English Early Modern History

Baker, Sheridan

"Henry Fielding's The Female Husband: fact and fiction", PMLA, 74 (3) (1959): 213-24.

Bartlett, P.

"Sodomites in the pillory in 18th century London", Social & Legal Studies, 6 (1997): 553-72.

Bentman, Raymond

"Thomas Gray and the poetry of 'hopeless love', Journal of the History of Sexuality, 3 (1992): 203-22.

Bergeron, David M.

King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire. University of Iowa Press, 1999.

Bergeron, David Moore

"Writing King James's sexuality", in Fischlin, Daniel and Fortier, Mark (eds), Royal Subjects: Essays on the writings of James VI and I, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002, pp. 344-68.

Betteridge, Thomas

"The place of sodomy in the historical writings of John Bale and John Foxe", in Betteridge, Tom (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 11-26.

Bingham, Caroline

"Seventeenth century attitudes toward deviant sex", Journal of Interdisciplinary History 1 (1971), 447-68.

Binns, J.W.

"Women or transvestites on the Elizabethan stage?: an Oxford controversy", Sixteenth Century Journal, 5 (1974), pp. 95-170. (Boys playing women's parts)

Black, Jeremy (ed.)

Culture and Society in Britain, 1660-1800 Manchester University Press, 1997. This has a chapter by Paul Hammonds investigating the political and religious use of sodomy accusations against Titus Oates.

Bloch, Ivan

Sexual Life in England Past and Present, trans W. H. Forstern. London: Francis Aldor, 1938. Several modern reprints. The English edition is only a summary of the original German edition.

Borris, Kenneth (ed.)

Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: a sourcebook of texts, 1470-1650, London: Routledge, 2004.

Bray, Alan

"The curious case of Michael Wigglesworth", in Martin Duberman (ed.), A Queer World, 1997.

Bray, Alan

The Friend. University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Bray, Alan

"Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship", History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990).

Bray, Alan

Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men's Press, 1982; 2nd edn 1988. New edition, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, with a new afterword and bibliography.

Bredbeck, Gregory W.

Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton. (Mainly literature rather than history.)

Bristow, Edward J.

Vice and Vigilence: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700. 1977.

Burg, B. R.

"Ho hum, another work of the Devil: Buggery and sodomy in early Stuart England", in Licata and Petersen, The Gay Past (1985), 69-78 (orig. pub. 1980).

Clarke, Aidan

"The Atherton File", Decies (The Old Waterford Society), 11 (1979): 45-54.

Clarke, Danielle

"'The sovereign's vice begets the subject's error': the Duke of Buckingham, 'sodomy' and narratives of Edward II, 1622-28", in Betteridge, Tom (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002, pp. 46-64.

Cocks, Harry

"Making the sodomite speak: Voices of the accused in English sodomy trials, c.1800-98", Gender & History, 18:1 (2006), 87-107.

Cocks, Harry

"Safeguarding civility: Sodomy, class and moral reform in early nineteenth-century England", Past & Present, 190 (2006), 121-46.

Conaway, Charles

"Shakespeare, molly house culture, and the eighteenth-century stage", Comparative Drama, 38:4 (2004), 401-23.

Cook, Matt

"Sex lives and diary writing: the journals of George Ives", in Amigoni, David (ed.), Life Writing and Victorian Culture (The Nineteenth Century Series) (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 195-214.

Cressy, D.

"Gender trouble and cross-dressing in early modern England", Journal of British Studies, 35, 4 (October 1996), pp. 438-65.

Crompton, Louis (ed.)

"Jeremy Bentham's Essay on "Paederasty"", Journal of Homosexuality, 3 (1978), 383-405; 4 (1978), 91-107.

Davenport-Hines, Richard

Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex in Britain since the Renaissance. London: Fontana, 1990.

Dempsey, Brian

"They were a bit, ken, 'thon wey' Part 1" [Gay Scottish history], History Scotland, Vol.9 No.5 (September/October 2009); "Part 2", History Scotland, Vol.9 No.6 (November/December 2009), pp. 46-53.

Dubro, James

"The third sex: Lord Hervey and his coterie", Eighteenth Century Life, vol. 2, no. 4 (1976).

Easton, Fraser

"Gender's two bodies: Women warriors, female husbands and plebeian life", Past & Present, 180 (2003), 131-74.

Fulk, R. D.

"Male homoeroticism in the Old English Canons of Theodore", in Pasternack, Carol Braun; Weston, Lisa M. C., Sex and Sexuality in Anglo-Saxon England: essays in memory of Daniel Gillmore Calder (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 277) (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004), pp. 1-34.

Gilbert, A. N.

"Buggery and the British Navy 1700-1861", Journal of Social History 10 (1976), 72-98.

Gilbert, Arthur N.

"The `Africaine' Courts-Martial: A Study of Buggery in the Royal Navy", Journal of Homosexuality 1 (1974), 111-22.

Goldberg, Jonathan

"Society and sodomy: the case of Christopher Marlowe", Southwest Review, 69 (1984), pp. 371-8.

Goldsmith, Netta Murray

Worst of Crimes: Homosexuality and the Law in Eighteenth Century London. London: Ashgate, 1997.

Graham, James

The Homosexual Kings of England. London: Universal Tandem Publishing Co., 1968. 92pp. Superficial biogs of William Rufus, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Edward II, Richard II, James I, William III. No notes or bib.

Greene, Jody

"Public secrets: Sodomy and the pillory in the eighteenth century and beyond", The Eighteenth Century [Lubbock], 44:2/3 (2003), 203-32.

Haggerty, George

"Keyhole Testimony: Witnessing Sodomy in the Eighteenth Century", Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 44, nos. 2-3 (2003): 167-82.

Haggerty, George E.

"Male love and friendship in the eighteenth century", in O'Donnell, Katherine and O'Rourke, Michael (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 70-81.

Haggerty, George E.

Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999.

Haggerty, George E.

"Keyhole testimony: witnessing sodomy in the eighteenth century", The Eighteenth Century [Lubbock], 44:2/3 (2003), 167-82.

Hamilton, Jeffrey S.

"Menage à roi: Edward II and Piers Gaveston", History Today, 49:6 (1999), 26-31.

Hammond, Paul

Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.

Hammond, Paul

"Friends or Lovers? Sensitivity to Homosexual Implications in Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1640-1701", in Cedric C. Brown and Arthur F. Marotti (eds), Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, pp. 225-247.

Hammond, Paul

"James I's Homosexuality and the Revision of the Folio Text of King Lear", Notes and Queries, 242 (1997) 62-64.

Hammond, Paul

Love Between Men in English Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996.

Hammond, Paul

"Marvell's Sexuality", The Seventeenth Century, 11 (1996) 87-123; anthologized in Andrew Marvell, edited by Thomas Healy (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 170-204.

Hammond, Paul

"Rochester's Homoeroticism", in Nicholas Fisher (ed.), That Second Bottle: Essays on Rochester, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, pp. 46-62.

Hammond, Paul

"Titus Oates and 'Sodomy'", in Jeremy Black (ed.), Culture and Society in Britain, 1660-1800, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Harvey, A. D.

Sex in Georgian England: attitudes and prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s, London: Duckworth, 1994.

Haynes, Alan

Sex in Elizabethan England. London: Sutton, 1999. Has one chapter on homosexuality, a few other references throughout.

Herrup, Cynthia B.

A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hyde, H. Montgomery

The Other Love: A Historical and Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain. London: William Heinemann, 1970.

Johansson, Warren

"London's medieval sodomites", in Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson (eds), History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992, pp. 159-63.

Karras, Ruth Mazo and Boyd, David Lorenzo Boyd

"'Ut cum muliere': A male transvestite prostitute in fourteenth-century London", in Fradenburg, Louise and Freccero, Carla (eds) Premodern Sexualities, New York: Routledge, 1996.

Kimmel, Michael S.

"'Greedy kisses' and 'melting extasy': Notes on the homosexual world of early 18th century England as found in Love Letter Between a certain late Nobleman and the famous Mr. Wilson", Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 19, no. 2 (1990).

Lee, Clare

"Men in Beowulf" in her edited collection Medieval Masculinities. University of Minnesota Press. Regarding homosexuality in Beowulf.

McCormick, Ian (ed.)

>Secret Sexualities: Sourcebook of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Writings. London: Routledge, 1997.

Meyer, Richard

"'Nature revers'd': satire and homosexual difference in Hogarth's London", in Fort, Bernadette; Rosenthal, Angela (ed.), The other Hogarth: aesthetics of difference (Princeton (NJ) and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 162-75.

Miller, Carl

Stages of Desire: Gay Theatre's Hidden History. London: Cassell, 1996.

Moonie, Martin

"William Greenfield: gender and the transmission of literary culture", in Crawford, Robert (ed.), The Scottish invention of English literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 103-15.
About Edinburgh minister and Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh University William Greenfield, who was excommunicated and stripped of his degrees in 1798 following a homosexual scandal; lived in exile in England; Greenfield's Essays on the Sources of the Pleasures received from Literary Compositions (1809) erroneously attributed to Edward Morgan.

Mounsey, Chris (ed.)

Presenting Gender: Changing Sex in Early-Modern Culture. Bucknell University Press, 2001. (Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture)

Naphy, William

Sex Crimes: From Renaissance to Enlightment, Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 2002.

Norton, Rictor, ed.

Eighteenth-Century British Erotica Part 1 and Part 2 edited by Rictor Norton and others. Review

Norton, Rictor

Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830. Orig. pub. 1992, new revised edition 2006. 1992.
This pioneering historical study is the first comprehensive chronicle of the English gay community at its 18th-century roots, sporting for the first time a distinctive subculture with its "molly houses," "sodomites' walks," "maiden names" and gay slang. Rictor Norton's research into trial records and contemporary documents establishes a vital cornerstone for the reconstruction of gay history. Challenging in its demonstration that the molly subculture was primarily a working-class community of blacksmiths, milkmen, publicans and shopkeepers, Mother Clap's Molly House also records the exuberant lives of personalities such as Charles Hitchin the "thief-taker," the dramatists Samuel Foote and Isaac Bickerstaffe, William Beckford of Fonthill, and Rev. John Church, prosecuted for his blessing of gay marriages. All these are set against a backdrop of persecution, blackmail and the pillory. Review on Speak Its Name blog

Norton, Rictor

"Recovering Gay History from the Old Bailey", The London Journal, 30, 1 (2005): 39-54.
Abstract: Trials for sodomitical offences at the Old Bailey provide evidence not only for a gay subculture and a collective gay identity in the 'molly houses' of eighteenth-century London, but also for a personal homosexual identity among 'sodomites' and 'indorsers' whose activity seems limited mainly to cruising grounds and bog-houses. This article argues that although homosexual prosecutions appear to focus primarily upon a sexual act, they can be used to understand an underlying sexual orientation. By exploring the impediments to recovering gay history from criminal records – the distortions caused by a narrow focus on strictly jurisprudential issues, such as the misrepresentation of consenting relations as 'criminal assault' or the legalistic discourse of 'sodomy'; a narrow sexological focus on strictly sexual behaviour, such as 'active'/'passive' 'roles'; and doctrinaire claims about 'the homosexual' not being 'constructed' until modern times – this article lays the foundation for a history of being gay in eighteenth-century London. It argues that a precise focus on the broader sociocultural content of trials, newspaper reports and satires can uncover a history of recognisably gay men.

Patterson, Craig

"The rage of Caliban: Eighteenth-century molly houses and the twentieth century search for sexual identity", in T. Di Piero and P. Gill (eds), Illicit Sex: Identity Politics in Early Modern Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997, pp. 256-69.

Peakman, Julie

Mighty Lewd Books: The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Review

Poole, Steve

'"Bringing great shame upon this city" : sodomy, the courts and the civic idiom in eighteenth-century Bristol', Urban History, 34:1 (2007), 114-26. Publisher: Cambridge University Press.

Radel, Nicholas F.

"Can the sodomite speak? Sodomy, satire, desire, and the Castlehaven case", in O'Donnell, Katherine; O'Rourke, Michael (eds), Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, pp. 148-67.

Robinson, David Michael

"Pleasant conversation in the seraglio: lesbianism, Platonic love, and Cavendish's blazing world", The Eighteenth Century [Lubbock], 44:2/3 (2003), 133-66.

Rousseau, G.S.

"The pursuit of homsexuality in the eighteenth century: 'utterly confused category' and/or rich repository", Eighteenth Century Life, 9 (1985), pp. 132-68.

Rowland, Jon Thomas

"Swords in Myrtle Dress'd": Toward a Rhetoric of Sodom: Gay Readings of Homosexual Politics and Poetics in the Eighteenth Century. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1998.

Rubini, Dennis

"Sexuality and Augustan England: Sodomy, politics, elite circles and society", Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 16, nos. 1 and 2 (1988).

See, Sam

"Richard Barnfield and the limits of homoerotic literary history", GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 13:1 (2007), 63-91.

Senelick, Laurence

"Mollies or men of mode? Sodomy and the eighteenth-century London stage", in Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson (eds), History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1(1) (1990), pp. 33-67. Reprinted New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992, pp. 287-321.

Smith, Bruce R.

Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Stewart, Alan

"Bribery, buggery, and the fall of Lord Chancellor Bacon", in Kahn, Victoria Ann and Hutson, Lorna (eds), Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Stewart, Alan

Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England. Princeton, N.J. and Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Stewart, Alan

"Edward II and male same-sex desire", in Sullivan, Garrett A.; Cheney, Patrick Gerard; Hadfield, Andrew (eds), Early Modern English Drama: a critical companion (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 82-95.

Summers, Claude (ed.)

Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context. New York: Harrington Park, 1992.

Toulalan, Sarah

Imagining Sex: pornography and bodies in seventeenth-century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Trumbach, Randolph

"The birth of the queen: Sodomy and the emergence of gender equality in modern culture, 1660-1750", in Duberman et al., Hidden from History (1989), pp. 129-40.

Trumbach, Randolph

'Blackmail for sodomy in eighteenth-century London', Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques, 33:1 (2007), 23-39. Publisher: Department of History, University of Waterloo.

Trumbach, Randolph

"Erotic fantasy and male libertinism in Enlightenment England", in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography, 1996.

Trumbach, Randolph

"Gender and the homosexual role in modern Western culture: the 18th and the 19th centuries compared", in T. van der Meer, et al. (eds), Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality.

Trumbach, Randolph

"The heterosexual male in eighteenth-century London and his queer interactions", in O'Donnell, Katherine; O'Rourke, Michael (ed.), Love, sex, intimacy, and friendship between men, 1550-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 99-127.

Trumbach, Randolph

"Is there a modern sexual culture in the West; or, did England never change between 1500 and 1900?", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1(2) (1990), pp. 296-309. (review of the literature)

Trumbach, Randolph

"London's Sapphists: from three sexes to four genders in the making of modern culture", in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Routledge, 1991, pp. 112-41. Also reprinted in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender, New York: Zone Books, 1994, pp. 111-36.

Trumbach, Randolph

"London's sodomites: homosexual behavior and Western culture in the 18th century", Journal of Social History, 11, 1 (1977), 1-33.

Trumbach, Randolph

Sex and the Gender Revolution: Volume 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, University of Chicago Press, 1998. 512pp, 3 maps, 37 tables.
From the blurb: "A revolution in gender relations occured in London around 1700, resulting in a sexual system that endured in many aspects until the sexual revolution of the 1960s. For the first time in European history, there emerged three genders: men, women, and a third gender of adult effeminate sodomites, or homosexuals. This third gender had radical consequences for the sexual lives of most men and women since it promoted an opposing ideal of exclusive heterosexuality."

Trumbach, Randolph

"Sex, gender, and sexual identity in modern culture: male sodomy and female prostitution in Enlightenment London", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2(2) (1991), pp. 186-203.

Trumbach, Randolph

"Sodomitical assaults, gender role, and sexual development in eighteenth-century London", Journal of Homosexuality, 16 (1 and 2) (1988), reprinted in Gerard and Hekma, The Pursuit of Sodomy (1989), pp. 407-29.

Trumbach, Randolph

"Sodomitical subcultures, sodomitical roles, and the gender revolution of the eighteenth century: The recent historiography", Eighteenth Century Life, 9 (1985), pp. 109-121. Reprinted in Maccubbin, Robert Parks (ed.), Tis Nature's Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 109-21. Also reprinted in Wayne R. Dynes and Stephen Donaldson (eds), History of Homosexuality in Europe and America, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992, pp. 387-99.

Trumbach, Randolph

"Sodomy transformed: Aristocratic libertinage, public reputation and the gender revolution of the 18th century", Journal of Homosexuality, vol. 19, no. 2 (1990).

Weber, Harold M.

The Restoration Rake Hero: Transformation in Sexual Understanding in Seventeeth-Century England. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Weindling, Richard

"West End House and the Beckford scandal", Camden History Review, 20 (1996), 19-23. (Now Ivorson Road, West Hampstead.)

White, Paul Whitfield (ed.)

Marlowe, History and Sexuality. Studies in the Renaissance Series, vol 35. AMS Press, 1997.

Worrall, Andrew

"Richard Barnfield, 1574-?1620", Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Historical Society, 69 (1994): 120-25.

Young, Michael B.

"James VI and I: Time for a Reconsideration?", Journal of British Studies, 51 (July 2012): 540-67.

Young, Michael B.

King James and the History of Homosexuality. New York University Press, 1999.

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