The ‘sexual body’ is at once the sexed body identified as male, female, or non-binary, and the body that engages in sexual acts, experiences desire, and is perceived as an erotic object. This chapter explores a wide range of ideas about and experiences of the sexual body in pre-modern European, Native American, Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, Pacific, Māori, and West African cultures. It argues that to take a global historical perspective on sexual bodies it is necessary to consider a wide range of discourses and representations. It begins with sexual bodies in mythology: narratives of human origin from ancient Greek, Native American, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, Chinese, Māori, and West African cultures. Creation stories purvey ideas about sexual difference, desire, beauty, and gender relations that reflect a culture’s deepest belief-systems. Second, it examines sexual bodies in the medical discourses of Western and Chinese history, summarising ancient Western concepts of sex difference as a matter of moisture, heat, and anatomy, and ancient Chinese theories of qi, yinyang, and beauty. Third, it examines sexual embodiment in lived experiences of gender roles and puberty rites, showing that many Indigenous cultures historically accepted people of nonbinary gender.

This chapter looks at the cultural turn in historical writing since the 1980s and how it changed the established traditions of cultural history writing which had existed since the beginnings of professional history writing. The strong influence of poststructuralist theories led to a growing attention to questions of representations and constructions as well as to hidden meanings. It also traces the increasing desire to embed discourses in social practices. The chapter argues that an emphasis on the situational and relational processes in which humans acted remained often linked to an emancipatory agenda. A concern for human agency united with an interest in forms of creolisation and hybridity. Theories of alterity and studies of cultural transfer moved to the fore in many sub-fields of history, e.g. in LGBT history. The chapter explores in particular a range of promising new avenues in the new cultural history: the history of the senses, the history of emotions, the history of the body, the history of violence, nationalism studies. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the new cultural history contributed to greater self-reflexivity about the role of historical writing in collective identity formation. In particular Stuart Hall’s theory of ‘identification’ is used to describe the way in which a commitment to an engaged history writing can be squared with reflexivity about identity formation through historical writing.

This chapter looks at the visual and material culture of Jacobitism focusing on a heterogeneous group of objects in the collections of the NMS, V&A and BM, that are defiantly Jacobite in their content and intent. These objects range across media, and across the artistic hierarchies of the so–called fine and decorative arts. There are one–off larger than life portraits of the Jacobite figure heads and their families painted by court artists in the cosmopolitan urban centres of Europe, which were then mass-produced as engravings and published as prints; objects with a distinctive cultural currency, like coins and medals, engraved glassware and embroidered textiles. There are items of dress and adornment, including fans, garters and snuffboxes, that formed part of a corporeal culture of display and concealment. Some of the objects are gendered; others are anamorphic and shape-shifting. Many objects carry inscribed textual mottoes, sometimes in Latin that quote directly from texts including Vergil’s Aeneid. Using the body as a synthesising thematic, the chapter aims to chart the associations of Jacobitism with Scotland though the use of cross–media images and objects, while at the same time, highlighting the possibilities of using such material as tools for historical enquiry.