Book excerpt: Understanding heteronormativity is imperative for understanding the culture of the eighteenth century writ large, as well as the imaginaries of sex and sexuality that it bequeaths to the present. This collection foregrounds British, European, and transatlantic heteronormativities to pose vital, if vexing, questions about the degree of continuity subsisting between heteronormativities past and present, questions compounded by the aura of transhistoricity lying at the heart of heteronormativity as an ideology.