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What does it mean to be a man? This text examines the manly stereotype, which stresses courage, moral restraint and athletic comportment, which has become representative of normative modern society. The role of women and the "unmanly men" in maintaining the stereotype and its erosion is studied.

A "common woman" in medieval England was a prostitute, distinguished as such less for taking money for sex than for belonging to all men in common. Karras's book tells the story of these women, their experiences, relations, and treatment under the law, and concludes that prostitution was central to the medieval understanding of feminity.

Drawing upon a wealth of actual cases and trial evidence left by the Spanish Inquisition, this work documents the eroticizing of the confessional between 1530 and 1819. It argues that the Counter-Reformation Church actually helped to foster sexual solicitation in the confessional.

This study of the evolving definition of masculinity in France since the 18th century examines the aristocratic ethos of male honour, the cultural practices and mentality of middle and upper class men, and the appeal of codes of honour to men throughout French society.

Through the prism of sexuality the author makes a convincing case that in the aftermath of the French religious wars, French authorities sought to create a new order in which prescriptions and the disposition of the body worked to discipline and rein individuals within a variety of institutions ranging from the family to the church.

This volume explores homosexuality in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century France. Examining the evolution of behaviour, identities, and representation in the period when homosexuality, in the modern sense of the term, emerged, the essays outline the development of homosexual subcultures and patterns of sexual repression and liberation.

In 1432, the Office of the Night was created specifically to police sodomy in Florence. Seventy years of denunciations, accusations and sentencings left an extraordinarily detailed record, which the author uses in this portrait, calling into question modern conceptions of sexuality and gender.

Explores the relationship between erotic writing, masculinity, and national identity in Renaissance England. This book draws on both manuscripts and printed texts, and incorporates insights from feminist theory and queer studies. It argues that pornography is a historical phenomenon and that it does not exist in all cultures.

Based on archival literature, 'Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice' brings to life the voices of ordinary Venetians and opens up their world of intimacy and conflict, sexuality, and living arrangements. Ferraro examines the scripts that spouses brought to the city's ecclesiastical court in order to annul their vows or achieve legal separation.

Making Marriage Modern explains the emergence a new form of relationship between the sexes-the "companionate marriage"- which incorporated birth control and an active sexual role for wives. While displacing Victorian marriage and femininity, the companionate ideal prevailed by the 1940s and set the standard against which second-wave feminists rebelled.

This extraordinary story is told from the archive documents in the case of Sister Benedetta Carlini, an Abbess who was imprisoned for thirty-five years after being found guilty of a lesbian relationship with another nun.

The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers tells a story of a death, but more importantly it also tells the story of a life--that of Mary Rogers--and of the complex urban social world of which she was a part. Like the city in which she lived, Mary Rogers was a source of wonder, mystery, and fear, provoking desire, and inspiring narrative.