Did you know that in 1400BC in the Hittite kingdom, bestiality was punishable by death, except if it were done with a horse in which case there was no punishment? Or that the Egyptian king Menephta claimed 6359 severed phalluses (phalli?) as a trophy of war after his victory against the Libyans? No? Neither did I until I read History Laid Bare by Richard Zacks.
History Laid Bare (Love, Sex and Perversity from the Ancient Etruscans to Lawrence of Arabia) is a collection of sex related factoids, arranged in roughly chronological order from the beginnings of written language around 1500BC right through to the 1920s. Richard Zacks (a professional historian) has trawled ancient and modern written records searching for all those facts that our history teachers left out.
History is full of sex. The written records are full of it. But since prudish Victorian times, it has been sanitised out of the history we learn in school. From the legendary debauchery of the Roman emperors (which is glossed over in most history texts) to the sordid debauchery of Regency England, a whole section of history has been expunged. As Mr Zacks says - It's as if great men were never naked and never lusted. This book addresses the balance.
You can dip into this book at any page and come up with an amazing fact. I had no idea,for example, that in 1012, Burchard of Worms (better known for for his 20 volume text on Canon Law), catalogued over 200 different sexual sins and their respective punishment. Most of them dreamed up from his very active imagination. I mean, to dream up the act of smearing yourself in honey, rolling in flour, scraping it off and then using it to bake a loaf of aphrodisiac bread requires a very interesting mind. To actually think up 200 such sins and come up with an appropriate punishment for each of them requires a touch of insanity.
For those of you that think the clitoris was only discovered in the 20th century, think again. Hippocrates described it (and its function) in 400BC. It was the prudish Victorians who deleted it from anatomical texts.
Did you know that Casanova lost his virginity at 16 to a girl named Angela? And her two cousins (Nanetta and Marton)? While he was an Abbot (elected Abbot at 15, one of the youngest ever).
Or that in 1849 a French Army officer named Bertrand was convicted and sentenced to one year on prison for digging up, mutilating and having sex with the corpses of young women?
Or that a young virgin could be procured in 1885 London for as little as £5?
Or that the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec was referred to as a walking penis?
Or that the Norman conquest of England nearly failed because many of the Norman knights kept popping back home to make sure their wives weren't getting up to mischief while they were away?
For a trivia buff like me this book is absolutely invaluable. Any page of this can be turned into hours of dinner party (if you have the right sort of guests) or pub conversation. If you love trivia and love sex, this is the book for you.
Oh, and Lawrence of Arabia? After being tortured by the Turks, he grew to like it and in his later years hired a strong young man to whip him daily...
