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Sexuality & Culture (2011) 15:213215 DOI 10.1007/s12119-011-9088-z
BOOK REVIEW
Volkmar Sigusch and Gnter Grau (eds): Personenlexikon der Sexual-Forschung
Campus, Frankfurt, 2009, 813 pp.
Robert Beachy
Published online: 6 February 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011
Touted by its editors as the rst of its kind in the world, the Personenlexikon, a biographical reference work of sexual research, is an ambitious and impressive achievement (p. 10). The project was conceived 30 years ago, and nished with the help of 60 authors. The 800-page volume offers 197 individual entries (on 199 gures) ranging in length from one to ten pages. Most entries include a short introduction, a biography, an analysis of the subjects work, and a short but extremely valuable bibliography of secondary scholarship and the subjects published research. The biographies are uniformly succinct and informative, representing the latest research, often based on monographs and articles of the contributing authors. Clearly a labor of love, the Personenlexikon reects the work of some of the leading historiansincluding the editorsof sexology, sexuality, psychiatry, and the medical sciences.
Only men and women who died before 2009 are included, and a clear majority was German or Germanophone (counting Swiss and Austrian). The editors concede that they had difculty nding contributors for Francophone subjects, although several are represented in the volume, such as Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault. The volume also provides biographies of important American, British, Dutch, Scandinavian, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Czech, Israeli, and Italian gures. Most subjects were scholars or researchers, but the volume offers entries for several who were primarily engaged...