Table of Contents:
  • The background: Culture and sexuality ; The sources of Western attitudes ; The Jewish contribution
  • The European inheritance : The contradictory contribution of the Greeks ; Roman mythology and reality ; Classical sources of christianity hostility to sex ; Early christianity: a sex-negative religion
  • Attitudes toward sex in the non-Western world: Islam: a sex-positive religion ; Sex in the Indian subcontinent ; Sexual theory and attitudes in ancient China
  • The christian world: Byzantium and Eastern Orthodox Christianity ; The early Middle Ages in the West ; The later Middle Ages ; A reevaluation and reaffirmation
  • New horizons and the New World: From religion to science ; Europeans in a new setting: coloniual America ; Nineteenth-century attitudes toward sex ; The law and its enforcement ; Stigmatized sexual behavior in the nineteenth-century America
  • The twentieth Century: trends and assumptions: Problems and prospects ; Where we are going and how we get there.