The ‘sexual body’ is at once the sexed body identified as male, female, or non-binary, and the body that engages in sexual acts, experiences desire, and is perceived as an erotic object. This chapter explores a wide range of ideas about and experiences of the sexual body in pre-modern European, Native American, Chinese, Islamic, Jewish, Pacific, Māori, and West African cultures. It argues that to take a global historical perspective on sexual bodies it is necessary to consider a wide range of discourses and representations. It begins with sexual bodies in mythology: narratives of human origin from ancient Greek, Native American, Judeo-Christian and Islamic, Chinese, Māori, and West African cultures. Creation stories purvey ideas about sexual difference, desire, beauty, and gender relations that reflect a culture’s deepest belief-systems. Second, it examines sexual bodies in the medical discourses of Western and Chinese history, summarising ancient Western concepts of sex difference as a matter of moisture, heat, and anatomy, and ancient Chinese theories of qi, yinyang, and beauty. Third, it examines sexual embodiment in lived experiences of gender roles and puberty rites, showing that many Indigenous cultures historically accepted people of nonbinary gender.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the geographical testimonia and fragments of Mnaseas (active c.225–c.200 BC), arranged as 53 extracts. The chapter introduction reviews the evidence for his origin (Patara rather than Patrai) and date, and the structure of his geography (at least three books on Europe, followed by at least two on Asia and probably more than one on Africa or ‘Libye’). His work is characterized by a lively interest in mythology, including unique versions of some myths, to which he may have applied a rationalizing approach. The relative frequency with which he is cited suggests that his reputation was high.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation (approximating English pentameters) of the anonymous iambic poem sometimes called (without any evidence) ‘Pseudo-Skymnos’ but here ‘the Nikomedean Periodos’ (127/6–74 BC). The surviving, first part of the poem, whose ‘journey’ is arranged clockwise from the western Mediterranean, takes us a little way into the Black Sea. For the next part, dealing with the Black Sea, we have 38 fragments, all but one of which are from the Pseudo-Arrianic Circumnavigation of the Black Sea (Chapter 36 of this volume). Of the remainder we have no trace. The chapter introduction revisits the controversy about the identity of the poem’s author: possibly Apollodoros of Athens, though that suggestion is less secure than has been thought (despite the claimed reading of Apollodoros’ name in a damaged passage of the manuscript); possibly the otherwise unknown Pausanias of Damascus (if he existed). The poem, dedicated to a king Nikomedes of Bithynia, displays the influence of Ephoros and Eratosthenes, as well as responding to Homer. Though innovative, the work had little influence (though the late antique Euxine, Chapter 36 below, repeatedly quotes from it) but remains an important source for scholars investigating Greek colonial foundations in the West. A new map indicates the ‘route’ followed in the poem.

This chapter presents new, annotated translations of the scanty testimonia and fragments of Skymnos of Chios (early 2nd century BC), arranged as eight extracts. The introduction reviews his outputs: works on Europe and Asia totalling at least 16 books, perhaps following an anti-clockwise sequence; possibly also on Libye (Africa). His work extends to Britain and the Black Sea, and evinces an interest in colonial origins, mythical geography, and botany. He has plausibly been identified with a known Skymnos of Chios alive in the 180s. His inclusion is justified because in the 17th century he was proposed as the poet of the Nikomedean Periodos (Chapter 17 of this volume), for which association there is, however, no manuscript evidence and which is impossible on chronological grounds.

Chapter 1 exposes and examines the movement of narratives, and cultural imaginaries, about cinchona across the Atlantic World around 1800, by studying the circulation of ‘origin myths’ about how the ‘wonderful’, ‘admirable’ medicinal properties of cinchona had first come to the knowledge of mankind. The chapter scrutinizes the various story elements present in contemporary origin stories – the natives’ alleged secrecy, closeness to nature and unlettered simplicity – exposing them as widespread, and long-lived, topoi, woven from the epistemic fabric of the Atlantic World. Laying ground for subsequent chapters, it argues that these topoi ultimately served to make sense of, promote and propagate the bark’s ‘wonderful properties’ – as much, or more so, as the discerning appreciation of its supposed medical ‘effects’, or the support of prominent regal and religious advocates historians have tended to privilege in their accounts of the bark’s rise.