In his study of the eighteenth-century Britain, Roy Porter argues that between roughly the end of the seventeenth century and the early years of the nineteenth century there was a ‘relaxation of strict protocols [that] gave greater breathing space to personal relations’ (Porter 1990: 259). This was especially true of sexual relations. ‘The libido’, Porter argues, ‘was liberated, and erotic gratification increasingly dissociated from sin and shame’ (Porter 1990: 260). Dror Wahrman comes to a very similar conclusion concerning the eighteenth century. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, as has been noted by many scholars, there was a decline in the faith in ‘God's active and authoritative ordering [which] was superseded by mans own, more tentative and open-ended, which prompted the reconstitution of the relevant notions and categories of identity’ (Wahrman 2006: 200–1). In particular, the various categories of identity lost their moorings to God and to God's judgement and subsequently came to be understood as mutable, open-ended, and flexible forms of identity. Wahrman refers to this as the ancien régime of identity, which gave way, early in the eighteenth century to fixed forms of identity. As Wahrman puts it, there was a ‘shift from mutability to essence, from imaginable fluidity to fixity, from the potential for individual deviation from general identity categories to an individual identity stamped indelibly on each and every person’ (Wahrman 2006: 128).