The histories of sex and sexuality have been focused in recent years by the powerful reconceptualizations of scholars such as Michel Foucault, Edward Shorter, and Lawrence Stone. Yet one enormous obstacle, which keeps this key dimension of life singularly opaque to understanding, remains: our almost total ignorance of the sexual beliefs and behavior of all but the tiniest minority of people in the “world we have lost.” Certainly, as Peter Gay has recently reminded us, more intimate secrets survive in the archives than we sometimes credit; yet it is safe to predict that we shall remain forever in the dark about the love lives of otherwise well-known public figures, about John Milton as well as the mute inglorious Miltons. For this reason it is worth exploring the history of sexual advice literature, which promises to throw at least a few dim rays upon the broader contours of sexual values and practices of earlier times.

It goes without saying, of course, that extrapolating from the guidance of advice books to what people actually thought and did is immensely hazardous, for reasons that need little rehearsal here. We know next to nothing about who read such publications, for what reasons, and with what effects. In many cases we know little about the authors or their intentions. These uncertainties apply even to the best-sellers. It is not clear, for example, whether the many-editioned antimasturbation polemic Onania was written or read as either a puritanical morality tirade or a catchpenny emission of lewd softporn.