Table of Contents

List of illustrations; Notes on contributors; Preface and acknowledgements; Introduction: a history of sexuality?; 1. Marriage, love, sex, and Renaissance civic morality; 2. Typology, sexuality and the Renaissance Esther; 3. Artifice as seduction in Titian; 4. Renaissance women and the question of class; 5. Venetian women and their discontents; 6. The ambiguity of beauty in Tasso and Petrarch; 7. George Pettie, Barnaby Rich, and delights for women 'only'; 8. Troping Utopia: Donne's brief for Lesbianism; 9. Staging gender in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew; 10. The semiotics of masculinity in Renaissance England; 11. Recuperating women and the man behind the screen; 12. Male Renaissance poets in the female body; 13. The geography of Renaissance love; 13. Gender and conduct in Paradise Lost.

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An exploration of sexuality and gender in Renaissance art, literature, and society.

Reviews

"The great strength of this volume is that it displays the wide variety of approaches being applied to cultural products of the Renaissance. In particular, it demonstrates how the juxtaposition and reconsideration of different types of evidence (visual, literary, and 'empirical') can significantly enrich our understanding of the Renaissance." Linda L. Gaus, Sixteenth Century Journal