The late 17th and early 18th centuries marked one of the great turning points of Western

history, a change of attitudes towards allowing people freedom to do what they wanted with

their own bodies in private and with consent.

By definition though, before that, it was not accepted that people had that freedom.

In England, before the 1660s and in New England in the 17th century, and in many places

across Europe, sexual relations were highly regulated, which is to say that sex before marriage,

fornication, was forbidden, adulterers could be put to death, and the church, the state,

and one's neighbours all put huge amounts of energy into catching sexual wrongdoers and

punishing them for their sins.

You might associate this sexual illiberality with strict fundamentalist regimes today,

but in fact it has its place in the history of the West too.

To discuss this culture of sexual restrictions, I'm joined by Professor Farrahmer's

De Bovala.

Professor De Bovala is a senior research scholar at Princeton University, and before that he

spent many years on the faculty at Oxford where he's now a life fellow of All Souls College

and of Exeter College.

He's writing a global history of free speech, and he's the author of the acclaimed The

Origins of Sex, a history of the first sexual revolution.

I was one of many people to name it as one of my books of the year when it was published,

and to quote myself, I called it fascinating, delightfully scholarly, and enthrallingly

readable, witty, insightful, and compelling.

And Farrah was also those things on this podcast.

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