This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.

This volume draws attention to some eighteenth-century figures who, by their mobility, their disrespect for authority, and in some cases their dishonesty, might once have been thought unworthy of scholarly attention. This book opposes the great thinkers of a supposedly monolithic Enlightenment to a peripheral world of radicals and miscreants and seeks to understand the coexistence, and to some degree the complicity, of a wide range of eighteenth-century "libertines" in the Enlightenment project. Through the study of a range of individuals --including female rakes and libertine whores (Con Phillips, Jeanne La Motte, Casanova's Henriette), the great thinkers (Voltaire, Kant, Goethe), and some of the most notorious adventurers and rebels (Wilkes, Casanova, Cagliostro, Sade)--this book reflects on the history of the eighteenth century Enlightenment and the Europe that hosted it.

This first major study of a curiously neglected term in the history of sexuality will intrigue students, scholars and enthusiasts alike. The authors take us through a journey across four centuries, showing how notions of sexual coldness and frigidity have been thought about by legal, medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and literary writers.

Sex in the Eighteenth-century was not simply a pleasure; it had profound philosophical and political implications. This book explores those implications, and in particular the links between sexual freedom and liberty in a variety of European and British contexts. Discussing prostitutes and politicians, philosophers and charlatans, confidence tricksters and novelists, Libertine Enlightenment presents a fascinating overview of the sexual dimension of enlightened modernity.