This highly original book brings into focus the sexual discourses manifest in a wealth of little-studied source material--medical texts, legal documents, religious literature, dream interpretation manuals, shadow theater, and travelogues--in a nuanced, wide-ranging, and powerfully analytic exploration of Ottoman sexual thought and practices from the heyday of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Following on the work of Foucault, Gagnon, Laqueur, and others, the premise of the book is that people shape their ideas of what is permissible, define...