Historians Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma make available--for the first time to an English-speaking audience--the best, most recent work on the history of male homosexuality in Early Modern Europe. The role of the male homosexual--during the pivotal era of 1400 to 1800--is thoroughly explored. A wide-ranging group of authors offers relevant and fascinating material on sexual history and sexuality, in general, and on homosexuality and European history, in particular.

Contents Introduction I. Italy and Iberia Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Views of Bernardino of Siena "Socratic Love" as a Disguise for Same-Sex Love in the Italian Renaissance The "Nefarious Sin" in Early Modern Seville Love's Labors Lost: Five Letters From a Seventeenth-Century Portugese Sodomite II. France, Germany, and Scandanavia Homosexuality and the Court Elites of Early Modern France: Some Problems, Some Suggestions, and an Example Police and Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century Paris: From Sin to Disorder The Personal, the Political, and the Aesthetic: Johann Joachim Winckelmann's German Enlightenment Life Sodomy in Early Modern Denmark: A Crime Without Victims III. The Netherlands Sodomy in the Dutch Republic, 1600-1725 Sodomy at Sea and at the Cape of Good Hope During the Eighteenth Century Those Damned Sodomites: Public Images of Sodomy in the Eighteenth-Century Netherlands Prosecution of Sodomy in Eighteenth-Century Frisia, Netherlands The Persecutions of Sodomites in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam: Changing Perceptions of Sodomy IV: England "In the House of Madam Vander Tasse, on the Long Bridge": A Homosocial University Club in Early Modern Europe Sexuality and Augustan England: Sodomy, Politics, Elite Circles, and Society Sodomy and Male Honor: The Case of Somerset, 1740-1850 Sodomitical Assaults, Gender Role, and Sexual Development in Eighteenth-Century London V. Overviews Sodomites, Platonic Lovers, Contrary Lovers: The Backgrounds of the Modern Homosexual Homosexual Acts and Selves in Early Modern Europe Index