Homosexuality in early modern France : a documentary collection

J. Merrick, B. Ragan

Homosexuality in Early Modern France is an edited volume of translated documents about male and female homosexuality in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution. As such, this book is the first documentary collection in English about homosexuality in any Continental country during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The authors use a wide variety of materials -- religious, legal, criminal, polemical, literary, and philosophical -- to present everything from the arrest records of men accused of sodomy to the writings of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot. The sources provide empirical evidence about the ways in which same-sex relations were condemned by theologicans, jurists, and doctors, experienced by people of both sexes and different classes, regulated by police and magistrates, and represented and manipulated by contemporaries for polemical and political purposes. This collection will give scholars, students, and other readers access to texts and documents not previously available in English and provide them with raw material for understanding the questions about subcultures and identities that are at the heart of current debates in the history of sexuality.