Lascivious Bodies:a sexual history of the 18th century Julie Peakman Atlantic Books, 348pp, £16.99 ISBN 1843541564

Oh, my. Don't I get the juicy jobs? I read Lascivious Bodies while staying with my 92-year-old mother. It seemed unwise to read out titbits: she has enough trouble with the sexy stuff I write myself. Would she have appreciated the Monks of Medmenham or the Knights of Castle Dreel, The Birchen Bouquet or the memoirs of a female flagellant? I think not. But New Statesman readers, I suspect, are made of sterner stuff.

This is a book about sex in Britain during the "long 18th century" between 1680 and 1830. Or rather, as neither Havelock Ellis nor mass surveys existed, it is a series of tales of naughty behaviour, gleaned from the memoirs, trials, letters and diaries of the day. We never learn what ordinary, uxorious people got up to: whether they preferred the missionary position or went in for fellatio as a matter of course. But hey ho, that's me carping. Every other sexual diversion is on display, every taboo and curiosity.

It was, writes Peakman, an era of great flux in Europe, and of particular exuberance in England, where trade was expanding and new freedoms were being enthusiastically explored. The Age of Enlightenment mingled with the Age of Romanticism; gothic ruins, secret societies and parodies of Masonic rituals abounded, and not just in Mozart. It was a time of a vigorously free press, of scandal sheets, cartoons, lampoons and blackmail, of "publish, and be damned". In England, it was an age of libertines, most obviously in London, the sex capital of Europe, where James Boswell could catch the pox at the drop of his trousers (at least 17 times) and where the debauched John Wilkes MP was carried along by mobs with the cry: "Wilkes and liberty!"

Double standards applied. For most women, sex was to be had only in marriage. A man, however, was expected to reach the marriage bed fully experienced. That created a market for courtesans, bawds and prostitutes, for molly houses (where street boys minced about dressed as women) and every other kind of vice. However, adventurous girls could also use sex as a means of getting ahead: Moll Flanders was hardly fiction, as the memoirs of Peg Plunkett and Harriette Wilson show.

Peakman is an energetic researcher. My favourite eye-popper was the Order of the Knights of St Francis, founded by Sir Francis Dashwood, chancellor of the exchequer to George III (don't even think about Gordon Brown), a man with "the staying power of a stallion and the impetuosity of a bull". He restored the ruined Medmenham Abbey in Buckinghamshire where initiates, mostly his high-society pals and ladies, dressed up as monks and nuns to frolic in a gothic cloister and library filled with pornographic books, in orgies lasting a week at a time. They make today's swingers look very tame.

It wasn't just London that was swinging. The Edinburgh branch of the Beggar's Benison club, whose acolytes were lords and merchants, commissioned pewter vessels that included phallic cups and a platter into which every participant would ejaculate before dinner; much fine wine was imbibed; and one can picture drunken Scotsmen shouting for more, much as they would today for a goal by Rangers. They owned a wig allegedly made of pubic hair from the mistresses of Charles II and George IV; every initiate of the successor Wig Club was required to add a hair to it.

This volume developed out of a series of lectures given by Peakman at Oxford Brookes University, entitled "Sex in History (1650-1850)". I am intrigued to think of a theatre full of students assiduously scribbling notes; she thanks them for their "enthusiastic questioning and avid interest in the subject". I'll bet. So the style is a tad pedantic although, what with the lengthy extempore quotations, Peakman cannot avoid hilarity. I will leave you with the goings-on of 1739 at Wadham College, Oxford, as revealed in a libel case:

There once was a warden of Wadham

Who approved of the folkways of Sodom,

For a man might, he said,

Have a very poor head

But be a fine fellow, at bottom.

Edwina Currie's Diaries 1987-1992 are published by Time Warner Paperbacks

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