The University of Turku hosted a conference, Framing Premodern Desires: Between Sexuality, Sin and Crime in 2014. This intellectually stimulating event inspired the book, which contains a selection of articles based on the presentations.

Sexuality and desires, closely linked with well-being and individual identities, have been perceived, described, and encountered in a variety of ways. They have belonged to the most regulated areas of human behaviour, bridled by religious and legal authorities. At the same time, the praise concerning procreation, as well as sexual acts within the frames of marital institutions and between people in love, are strongly present in surviving sources.

Recently, the scholarly field of the history of sexuality has laid a special emphasis on the many ways past sexual desires had been understood in a particular time and place. Of course, one collection cannot cover the polymorphic world of premodern European desires entirely, but the understanding of past sexual ideas, attitudes, and practices can be deepened by bringing together multidisciplinary approaches and various microscopic analyses.

The articles in this book focus on exploring the localities and temporalities of sexuality, the visibility and invisibility of sexual desires, as well as the intersections of sexuality and moral offences in late medieval and early modern European societies.

The editors would like to thank all the participants at the Turku conference for their valuable input to scholarship on desires. We are especially grateful to Garthine Walker for the introductory chapter and to all our wonderful authors for their insightful contributions. We would also like to thank the editor-in-chief of the series Crossing Boundaries, Matti Peikola, for superb cooperation, and Miika Norro for his sharp eye and overall help in finalising the manuscript.

About the editors

Meri Heinonen, PhD, is a Research Fellow in Turku Centre for Medieval and Early Modern History and Cultural History at the University of Turku. Her studies have mainly concentrated on medieval religious history and gender history.

Marjo Kaartinen, PhD, is professor of Cultural History at the University of Turku. She has published widely on early modern cultural history, and is especially interested in the history of gender and bodiliness.