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The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals. By DAVID STEVENSON. East LiNton: Tuckwell Press, 2001. Pp. xviii + 265. L18.99 (cloth).
In discreet meetings, the leading figures of Scotland's East Neuk met to engage in public masturbation and to extol the pleasures of the libertine. David Stevenson makes the vehicle of these very un-Presbyterian activities, a Scottish sex club, the subject of his most recent study. His analysis of the Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth-century provincial club whose members extolled the virtues of sex and sexual freedom, adds to the valuable insight offered by the author into associational culture in early-modern Scotland through his previous analysis of Freemasonry. Like Freemasonry, the Beggar's Benison's influence spread beyond the borders of the East Neuk of Fife, where it began, and eventually included chapters in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and even Russia. Stevenson argues, at times persuasively, that, like Freemasonry, the Beggar's Benison Club was a product of the Enlightenment and a dynamic cultural force, though on a much more modest scale. What makes this study singular in Scottish historiography is its subject matter.
The historiography of clubs has been dominated by study of the philosophical, social, and political societies. To these, Stevenson adds the category of the sex club, hitherto passed over in the study of Scottish associational networks, and he argues that under careful analysis it too may be seen as expressing philosophical, social, and...