What did the Victorians know about desire between men? Was it really 'the love that dare not speak its name'? Nameless Offences argues that even before Oscar Wilde and the rise of sexual science there was an open, public and concerted discussion of same-sex desire that went to the heart of Victorian notions of masculinity, civil society, class and identity. How did homosexuality come to be known as a 'secret vice', consigned to a secret place - the closet - when contemporaries regularly described its existence as widespread, threatening and even notorious? Nameless Offences asks where the closet came from and how the English learned to describe that which was 'nameless' and indescribable in this way. This groundbreaking book offers the definitive portrait of male homosexuality in the nineteenth century and includes many perceptive insights into what it reveals about the interaction between public and private morality which lay at the heart of Victorian England. 'Nameless Offences is a cogently argued and well-written book which contributes importantly to our understanding of the history of the legal regulation of sexual behavior between men in the 19th century...I cannot do justice...to the richness of his historical narrative...[he] has found gems of narrative detail...and woven them into a persuasive analysis.' - Morris B. Kaplan, Associate Professor of Philosophy, State University of New York

During the Victorian era, an emerging cultural emphasis on truth-telling drove the development of new ways of inhibiting perjury. Drawing on a broad array of archival research, Wendie Schneider chronicles this period of experimentation and how its innovations-particularly cross-examination-shaped contemporary trial procedure. This title was made Open Access by libraries from around the world through Knowledge Unlatched.

‘... the rich range of historical information that Clark weaves into her chapters... makes this ambitious overview of sex in Europe a highly accessible and successful endeavour.’ – Times Higher Education Supplement 'Provides a valuable overview of the history of sexuality in Europe since classical antiquity, synthesising as it does a mass of studies of specific regions and periods which have appeared during the last two decades.' Lesley Hall, Wellcome Library, UK Desire: A History of European Sexuality is a sweeping survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present day. It traces two concepts of sexual desire that have competed in European history: desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly; and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary. This book follows these changing attitudes toward sexuality through the major turning points of European history. Written in a lively and engaging style, the book contains many fascinating anecdotes drawing on a rich array of sources including poetry, novels, pornography and film as well as court records, autobiographies and personal letters. While Anna Clark builds on the work of dozens of historians, she also takes a fresh approach and introduces the concepts of twilight moments and sexual economies. Desire integrates the history of heterosexuality with same-sex desire, and focuses on the emotions of love as well as the passions of lust, the politics of sex as well as the personal experiences.

This book offers an original and exciting analysis of the concept of the criminal underworld. Print culture, policing and law enforcement, criminal networks, space and territory are explored here through a series of case studies taken from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This first study of the legal history of sex offences in Mandate Palestine pioneers a new socio-cultural perspective on evidence.

In 1864, the German jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs coined the term “urning” as a word for same-sex attracted men. Over the next few years, first anonymously and then publicly, he campaigned against the public persecution of these men. In response, some of his readers took on the urning terminology for themselves and engaged with Ulrichs to negotiate the finer points of their new identities. In Urning, Douglas Pretsell writes of same-sex attracted men in German-speaking Europe who used the neologism “urning” as a personal identity in the late nineteenth century. This was in the period before other terms such as “homosexual” gained currency. Drawing on letters, memoirs, and psychiatric case studies, the book uses first-hand autobiographical accounts to map out the contours of urning society. Urning further explores individual accounts of some urnings who attempted their own forms of activism to transform the world around them , even though they had no formal organization. As the century drew to a close, the efforts of Ulrichs and his urning followers paved the way for the launch of the world’s first homosexual rights organization. Urning argues that the men who called themselves urnings were self-identified, self-constructed agents of their own destinies.