Books by Katherine (Vanderbilt University Crawford

Eunuchs and Castrati examines the enduring fascination among historians, literary critics, musicologists, and other scholars around the figure of the castrate. Specifically, the book asks what influence such fascination had on the development and delineation of modern ideas around sexuality and physical impairment.

This book examines how, as Renaissance textual practices and new forms of knowledge rippled outward from Italy, French notions of masculinity, sexual agency, and procreation were fundamentally changed. Katherine Crawford reveals that humanists, poets, and political figures contributed to the rapid alteration of sexual ideas to suit French cultural needs.

A pioneering social and cultural history of sexuality in Europe from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment. Ideas about fertility, love, affection, sin, health, disease, criminality, and deviancy changed dramatically in this period and Katherine Crawford shows how these changes produced the conditions in which modern notions of sexuality were developed.