The Erotic Dreams of Emanuel Swedenborg

By Richard Lines

During the time of his "spiritual awakening" in 1744 the scientist and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg kept a dream diary. Richard Lines looks at how, among the heavenly visions, there were also erotic dreams, the significance of which has been long overlooked. more

Sex and Science in Robert Thornton’s Temple of Flora

By Martin Kemp

Bridal beds, blushing captives, and swollen trunks - Carl Linnaeus' taxonomy of plants heralded a whole new era in 18th-century Europe of plants being spoken of in sexualised terms. Martin Kemp explores* how this association between the floral and erotic reached its visual zenith in Robert Thornton's exquisitely illustrated Temple of Flora. more

When the Birds and the Bees Were Not Enough: Aristotle’s Masterpiece

By Mary Fissell

Mary Fissell on how a wildly popular sex manual — first published in 17th-century London and reprinted in hundreds of subsequent editions — both taught and titillated through the early modern period and beyond. more

Carel and Abraham Allard in the Court of Momus

By Daniel Horst

RIJKSMUSEUM - Daniel Horst explores the controversial collection of satirical etchings published by Abraham Allard in Amsterdam ca. 1708 under the title 't Lusthof van Momus. more

Get Thee to a Phalanstery: or, How Fourier Can Still Teach Us to Make Lemonade

By Dominic Pettman

Hot on the heels of the French Revolution — by way of extravagant orgies, obscure taxonomies, and lemonade seas — Charles Fourier offered up his blueprint for a socialist utopia, and in the process also one of the most influential early critiques of capitalism. Dominic Pettman explores Fourier’s radical, bizarre, and often astonishingly modern ideas, and how they might guide us in our own troubled times. more

Postures of Transport: Sex, God, and Rocking Chairs

By Hunter Dukes

What if chairs had the ability to shift our state of consciousness, transporting the imagination into distant landscapes and ecstatic experiences, both religious and erotic? In an essay about the British and American fascination with rocking chairs and upholstery springs in the 19th century, Hunter Dukes discovers how simple furniture technologies allowed armchair travelers to explore worlds beyond their own. more

The Emancipatory Visions of a Sex Magician: Paschal Beverly Randolph’s Occult Politics

By Lara Langer Cohen

Erotic magic, Black emancipation, gender fluidity, interplanetary spirit realms — these were but a few of the topics that preoccupied Paschal Beverly Randolph (b. 1825), an occult thinker who believed that his multiracial identity afforded him “peculiar mental power and marvelous versatility”. Lara Langer Cohen considers the neglected politics of Randolph’s esoteric writings alongside the repeated frustration of his activism: how dreams of other worlds, above and below our own, reflect the unfulfilled promises of Emancipation. more