 2005. The line between pain and pleasure is as thin as the tail of a whip, and this classic work is the definitive history of flagellation through the ages. As it shows, flagellation is much more than a punishment - it is also intimately tied to discipline and eroticism, has a romantic and even comic side, and has also been used for medical purposes. No one is above the bite of the birch or rod - convent nuns were chastised severely, queens have been flogged, and even favourites of the sultan have had to endure the whip in the great seraglios. The author deals in great detail with whipping in ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, the favourite parts of the body for whipping, flagellation and discipline in monasteries and convents, whipping in prisons, the rod in Russia, flagellation in America, whipping in Europe and the Far East, the flogging of slaves, military flogging, school punishments and the birch in the boudoir, all enlivened with colourful anecdotes. There is a chapter on the instruments of whipping, a selection of ribald and erotic poems on whipping, a section on eccentric forms of whipping such as that practised on prostitutes, many detailed line drawings, descriptive accounts and a full index. The work shows the fundamental place whipping has always played in human history, both publicly and in private, and continues to play today.

Birchgrove Press brings together in one volume two books representing the developing corpus of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English sexual fiction focusing on flagellation: Exhibition of Female Flagellants (c. 1780) and its sequel, Part the Second of the Exhibition of Female Flagellants (c. 1785). Collections of amusing anecdotes about the pleasures of flogging, these novellas focus on birching in aristocratic domestic and scholastic contexts, emphasise the display of blood, and extol the aphrodisiacal qualities of flowers. The author or authors are not known. Part one, Exhibition of Female Flagellants was first published about 1780, possibly by George Peacock in 1777. Part two, Part the Second of the Exhibition of Female Flagellants, was first published about 1785, probably also by George Peacock. Both books were reprinted in the early nineteenth century and by John Camden Hotten in 1872. This Birchgrove Press edition, which is based on Hotten's reprints, includes an Appendix with bibliographic details excerpted from Pisanus Fraxi's [Henry Spencer Ashbee's] Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877). Ashbee's record provides a fascinating overview of both books' publishing history.