Medieval Sex for SEXPO 2023

Recommended titles for Sexpo event 2023

Updated June 2, 2023
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Before the closet : same-sex love from Beowulf to Angels in America
Frantzen, Allen J.
Paper Book
Allen J. Frantzen challenges the long accepted view that the early Middle Ages tolerated and even fostered same-sex relations and that intolerance of homosexuality developed only late in the medieval period. Frantzen shows that in early medieval Europe, the Church did not tolerate same-sex acts, in...
Common women : prostitution and sexuality in Medieval England
Karras, Ruth Mazo
Paper Book
"Common women" in medieval England were prostitutes, whose distinguishing feature was not that they took money for sex but that they belonged to all men in common. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England tells the stories of these women's lives: their entrance into the trade...
A history of the wife
Yalom, Marilyn.
Paper Book
A woman coming of age today has good reason to wonder what marriage will mean to her. Certainly, it will no longer imply that her husband will provide for her, as an ability to earn a living is commonly expected of both men and women. Also, marriage will no longer offer a woman a unique gateway...
Marriage, sex, and civic culture in late medieval London
McSheffrey, Shannon.
Paper Book
Awarded honorable mention for the 2007 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize sponsored by the Canadian Historical Association How were marital and sexual relationships woven into the fabric of late medieval society, and what form did these relationships take? Using extensive documentary evidence from...
Same-sex unions in premodern Europe
Boswell, John
Paper Book
Both highly praised and intensely controversial, this brilliant book produces dramatic evidence that at one time the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches not only sanctioned unions between partners of the same sex, but sanctified them--in ceremonies strikingly similar to heterosexual marriage...
Sex and gender in medieval and Renaissance texts : the Latin tradition
Miller, Paul Allen
Paper Book
This collection reclaims a vast body of long-neglected Latin texts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and examines how they represent the feminine and the female body. The authors explore the ideological values explicitly encoded by the feminine in these texts, other, less articulated values...
The wages of sin : sex and disease, past and present
Allen, Peter L.
Paper Book
Near the end of the century, a new and terrifying disease arrives suddenly from a distant continent. Infecting people through sex, it storms from country to country, defying all drugs and medical knowledge. The deadly disease provokes widespread fear and recrimination; medical authorities call...

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