The Kinky Renaissance

A provocative essay collection that theorizes the Renaissance through the lens of kink.

The Kinky Renaissance is a groundbreaking collection of essays that explore kink as a theoretical analytic, a historical formation, and an aesthetic mode. The essays in this work expand the sexual archive and its lexicon by introducing new vocabularies to familiar sexual scenes in early modern literature and culture and by bringing lesser-known scenes to bear on the study of sexuality in the period. Providing a capacious theory of sexuality and historical precedents for contemporary kinky practices, The Kinky Renaissance explores the erotic potential of early modern literature and pauses over various kinks nestled between and beside them. The collection boldly argues for a broader concept of a kinky Renaissance—one which reorients the terms of both the history of sexuality and queer theory more broadly.

Gillian Knoll is associate professor of English at Western Kentucky University and the author of Conceiving Desire: Metaphor, Cognition, and Eros in Lyly and Shakespeare.

Joseph Gamble is assistant professor of English at the University of Toledo and the author of Sex Lives: Intimate Infrastructures in Early Modernity.