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A Gay History of Britain Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages
Matt Cook, Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach, H. G. Cocks, contributing author
ISBN: 1-84645-002-0
ISBN-13: 978-1-84645-002-0
256 pages
Greenwood Press
Publication: 6/30/2007
List Price: $49.95 (UK Sterling Price: £34.95)
Discount Price: $24.98 Sale Price for U.S. Customers Only. Save 50%. Ends 12/31/2009.
Availability: In Stock
Media Type: Hardcover
Trim Size: 6 1/8 x 9 1/4
Subjects: Reviews:
  • The authors are professors of history and English at Birbeck and Kings Colleges in London and Baruch College in New York. In chapters focusing on six British eras from the Middle Ages to the present, they examine through literature and other primary documents how intimate emotional and/or sexual relationships between men were understood and defined by those involved and their societies. Among other things, they demonstrate that it was not until the 1700s that the notion of a gay identifying minority of men existed and separated them from the rest. The final chapter catalogs gay reform in Britain and its modern legacy.
    —Reference & Research Book News     August 2007
  • [A] very worthwhile project, which brings together some of the best insights of modern scholarship. Here we have a very readable history that refuses simple categorisations while providing vivid insights into the complex ways in which sexuality and intimacy are organised. Mills asks for a 'more unruly understanding of sex and love' than is usually allowed by historians of sexuality. This offers an unruly history at its best.
    —Times Higher Education Supplement     5 June 2007
  • [A] thorough and fascinating glimpse back at gay life in the UK over the last 1,000 years....a landmark achievement, shedding light on a section of history too often ignored or overlooked.
    —Out in the City     June 2007
  • It is next to impossible to offer a continuum gay history, whether in Britain or elsewhere. Nevertheless, the four authors assembled here (Cook, Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach and HG Cocks) do a largely good job. Professional historians, they manage not to over-enunciate recent ritualistic assumptions in the field. Foucault appears twice....Fundamentally, the story of gay Britain becomes narratable from the mid-19th century onwards. It is a substantial, moving and significant one, well captured in an impressive book whose watershed moment remains the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895.
    —The Independent (London)     May 31, 2007
  • A valuable, long-overdue addition to the canon of gay history.
    —Gay Times     April 2007
Description: The book explores the changing ways in which male-male sex and love have been perceived and experienced from the late Anglo-Saxon period to the present. Celebrated figures, such as Richard Lionheart, whose love for Philip Augustus of France was so well-documented, Oscar Wilde, gubject of the most explosive scandal of the Victorian period, and Derek Jarman, the great artist and chronicler of the age of AIDS, are examined alongside little-known figures: Eleanor/John Rykener, a cross-dresser in Chaucer's England, the mollies of eighteenth-century London, the habituants of underground gay bars and cafes in 1930s Manchester and Brighton, and the newly-confident gays of contemporary Britain, who marry, adopt children and command the increasingly powerful 'pink pound'. Drawing on a fabulous wealth of research, the authors - each an expert in his field - have worked closely together to deliver a powerful, highly-readable and eye-opening history of love and desire between men in Britain.
About the Author: Matt Cook (lead author and editor) is lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, and author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 - 1914 (2003).

Robert Mills is a lecturer in English at King's College London, and author of Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005).

Randolph Trumbach is professor of history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978) and Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (1998).

H. G. Cocks is lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003).
PDF Catalogs:
Greenwood History Spring 2008.pdf
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