Introduction: Friendship and Same-Sex Love

Drawing on poems, letters, essays and fiction, art and music, this collection reveals a rich mixture of early modern subjects' sexual self-fashioning, their negotiations with the dominant culture and with the demands of sexual and gender norms, and the ways in which that culture in turn sought to frame and contain queer subjects. The complexities of friendship and same-sex love explored here encompass public and private, sexual and non-sexual intimacy. Given the inadequacy of modern taxonomies in dealing with these complex forms, the history of sexuality here requires a queer sensibility based on emotional and intellectual flexibility and inclusiveness.