Long-Lost Manual from the 1700’s Reveals How Georgians Viewed Sex

A copy of Aristotle’s Masterpiece Completed In Two Parts, The First Containing the Secrets of Generation from 1720 has been discovered and offers us both a humorous and sobering look at how sex and women were viewed during Georgian times. The book is set to be auctioned at Derbyshire next month.

As Sky reports, the book serves as a supposedly scientific guide to understanding sex and offers women advice on how to conceive a healthy child and warns men of the veracious sexual appetites of women. The book also includes a lengthy section which warns women about the dangers of bestiality, which can cause children to be born with terrible deformities such as extra arms or even wings. It includes illustrations of supposedly real abominations born in 1512 that were spawned after their mother lay with animals.

Auctioneer Jim Spencer said: “This is blamed on ‘filthy and corrupt affection’. But you have to bear in mind that this book was written when people were still being burnt for witchcraft in Georgian England. A century after women first won the right to vote in the UK, this book takes us back to very different times. It talks of man being ‘the wonder of the world, to whom all things are subordinate’. Meanwhile women are painted as being prone to sexual indulgence.”

The guide goes on to state that the mere thoughts of parents can affect the form of an unborn child and women are encouraged to “earnestly look upon the man and fix her mind upon him” during sex, so the “child will resemble its father.”

The book goes on to warn men about the lusts of women. The guide states that, when a girl reaches puberty, “natural purgations begin to flow” and blood “abounding” in their bodies “fires up their minds to venery,” also known as sexual indulgence. “External causes may also incite ’em to it; for the spirits being brisk and inflamed when they arrive at this age,” the book adds,

It advises parents to avoid letting their young girls eat hard, fat things which might make their bodies heated. It also offers advice on how to have a happy marriage and how to conceive either girls or boys. “Before they begin their conjugal embraces to invigorate their mutual desires and make their flames burn with a fiercer ardour by those endearing ways that love can better teach than I can write,” states the author. “And when they have done what nature can require, a man must have a care he does not part too soon from the embraces of his wife.”

Those hoping to conceive a boy should apparently do so whilst the sun is in Leo and the moon in Virgo, Scorpio or Sagittarius. The woman should then lie on her right side. For a girl, she should lie on her left.

The book has been banned for around 250 years and is expected to fetch up to £120 at Hansons’ auction house in Etwall, Derbyshire, in March.

The Georgian era of British history is known for many great things. From writers such as Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, poetry from the likes of Lord Byron and William Blake, great architecture, and a good deal of social change. However, it seems the intricacies of sex were still yet to be fully understood!