This work offers an interpretation of the case of the second Earl of Castlehaven, who was convicted of abetting the rape of his wife and of committing sodomy with his servants. He also stood accused of inverting the natural order of his household.

This work offers an interpretation of the case of the second Earl of Castlehaven, who was convicted of abetting the rape of his wife and of committing sodomy with his servants. He also stood accused of inverting the natural order of his household.

This “engrossing, fast-paced, extremely well-researched biography” (Booklist) transports us to Tudor and Stuart England as Alice Spencer, the daughter of an upstart sheep farmer, becomes one of the most powerful women in the country and establishes a powerful dynasty that endures to this day. Perfect for fans of The Duchess Countess and Georgiana. Alice Spencer was born in 1560 to a family on the rise. Her grandfather had amassed a sizeable estate of fertile grazing land and made a small fortune in sheep farming, allowing him to purchase a simple but distinguished manor house called Althorp. With her sizable dowry, Alice married the heir to one of the most powerful aristocratic families in the country, eventually becoming the Countess of Derby. Though she enjoyed modest renown, it wasn’t until her husband’s sudden death (after he turned in a group of Catholics for plotting against Queen Elizabeth I) that Alice and her family’s future changed forever. Faced with a lawsuit from her brother-in-law over her late husband’s fortune, Alice raised eyebrows by marrying England’s most powerful lawyer. Together, they were victorious, and Alice focused her attentions on securing appropriate husbands for her daughters, increasing her land ownings, and securing a bright future for her grandchildren and the entire Spencer family. But they would not completely escape scandals, and as the matriarch, Alice had to face an infamous trial that threatened everything she had worked so hard for. Now, in “this riveting tale reads more like a legal thriller than historical nonfiction” (Beth Morrison, coauthor of The Lawless Land), the full story of the remarkable Alice Spencer Stanley Egerton is revealed. A woman both ahead of and part of her time, Alice’s ruthless challenging of the status quo has inspired future generations of Spencers and will change the way you view Tudor women.

Boys at Sea is a study of homoerotic life in the Royal Navy during the age of sail. The book traces every feature of sexual life at sea, including seduction, rape, prostitution, courts martial, and the punishments meted out to those convicted of violating the stern moral code set down in the Articles of War .

"The queer man's mode of embodiment--his gestural and vocal style, his posture and gait, his occupation of space--remembers a political history. To gesture with the elbow held close to the body, to affect a courtly lisp, or to set an arm akimbo with the hand turned back on the hip is to cite a history in which the sovereign body became the effeminate and sodomitical and, finally, the homosexual body. In Queer Articulations, Thomas A. King argues that the Anglo-American queer body publicizes a history of resistance to the gendered terms whereby liberal subjectivities were secured in early modern England. Arguing that queer agency preceded and enabled the formulation of queer subjectivities, Queer Articulations investigates theatricality and sodomy as performance practices foreclosed in the formation of gendered privacy and consequently available for resistant uses by male-bodied persons who have been positioned, or who have located themselves, outside the universalized public sphere of citizen-subjects. By defining queerness as the lack or failure of private pleasures, rather than an alternative pleasure or substance in its own right, eighteenth-century discourses reconfigured publicness as the mark of difference from the naturalized, private bodies of liberal subjects. Inviting a performance-centered, interdisciplinary approach to queer/male identities, King develops a model of queerness as processual activity, situated in time and place but irreducible to the individual subject's identifications, desires, and motivations."--Pub. desc. (v.2).

Historical biography has a mixed reputation: at its best it can reveal much not only about an individual, but the wider context of their life and society; at worst it can result in a narrowly focused work of hagiography or condemnation. Yet in spite of its sometimes inferior status amongst academics, biography has remained a popular genre, and in recent years has developed into new and intriguing areas. As the essays in this volume reveal, scholars from an array of different disciplines have embraced what biography can offer them, expanding the remit of biography from people to things, tracing the 'life' of their chosen object from creation to use to disposal to rediscovery. The increasing concern with the physicality of manuscripts and books has also meant an awareness of and interest in the 'lives' of these forms of material culture. Historians have also become increasingly interested in groups of individuals resulting in prosopographical studies. A book on the diversity of biography is therefore very timely, exploring the multi-disciplinary application of historical biography in the period 500-1700. It presents fourteen case studies offering new approaches to historical biography, written by early-career researchers from backgrounds in archaeology, English, art, architectural history and history, demonstrating different approaches and techniques. Overall, the collection is a strong and united statement by a group of early-career researchers who insist on the vitality of biography as a central concern of historians across the disciplines of the humanities. Contributors believe that the 'life' is a fundamental medium of study for the medieval and early modern periods, and thus . bolsters the move back towards biography as a primary tool of medieval and early modern scholars, as well as a tool for future research for humanities scholars interested in biography.