Book Review

The study of sex and sexuality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe is comparatively new, but the field has produced a wealth of comprehensive and often sophisticated works. The same cannot be said of America. With a few notable exceptions, the subject has been barely explored. The collection under review consists of twelve loosely connected essays on the "perceptions and realities" of sex and sexuality in North and Central America and the Caribbean. It is a hopeful, if tentative, effort to formulate a sexual history for this side of the Atlantic. The four sections cover early contact between native people and colonizers, the regulation of sex in New England, race and sex in slave societies, and courtship and seduction in the North during and after the American Revolution. Gender is as much a focal point as sex and sexuality, especially in the last section.

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In the first section, Stephanie Wood investigates the use of rape in the Spanish conquest of Mexico and the Caribbean. Gordon Sayre finds that descriptions of native sexuality are better mirrors of the differing expectations of their French missionary or explorer authors than they are transparent descriptions of real behaviors. Mary Rowlandson's narrative is reexamined by Steven Neuwirth. He speculates that her construction of her captivity contains both projections of desire and flashes of anger at female oppression. In the second section, Else L. Hambleton re-creates the circumstances that allowed Priscilla Willson's rapist to escape both conviction and lasting repercussions for his crime, while Erik R. Seeman looks at the religious justifications for Sarah Prentice's adoption of celibacy.

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