Noelle Gallagher Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination is a lively interdisciplinary study of how venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art. By unpicking the slang, symbolism and wordplay through which VD was usually represented, it sheds new light on a subject which was often shrouded […]
Tag: eighteenth century
“Well Known as Miss Betty Cooper”: Gender Expression in 18th-Century Boston
One 1771 advertisement sought the recapture of an enslaved person known by two names: Cato and Miss Betty Cooper.
Pleasing and Teasing: Bourgeois Sexuality in the Age of Commerce
Angelica Church lived at the intersection of two revolutions, in a world of dangerous financial speculation, intense political intrigue, and the play of passions between men and women.
“She was both Poxt and Clapt together”: Confessions of Sexual Secrets in Eighteenth-Century Venereal Cases
Olivia Weisser Furtive trysts. Regretful dalliances. Fleeting affairs. Sexual secrets were nothing new in the 1700s, but confessing them to a doctor became surprisingly common in published medical cases of venereal disease. In one instance, a woman consulted a surgeon for a common reproductive ailment known as “the whites.” She […]
From Cod to Codpieces: Benjamin Franklin’s Guide to Food and Sex
Benjamin Franklin’s dalliances with a cod may not seem particularly notable, given his other exploits.
Tempests and Teapots: Sexual Politics and Tea-Drinking in the Early Modern World
The American Revolution is impossible to understand without food and sex at its center.
Women’s Experiences in Fornication and Paternity Suits in Massachusetts, 1740-1800
Kelly A. Ryan On January 11, 1779, Nabby Whitmore, a white single woman from Royalston, Massachusetts, confessed to Justice of the Peace Abel Wilder that she was pregnant with a child that “was likely to be born a bastard.” Whitmore told Wilder that the father of her child was William […]
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