Undercurrents of History

Abstract

In her 1989 essay on Feminist and Gender History Through Literary Looking Glass: German Historiography in Postmodern Times (in Central European History 22, no. 3/4 [1989]), Isabel Hull has claimed that femi? nism and postmodern critique are most powerful in their work of destruction: of traditional claim of historians to universality, of master narratives that claim to be able to organize historical world according to coherent principles of which male historians have been guardians, and in deconstructing Relevanzhierarchien of modern German historiography. This may very well be so. But in her new book, Isabel Hull is not content with just doing work of destruction. This book deals with time period during, before, and after what Reinhard Koselleck has termed die historische Sattelzeit, time of accelerated change in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which modern world has taken shape. It explores emergence of civil society and modernity in Central Europe. By focusing on offi? cial sexual system, it does so from an angle which is more common in literary studies and which plays a significant role in feminist as well as in postmodernist debates, but continues to be somewhat of a rarity in historical sciences (in spite of Michel Foucault's book on sexuality). Hull investigates ways in which sexual has changed from early modern period to nineteenth century and which role it has played in organization of state, society, and communities. Sexual system is defined as the patterned ways in which sexual behavior is shaped and given meaning through institutions (p. 1). What follows is a detailed and very knowledgeable study of institution-building, social and legal change, of various discourses among church officials, bureaucrats, philosophers, and educated public on morality and sexual norms in German states. The book actually covers much more than its title promises: it starts in sixteenth century by describing sexual that church had established, and it ends in nineteenth century with an outlook on fully developed civil society. Thus