Same-sex+relationships+in+the+early+seventeenth+century


 * The renaissance - Same-sex relationships in the early seventeenth century **

The period had complex attitudes to same-sex relationships, and Jame’s (James VI of Scotland – became James I and establishing tha Stuart dynasty) susceptibility to lovely, expensive youths was seen as more a political than a moral calamity. Same-sex relationships were common in the period, although information about them can be hard to find. For one thing, early moderns are not known to have self-identified as homosexual or heterosexual; these reifincations of sexuality trace to the nineteenth century. For another, the church and the state choose to regulate sexual relationships that had economic consequences, such as those that added to the poor rolls or that jeopardized the orderly transfer of property. Both gay and lesbian relationships have tended to disappear into the common practice of same-sex bedsharing. Into more open sexual experimentation, and into the language of passionate friendship. John Donne led the shift towards ’new’ poetic genres. These included classical elegy and satire, epigram, verse epistle, meditative religious lyrics and the country-house poem. Donne delights in making the overlap between sexual and religious love seem new and shocking, and he has been regarded as a founder of ”Metaphysical” poetry. There is a poem of same-sex desire of an anonymous, which deals with a women who longs to be transformed into a man so that she can marry the female object of her passionate love. King James VI of Scotland.

John Donne.

(Sophia, Jakob J. og Jonas F.)