The Shapes of Fancy stages an impassioned defense of the inherently desirous nature of reading.
Early Modern
The Beauty and the Terror
The Italian Renaissance was far stranger and darker than many of us realise, and that sex and sexuality played an important role in this unsavoury side of the sixteenth century.
Three’s a Crowd?: Navigating a Love Triangle in Enlightenment France
How an Enlightenment philosopher understood the love between his mistress and her sister
‘She rose in the Morning of a contrary Sex’: Stories from Early Modern Wonder Books
Early modern wonder books included stories of people who changed sex as a surprising natural phenomenon.
Homosensuality and the early modern Anglo-Ottoman encounter
Sensationalised sexual depravity of the Ottomans was a popular trope in early modern European discourses on the Turks.
Itch, Clap, Pox: Venereal Disease in the Eighteenth-Century Imagination
How venereal disease was represented in eighteenth-century British literature and art.
Some Like It Hot: Sex and the Sauna in Early Modern Sweden
Early modern travellers found Sweden’s saunas both exotic and erotic, but local attitudes were more complicated.
Recent Posts
Of Polymaths and Pederasts: Reflections on Rachel Hope Cleves’s <i>Unspeakable</i>
Raúl Luis Suarez’s Smile and The Ruthless Archive
The Shapes of Fancy: Reading for Queer Desire in Early Modern Literature
Queer as Cop: Gay Patrol Units and the White Fantasy of Safety
Campaigning for Lesbian and Gay Rights in Ireland, 1981-1993