Love, Sex, Intimacy and Friendship Between Men, 1550-1800

Top-drawer collection of international, interdisciplinary scholars reconfigure the history of sexuality and radically altering how we think about sexuality and how we write history. This book is a timely benchmark in answering and raising questions about male love, sex, friendship and intimacy in the early modern era.

This book gathers the most recent scholarship on the historicization of masculinity by the most original and widely respected thinkers in this relatively new field. By using the analytical tools of queer theory these international, interdisciplinary scholars have reconfigured the history of sexuality in radically altering how we think about sexuality and how we write history. This book is a timely benchmark in answering and raising questions about male love, sex, friendship, and intimacy in the early modern era. It is a revaluation that takes into account how widely this matter has been debated over the last ten years and is an invaluable contribution to Gay, Lesbian and Queer Studies; sexual, social and cultural history and Early Modern and Enlightenment Studies more generally.

KATHERINE O’DONNELL is Head of Women’s Studies in the School of Social Justice, University College Dublin, Republic of Ireland. She has published widely on the topic of Eighteenth-century Irish literature. She has edited Palgrave Advances in Irish History with Leeann Lane and Mary McAuliffe and Twenty-First Century Lesbian Studies, with Noreen Giffney (Harrington Press).
MICHAEL O’ROURKE is the editor (also with Katherine O’Donnell) of Queer Masculinities,1550-1800: Siting Same-Sex Desire in the Early Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and (with Noreen Giffney) of The Ashgate Companion to Queer Theory. His many articles focus on queer theory, the history of sexuality, and Continental philosophy.

Introduction–K.O’Donnel, M.O’Rourke & D.M.Halperin * Homoplatonic, Homodepressed, Homomorbid: Some Further Genealogies of Same-Sex Attraction in Western Civilization–G.Rousseau * Homosexuals in History: A.L. Rowse and the Queer Archive–A.Stewart * Male Love and Friendship in the Eighteenth Century–G.E.Haggerty * A Traditional Rite for Blessing Friendship–A.Bray * The Heterosexual Male in Eighteenth Century London and his Queer Interactions–R.Trumbach * How Queer Was the Renaissance?–M.Di Gangi * Can the Sodomite Speak? Sodomy, Satire, Desire, and the Castlehaven Case–N.F.Radel * (Per)versions of Sappho–J.Greene