☀ You can borrow and read Sex in Elizabethan England free below. ☀
Sex in Elizabethan England gets off to a slow start with a section on beds that’s interesting but not particularly sexy. Several chapters are then devoted to the complicated situations of Queen Elizabeth I (“The Virgin Queen” who was reportedly quite promiscuous) and her assorted royals and aristocrats — worries about marriage and managing perceptions and figuring out who was related to whom and who was sleeping with whom, and whether boffing someone would elevate one’s position or get one hanged. Elizabeth surrounded herself with virginal maids of honor, who made irresistible targets for every ambitious palace hanger-on, and some nice scandals resulted, especially when somebody ended up pregnant by someone who was already married and a suitable husband had to be found.
a variety of topics about sex in elizabethan england
Things start to heat up a bit in Chapter 6 when author Alan Haynes* deals with commercial sex in Elizabethan England. He goes on to discuss courtesans, the selling of virginity, the horror of being a cuckold, serial seducers, homosexuality, pornography, licentious poetry, plays, and literature, cross-dressing, impotence, fashion, and syphilis.
But this book is not just sex, sex, sex. You have to dig through a lot of historical and literary text to get to the racy bits. But that should be fine, as the text enclosing those bits is mostly quite interesting, if not exactly what we signed up for.
Adopting a variant of male attire could be entirely sensible and purposeful, as is evident in the biography of Thomasine Hall, who arrived in London aged twelve. She lived as a girl (despite the male component of her first name) until 1596 and the clamour surrounding the preparations for the Cadiz expedition. She ended the stable gendered years and enlisted as Thomas Hall in an apparently successful disguise, looking for adventure. Then for the next twenty years or so she veered from one gender designation to another and back again, crossing the invisible sexual boundary with nonchalance. Geography aided her. She sailed as a man to Virginia but on arrival in the colony only found work as a chambermaid — hence a change. When eventually commanded to give testimony before the General Court of Virginia to defend an accusation of being a transvestite, she claimed sweetly to ‘go in women’s apparel to get a bit for my cat’ — a perfectly fine response as cat-lovers will agree. The decision of the court was equally neat: s(he) should signal her androgyny to the world by wearing a combination of male and female clothes — mostly those for men but under an apron.
borrow or buy this ebook about sex in Elizabethan England
You can borrow (by the hour) and read the ebook Sex in Elizabethan England free via the nonprofit Internet Archive or buy* it from Amazon.
Since this book can only be borrowed by the hour, you can’t download it — but you can easily read it online with the Internet Archive’s built-in BookReader.
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