Before Intimacy: Asocial Sexuality in Early Modern England

Daniel Juan Gil examines sixteenth-century English literary concepts of sexuality that frame erotic ties as neither bound by social customs nor transgressive of them, but rather as OC loopholesOCO in people's associations. Engaging Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Sonnets, among others Gil demonstrates how sexuality was conceived as a relationship system not institutionalized in a domestic realm."