Abstract

"With great intellectual energy and resourcefulness, [Hull] has placed a new set of issues on our scholarly agenda. After reading Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815, no one will view this period in quite the same way again."—James H. Sheehan, Times Literary Supplement"Hull analyzes the evolving bureaucratic understanding of heterosexuality during the transition from absolutist moral regulation of sexual practices for the public good to the formation of a bourgeois civil society of privacy and property.... [She] offers a remarkable look at the sexual dimension of the liberal social contract and at those whose sexual liberty was assured thereby."—Choice"Isabel Hull's book is a very rich study, not only in detail and scope, but also in its theoretical implications—for the development of modern ideas of sexuality, for the development of civil society, and for the role of the state in regulating sexual matters of all types. It is bold, risky, often funny, elegant in its argument, beautifully written—and speaks to an audience far beyond its likely specialist readers."—from the Berkshire Prize citation.