Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - History's Worst F*ckboys: Casanova

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

Can you imagine being SO smooth-talking and seductive your surname becomes an actual noun in the dictionary to describe someone who has a reputation for being an expert at in the sack?Well today we’re going to be talking about a man who was just that…Giacamo Casanova.But is his legacy as a f*ckboy accurate? Was he really a prolific ladies man? And did he do anything else in his life other than seduce women…and if he did, why do we only remember him for that reason? Today we’re bringing you a very special Betwixt the Sheets mash-up episode with History Hit’s very own Casanova, Dan Snow (don’t worry, he has humbly confirmed we could call him that).Kate and Dan will be discussing why there is much more to Casanova than just womanising - he was a scam artist, outlaw, alchemist, spy and church cleric. He wrote satires, fought duels, and escaped from prison more than once. He even set up the French national lottery. Join Kate and Dan for this special collab episode of History Hit in the Sheets to find out all this and more!Produced by Freddy Chick, Charlotte Long and Mariana Des Forges. Mixed by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Cade Lister. I am me, you are you, and this is Betwixtor Sheets. Hello, everybody. I am so glad that you're joining us today, not just because it's always fabulous to have you around,

but because today, wait for it, this is our three-year anniversary. It's our third birthday. It's Betwixt's third birthday. Happy birthday to us. and it's the leather year. That feels oddly appropriate. I'll leave the anniversary presents up to you.

But before we can keep celebrating, I do have to tell you, as I have done for the past three years, that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults, spots, adult, things in an adulty way covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. Does that feel safer? I feel safer. Right, birthday buddies, let's do it. No, I mean it.

We don't want the librarians in here. Gosh, what does he do with his time? Count Waldenstein has some 40,000 titles in this library, and there is no coherent pattern to any of this at all. The organisation is terrible. No, stay quiet. Shh, can you hear that? A quill scratching somewhere in the stacks.

Somebody's in here. Let's go and have a look. Oh, there he is, the librarian, ignoring the library work, and instead he's writing his 12-volume biography. and what a biography it will be. After all, he may not look it, but his quiet librarian spending his final years in the middle of nowhere writing this book

is the one and only, Giacomo Casanova. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy doesn't. make a difference.

Goodness, my beautiful, damn. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Oh, and welcome back to Betwigs the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. By his own reckoning, Kassanova had some 116 lovers in his lifetime.

That fact, and the fact that he wrote all of this down, means that he has to be mentioned this month. After all, he was a love-bombing gift-giving Lothario, but was he a fuck-boy, too? Well, we have dealt with. back into the archive for this episode with none of the than the fabulous Dan Snow.

And what would Dan Snow and Cassanova for an airful? You can't ask for more than that, can you? Kate Lister, how's it going? You've got the fastest growing podcast in the world. Betwixt, it's pretty cool. I always love your, like, sexual advisory stuff at the start. You're like, courses, the whole point, listen to you, Muppets. That's my favourite bit is that having to go, right, yeah,

it's about sex. We're going to talk about sex. It's like when you get the little bottles of night hole and it says, warning may cause drowsiness. Yeah. But I actually quite enjoy that bit now. It sounds like you enjoy that bit, for sure, for sure. I mean, Cassanova is like a central figure of this story, isn't he? I mean, it's bonkers.

There's a lot of things you could say about him, and I'm sure that we will. But you'd have to say that he drank deeply from the cup of life, I think is what you'd have to say about Cassanova is he lived several lifetimes over, didn't he? I think that he realizes quite early on, you sort of get this sense when you read it is memoirs, which is really the only source that we have for Casanova, is these like thousands and 10,000 words on more memoirs that he wrote when he was in his 60s. And you get a real sense from him, sat there. He was a librarian at the time because he'd fritted everything away.

By the way, can we just briefly, Cassanova ended his days as a librarian? I love librarians, but I mean, that is a classic. It is, isn't it? Because he'd earned his fortune several times over and then spaffed it up the wall repeatedly because he couldn't stop gambling. He was a terrible, terrible gambler. And everything he did was about chance and opportunistic. And he would keep getting in trouble.

He'd keep being chucked out of places, which is kind of one of the reasons he was on the run all the time, is because he would keep pissing people off and then he'd be exiled. But I don't think he ever stopped being a chance. I think he worked out very early on that he was really clever. And he was. He was really, really bright. But I think that he worked out that you can trick people.

You can manipulate people. And I think he liked doing it as well. So he is super smart and he graduates. He hates the law, doesn't it? He hates it. But he graduates super young from university and is it still a teenager? He's really young. He's one of those like child prodigies.

He graduates from law at about like 17 or something like that. And he was just a voracious reader of books. He would just absorb everything. But then he's stuck because, well, all right, you're very clever and you know a lot of stuff and you're quite good looking by all accounts. But what are you going to do? You're still the son of an actress and you're penniless. So he attempted to go into the church for a bit, but wasn't very good at it.

He was a bit of a wronging, wasn't he? Well, you know, he was really good at delivering the sermons, and people started coming from all over the place to hear him talk. But there was one incident where he got smashed before he was supposed to give the sermon, and then he wasn't sure what he was supposed to do, so pretended to faint rather than give it away that he was absolutely sozzled. And it just became pretty obvious that he was not going to fit in the church because he kept shagging everyone.

And he then He basically finds self a wealthy patron, right? Which is, I mean... He does. It's just a shortcut. It's a life hack, that, isn't it? But then what are you going to do? You're like 18 years old.

How are you going to make your money? It's a very, very, very different world. You can't really have an apprenticeship. If you haven't inherited the money, there's only a few options available to you, really. And getting a wealthy patron is definitely one of them. And he does score the jackpot, and it's Senator Bragadon.

Cassanova found him when he was having a heart attack or a stroke and he kind of launched into it's another example of him being this brilliant con artist he launched into this oh my god I'm going to help you I'm the hero and he picked him up off the street and took him back to his apartments and laid down the bed and then he made this whole big song and dance about how he'd saved him and his doctors couldn't so when Braggenden kind of came back round he was incredibly indebted to Cassanova when he made him his principal air but it's another example of him bullshitting really really well

Well, instead of being a healer slash alchemist is something that he would turn to when he was struggling for a square meal. Yeah, and it was a dangerous game, actually, and it was one that would come around and bite him on the ass because in Venice at the time, there was sort of their own version of the Inquisition going on, which is sort of the repressive religious authorities were getting very upset with this sort of magic occult, sacrilegious stuff going on. And Cassanova really liked that. In fact, he's got one story that when he was really little is grandmother to. come to a witch to heal him of nosebleeds, which is extreme. And he thinks at some points that he is able to perform magic and cabala and mysticism. And at some points, like when his life pretends to be like a spiritualist and a mediumist, but he does kind of play around with this stuff, how much he believed it himself.

I'm not quite sure. Yeah, he does a bit of philosopher's stone action, doesn't we? We should talk about sex because he is also the victim of child abuse. I mean, he had his first sexual experiences were under the age. He was young, I mean, wasn't he? He was young. He didn't have full penetrative sex until he was in his teens, but his first sexual experience was with a woman that was older than him, definitely.

And he kind of remembers it as like it awoke something in him that he was going to devote the rest of his life to. But today, yeah, we'd say that that's child abuse. And then he's sort of famous sleeping nuns, but that does fit within the genre of sort of literary, non-porn in the 18th century was actually a thing. It was a thing. You've got to be careful when you talk about Casnava because it's like how much of it is true. If the authority that you've got on this is himself is his memoirs, how much of it can be corroborated by other source material,

you know, or how much of it, if you put different lenses on it and like it's your mate at school that was bragging about shagging two supermodels and you're like, did that happen? Did that happen? And there's certainly a lot in the memoirs that sort of maps onto quite popular genres of porn at the time. And nun porn was quite big. But yeah, famously, he had two very turbulent love affairs with two women who lived in a nunnery. We should talk about his – he was in prison. You've mentioned this. And his famous escape from prison, because that is a classic.

Tell me about that. Right. Okay. So he gets in prisons because – and this is going back to what you were saying at the beginning about. At the time, people were aware that he was – shagging people he shouldn't be shagging and he was getting a reputation and he was like the venetian authorities were gathering information on him about him being a fornicator and a seducer of women and a liar and somebody that stole men's wives away and was generally a rake and a scoundrel but what really did

for him was this sort of dabbling in magic that he liked to sort of put about and there was the accusation that he'd said anyone who believes in christianity is weak and he was arrested on those charges and he was thrown in jail in Venice and he stayed there for 15 months and he did manage to escape which was no mean feat because he was right up in they were called like the lead cells or because they had lead on the roof so it's how does he get away and he manages to find it sort of like I'd say an ice pick but it's not but imagine like an ice pick and he manages to sort of make a hole in the ground but then he's moved to a different cell just as he's about to Andy Dufrain it right but then he starts talking to a monk who's a bad monk who's in the cell next to him

and he manages to get him the ice pick and then he kind of tunnels through to his cell and they pull each other out and then they're like loosening the rafters in the ceiling of the building of the jail this is a perfect example of Kassanova being a complete con artist so they're climbing up the roofs they're climbing in the eaves and the only place that can get to is like this big great hall that they kind of drop down into but all the doors are locked so it's like well that's brilliant we can't get out but they're so tired they fall asleep And then they get woken up the next morning by a guard opening the door. And Casanova leaps into action straight away.

And he goes, how dare you? How dare you treat us like this? And what he knew was there'd been a ball there the night before. So he managed to pass off in that second that they were two guests of the ball that had been locked in there overnight by accident. The guard was so apologetic and terrified that they'd report him to his superiors. He led them out the building. That's like mad skills, that isn't it? That's mad skills

The joyful years before like, you know, official papers Yeah It just shows how far confidence can get you Doesn't it if you just front it out After it escapes Is that when he goes to France That's this incredible

The most proper bit Well, I say that, it's still gambling But the most kind of perhaps A bit of his career That's he's not actually breaking Multiple laws and customs at the same time He goes to France He goes to Paris

Yeah and he loves Paris And he learns the language And again, he's seducing everybody, famous courtesans, famous actresses, famous men's wives. But the one thing that he does is he, quote unquote, invent the first lottery. Yeah, like a national lottery. Like a state lottery. Yeah. I mean, he, again, what he does is he manages to convince people that he's invented it.

But what he actually did is he nicked the idea from other people that he'd been speaking to. So it wasn't his idea. But he packaged it really well and he was an amazing salesman. So he sold this idea to the Parisian authorities. And obviously, like, the lottery is win-win for everyone, it's all those poor slubs think, yeah, but I might win it. And we kind of enjoy that little buzz and the people that win are the company that does it. So he made them a lot of money and he made a lot of money for himself.

But yeah, he's still remembered as the inventor of the lottery. It gets a bit of work as a spy at this point. He hangs out of Madame de Pompadour, who's Louis the 15th's sort of favorite, foremost mistress. and Rousseau he's hanging out with. I mean, it's bonkers. If he did hang out with him. Oh, you see, maybe he's just making it up. It might be.

I mean, there's some cooperating evidence because when his memoirs were discovered and finally published, there was a lot of his letters and correspondence that was found. And there are letters that have been written to him. So we know that, I mean, unless he was going to the extent of faking letters written to him, like we know that some of this can be corroborated. But you can't help but reading it through and go,

oh, you helped Mozart with your music. Did you cast him over? Right. Of course you did. It just sounds very much like, yeah, he goes to another school, you wouldn't know him. It's just got that kind of vibe about it. But maybe I'm being really horribly wrong. Maybe it was all true.

Well, you don't know if you want it to be true or not. It's so bizarre. I like the way he basically nicks loads of money off an old French aristocrat by promising he can make him younger again. And then goes to Britain to flog his lottery scheme to the British government and ends up shagging some Brits. Then he does do this kind of mad European tour. again, meets Frederick the Great, meets Catherine the Great, wild.

Yep, he's all over the place. And you can look at that as like, isn't that quite exciting, that he's always kind of on the move, he lives his very kind of rootless existence, but he also keeps getting thrown out of places. So he has to keep leaving places. When he was in England, he was chagging various courts, and he didn't like it very much

because he couldn't speak English all that well and they couldn't speak French, which is kind of nice, because he had this thing about, like, he didn't just want to have sex, He also wanted witticisms and banter and, you know, all those things. Knock-knock jokes, I don't know. So he didn't like that very much.

And he got in trouble with quite a famous courtesan in Britain whose name escapes me. She had a French name. And she wouldn't sleep with him and he got really upset and angry because it's like the first woman that had refused him. And I think he slapped her as well. And he was really upset with himself and he left. I'll be back with Casanova and Dan after this short break. It's funny. The pictures of Casanova, I'm being a bit superficiality.

It doesn't look super attractive. and I just wonder if people's teeth must have been so bad. If you were like a bog standard six and a half out of ten, seven, were you like a ten in the 18th century, do you reckon? I think that what Casanova has, and I still think that this is true today, self-confidence and self-belief and wit and being funny is one of the most attractive things that you can have.

You could put someone in front of you that is a solid 10 out of 10, like your absolute dream shag. And it would be amazing. for a bit. It'd be like, oh my God, I can't believe I get to play with this. This is incredible. How long would it take before he started going, he's still here? If they had like no personality, if they were actually quite boring to be around, like how long would it take for that novelty to wear off? But he didn't have that. He had wit and charisma in absolute spades. And so he was

really confident and that will get you like so far almost every time. Listen to this kids. That's advice for you from the expert. That's advice. Yes. He was expelled from Warsaw when he had a jewel. I mean, come on, he's got to have a few jewels, and he got shot in the left hand with a colonel. They argued over an actress, of course. Of course. By the way, can we just talk about the actress thing?

What is it about an actress, hence the bishop actresses of the phrases that we use? Tell me about 18th century actresses. Right, so there has been, as long as there, because women weren't always allowed on the stage, of course. Right in Shakespearean times, it was men playing the roles of women. So it was considered very daring when women were finally allowed. on the stage. And there has been a very close association between actresses and sex workers, courtisans, that they've merged into one of them for a really, really long time. And I suspect

it's because an actress has got a certain amount of agency that other women don't have. So, for example, Kastanova's mother, she travelled all over Europe. You're not going home to a husband, that you have a certain amount of freedom that's built into that, that you're on the stage, so you're already being admired. That's definitely a part of it. And if you look at someone like the great courtisans throughout history, they start off as actresses. Like Nell Gwynne, one of my favourites, she started off as an actress on the stage, and that was how she caught the eye of Charlie Boy, Charles II and became his mistress. So there's a really close association between the two. Is this unusual a moment? Why she talks honestly about how he had sex with men as well as women?

Is that something, given that Sodomir's capital crime, that strikes me as kind of quite honest? He doesn't quite go into the same gory details that he does with women. There's like veiled suggestions. So he would write about one of his famous lovers, M.M., who was actually a nun, of course she was, but he was also the lover of a really prominent bishop, of course she was, and that they had sex while the husband watched. And it's kind of like, is that true?

Or was he in there as well? But there is one incident where he's very, very attracted to a famous singer, a castrato, and he goes to have sex with him. and then kind of realizes at the crucial moment, him as a her, and she's been masquerading as a castrato and stuffing her pants with a fake penis. And there is a certain amount of, he seems to be getting off on it a little bit.

So he probably wouldn't have written it down in explicit detail because, as you said, it's like really, really bad. But he seemed to have sex with literally everything. He gets back to Venice eventually. I just love the way he just travels. looking for opportunities to ingratiate himself with rich people and then occasionally he just doesn't find it. He's like, oh, Paul, Spain was complete, nothing happened there.

So then he keeps going. He's like a shark. He's got to have oxygen over the gills. I find it such an extraordinary way to live. It would be interesting, like, what would people make of him today from a psychological point of view? Like, there's so much going on there that he never marries and settles down. He doesn't really have a permanent home.

Like he said, he's always on the move. It's this very sort of rootless existence. But he seems to really thrive on it as well. And like in some places he's, when he was in Paris, he was a millionaire and then he lost it all, which is like an incredible feat. Like how the hell did you do that? He's silly sod.

And then other places he was just working as a violinist as a fiddler because he couldn't do anything else. He certainly fiddled. He certainly fiddled. But also I was like, you know, now we've got credit cars and sadly people can run up like massive. But like when you're wandering around Spain, looking for a rich person to read their fortune or do some crazy stuff to. Other days when he's

got nothing left in his wallet, he's like, oh, oh, like, I am going to go hungry and sleep in a barn tonight. Like, I find that just that pre-modern journeying lifestyle, I find it so fast, like the logistics of it. How did it work? A lot of it's on credit, and a lot of it is, like the art of the con artist is to make people think that they can trust you. So he needs to present himself to people, and he kind of gets this reputation. People might know who he is, even if they know him as a rake and a scoundrel. He was definitely famous for his jail break. So he's got a kind of a license to sort of turn up at places as a fascinating person. He just gets to a village, goes, where's the big house? Kind of. Bang on the door. Hey, everyone, it's your lucky day. Castanova is in town.

I'm here. It was really weird. It's the thought of like, B-list celebrities turning up at your house going, hi, I'm here. That's mad, isn't it? But he sort of had this reputation, so he knew where to go and he knew the right people. There's a certain sense that he kind of just things happen to him. At least in the memoirs, that's how he remembers it. Like, he doesn't seem to be able to just go out to the shops for a pint of milk without bumping into an actress or a carcassan or... Or Benjamin Franklin. Or Benjamin Franklin. Here he meets. Yeah, extraordinary. They talk about aeronautics and balloon transport together in Paris. They do. And he's spying. He seems to have a little nice, towards the end of his life,

he gets that nice little stipend from the Venetians. He so does a bit of spying. I guess he's flogging his roller decks, he's flogging his little backbook and his contacts to provide a bit of intelligence, the state security services? I think he would be a brilliant spy, apart for the fact that he wrote it all down in a memoir, which was definitely a bit of a giveaway. One of the things he was really good at was reading people. And so the way that he seduced, and I think that he still continues to seduce people, actually, because we're still drawn to him. We're still, like, who was this person, this enigmatic person, is that he kind of presents himself as this very exciting person who does stuff that you couldn't possibly.

possibly do. And I think that's quite magnetic, isn't it? The reality of it would be very different. And his last year, as we said at the beginning, he was a librarian, amazingly. He got very depressed. He was having not particularly good time. That's the period in which he claims to have Mozart helps him with a few bits and bobs. As you do. But then wrote this unbelievable memoir. That's surely your dream, because I've talked to you many times in this podcast, and you're saying the big problem is people don't write down the things we do, like sexually, and we don't write honest memoirs, right? We all write boring. unbelievably, because we don't offend people.

We don't want to get caught out for telling little porcupines, but he is one of those rare people that does just write this incredible memoir. And it is an incredible. As a historical document, it's so valuable. And it wasn't published unedited to begin with. It took a while to get their full gory details out there. But again, even that, as valuable as that is, you've got to always be thinking, is this unscensored, though?

Because there's a real sense that he knows he's writing it for an audience. he knows and that he's really enjoying reminiscing. One of my favorite quotes from his memoirs is, I wrote my life to laugh at myself, and so far I've succeeded. So he's like having a really good time remembering this stuff. But it's how accurate was it? If we could find the people he's writing about and go,

well, Katana always seems to think that you had an amazing time. Is that what you remember? I'm not so sure if those things would marry up, but it's still such a valuable document. I like his line where he just says, I can say I have lived. And I think is probably true. Although it's not whitewash things, there was at least one but several rape allegations. And then he slept with his daughter.

What's going with that? It's really complex because like, if I tell you this story about this guy, you invented the lottery and he's funny and he's charismatic and he chagged his daughter. It's like, whoa, go back one. What? So we're kind of left with this like, wow, okay. If it's true, if it's true. We don't know if there's corroborating evidence But he had an affair with a woman called Lucrezia

And then years later He met her daughter Who is called Leonilda And he almost had sex with her And then it found out that that's actually his daughter He almost had sex with her And then there's a weird description about He has sex with Lucrezia

While Leonilda's in the room But he doesn't have sex with her then But that's weird Like we're in weird territory already And then he has this thing about Later on when he met her when she's like 25, she was unhappily married because she couldn't get pregnant. So as a favour, as a fatherly favour, he has sex with her to get her pregnant.

And it's kind of just like, Cassanova, like I want to be on your side, but it's like, what are you doing? And it's, again, you've got to like, I'd say look at it in the context of the time, but no one was chagging their daughters at the time, even at the time. But what it might be is playing to incest porn, which was bizarre. like the Marquis de Sard writes about it all the time and when you look at erotica into the 19th century there's a weird amount of incest and by the way incest porn is still incredibly popular today on porn hub it's not fathers and daughters it tends to be stepmother and stepson that kind of thing so what he might be doing is bullshitting and trying to create weird sexual fantasies not that that makes this okay but that's what he might be doing I guess like

I struggle with his life to think, like, how unusual was it? Other lives like this, but that we just... Which I don't know about. Is it the fact this one's chronicled? It's fascinating, isn't it? And if they hadn't found those manuscripts, if they hadn't been published, we might never know that this man. Yeah, they had a really interesting life, didn't they?

They survived the bombing of Leipzig. They were suppressed for years. It's only quite recently that they've all come out, really. Yeah, and we're still, like, discovering little things, like who his famous lovers were because he anonymizes some of them in the memoirs like MM and CC and all these things. I think that he was unusual, even for the time,

and I think that he knew that he was unusual. And he had to have been unusual because no one would have given a shit about him otherwise. You can't be turning up at the court of Catherine the Great and going, hello, I'm casting over the completely normal because no one cares. He had this huge appetite for adventure and I think that he just said yes a lot.

You know, like most of us have that kind of like, I'm not really sure I should be doing it. I don't think he had that. He just steered into the skid his entire life. Steered into the skid. Yes, he did. Well, Casanova felt like the obvious point where our two podcasts would intersect. Because I love the 18th century and you love the history of, well, things that go on

betwixt the sheets. I don't think Cassanova was patrox the sheets for that long. I think it was, you know. It was anywhere he could try it up against walls in castles, boats, anywhere, but he must have done it betwixt the sheets a few times. I mean, you think so, wouldn't you? Yeah.

Some of the relations were off a bit longer. I think they would have had time for a bit of sleep occasionally. But you know, he only actually slept with about 120 people. I think that's quite an important thing. I think that's quite interesting as well. It made me think that it's not a kind of eye-watering figure, I don't think. It's not, is it?

No. You know, I might be giving away too much about myself. But when I read that, I was like, what? Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I sometimes wonder whether he includes, is that like a class thing? Does he not include a quick roll in the hay with somebody he considers, are those people that named people that he considers important? I think that was interesting.

Also, though, I wonder how, like, Catherine the Great had love affairs and gained her reputation as, like, a serial shaggar. In fact, she seemed to have been someone who enjoyed a consecutive series of reciprocal-loving relationships. And I wonder if in those days maybe that was an astonishing number of people to have slept with. It's fascinating. I mean, it's still quite a big number, When you think of someone like, I think Gene Simmons brags that he slept with over 10,000 people.

What? Yeah. It was a mad weekend, I'm telling you. That's kind of that sort of number. And I think that's quite an important point. I mean, yeah, there's a lot of dodgy stuff about Cassano, but you'd have to say that he does fall in love a lot. That there is like a lot of casual sex, but he does seem to have genuine relationships for a lot of people. But I have also wondered, were these just the named people?

What about like the faceless poor people that you had sex with? but yeah. Yeah, that's the thing I find interesting about him. But yeah, it's fascinating. Well, listen, Kate, thanks very much for coming on my... I'm surprised you have time these days. You're so important to come on my podcast. I really appreciate that.

Well, you know, just I'll try and remember you from when I was, Dan. It's been so lovely to talk to you. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And thank you so much to Dan for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts.

If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. Coming up, we're going to delve into what it meant to be beautiful and ugly in the past. This podcast was edited by Freddie Chick, Charlotte Long, Mariana Deforghese, and mixed by Dougal Patmore. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.

This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.