The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings.

This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviors are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons was interpreted as outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive anatomies or physiologies, and embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors.

This original book freshly illuminates many of the questions that are current today about the nature of homosexual activity and reveals how the early modern period and its scientific interpretations of same-sex relationships are fundamental to understanding the conceptual development of contemporary sexuality.

The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.

The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe investigates early modern scientific accounts of same-sex desires and the shapes they assumed in everyday life. It explores the significance of those representations and interpretations from around 1450 to 1750, long before the term homosexuality was coined and accrued its current range of cultural meanings. This collection establishes that efforts to produce scientific explanations for same-sex desires and sexual behaviours are not a modern invention, but have long been characteristic of European thought. The sciences of antiquity had posited various types of same-sexual affinities rooted in singular natures. These concepts were renewed, elaborated, and reassessed from the late medieval scientific revival to the early Enlightenment. The deviance of such persons seemed outwardly inscribed upon their bodies, documented in treatises and case studies. It was attributed to diverse inborn causes such as distinctive anatomies or physiologies, and embryological, astrological, or temperamental factors. This original book freshly illuminates many of the questions that are current today about the nature of homosexual activity and reveals how the early modern period and its scientific interpretations of same-sex relationships are fundamental to understanding the conceptual development of contemporary sexuality.

Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance is an anthology of key literary, philosophical, religious and scientific texts published during the English Renaissance. It addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, namely, was homosexuality differentiated as a distinct sexual identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Borris concludes that indeed it was, and includes relevant sections from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias and travel literature to support his claim.

Spenser's extraordinary Shepheardes Calender as first printed in 1579 is arguably the seminal book of the Elizabethan literary renaissance. This volume reassesses it as a material text in relation to book history, and provides the first clearly detailed facsimile of the 1579 Calender available as a book. The editor reconsiders the original book's development, production, design, and particular characteristics, and demonstrates both its correlations with diverse precursors in print and its significant departures. Numerous illustrations of archival sources facilitate comparison. By reinvestigating the 1579 Calender's twelve pictures, he shows that Spenser himself probably designed them, that they involve complex symbolism, and that this book's meaning is thus profoundly verbal-visual. An analyzed facsimile is an essential new resource for study of Spenser's Calender, Spenser, Elizabethan print and poetics, and early modern English literary history. -- .

Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined precipitously around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry, particularly in the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Through wide-ranging consideration of Homeric and Virgilian reception and its influence on both continental and English literary theory, he shows that allegorical epic tended to double for and displace epic throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyses the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry. Whereas standard literary history assumes Sidney opposes allegory, and that Milton minimises or rejects it in following Spenser, Borris's detailed readings demonstrate that Sidney and Milton are also major allegorists, and that Spenser remained so even in the latter books of The Faerie Queene. This book was first published in 2000.

Challenging conventional notions that literary allegorism declined around 1600, Kenneth Borris reassesses the Renaissance relations between allegory and heroic poetry. He concentrates particularly on the major texts of Sidney, Spenser and Milton. Borris offers a fresh approach to the interaction of allegory with literary genres; focusing on epic, he further analyzes the distinctive codes and conventions that constituted the generic repertoire of Renaissance allegorical epic poetry.