Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Kink in the Renaissance

Episode Date: March 5, 2024

Come with us back to Renaissance England, when writers were playing with ideas of sexuality in interesting ways.How much of a filth bag was Shakespeare? How did he play with the ideas of power dynamics for pleasure in his plays? And what were other writers doing to explore non-traditional ideas of sex, fantasy and desire?Joining Kate today are Joseph Gamble and Gillian Knoll, co-editors of the forthcoming book The Kinky Renaissance, which explore questions of sexual history through modern-day kink cultures. This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code BETWIXT sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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So betwixters, fancy taking in a play with me. Well, you're in luck. It's 1594, and there's a new playwright that everyone is loving. What's his name? Billy Shakespeare Smith. Something, Billiam Shakespeare, William Shaky Smith, William Shaky Smith. It's something like that, and he's got a new comedy out called The Taming of the Shrew, and I have got a plus one to the opening night.

I don't know too much about this one, other than it's said to be quite controversial, something about a shrewish wife being tamed by an oppressive husband? Huh. It's nothing to do with rodents then, which actually sounded slightly better. Could there be sexual undertones to this? Does the wife enjoy being used? I hope so, otherwise this is just a play about coercive abuse. But let's hop in the carriage and head over to Newington Butts Theatre, just south of the river.

You can get the first round of me in, and let's find out what this is all about. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Yes, social... Courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, my beautiful dance.

Goodness has nothing to do with it, Dary. Hello, and welcome back to Patrix the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. We often think of theatre as very highbrow, a very respectful and elevated art form. But that has not always been the case. No, no, no, no, no.

Today, we will be taking you back to what is known as the English Renaissance period, which starts in the late 15th century and keeps going to the early. early 17th century. It's a time when theatrical performances were rowdy affairs, full of bawdy references to sex and sexuality, not to mention a few people actually shagging in the stalls.

Today's guests are Joey Gamble and Jillian Null, authors of The Kinky Renaissance, which looks at the poetry, prose and plays of this period through the lens of kink to try and find out exactly what is going on. at the ready betwixters. I am ready to find out if you are. And welcome to betwixters sheets. It's only Joseph Gamble and Jillian Null. How are you both doing? Great. So good. So thank you so much for having us, Kate.

Oh, are you kidding? As soon as I found out that you guys are editing a forthcoming collection of essays, which you have titled The Kinky Renaissance, I think there was a collective buzz around the Betwix the shoots team, like, we need to get these people on. Brilliant title, the kinky renees. Who wouldn't want to read that? But kink is, it's quite a modern word. And for lots of different people, it can mean lots of things. There are people out there that kink, kinky for them is taking their pajama bottoms off.

And there are people out there that it means something vastly different. So when you're using it to look at history, what did you mean by that? And how did you get to that categorization? One of the things that we tried to do when thinking about this collection and bringing together a group of scholars to think about Kink in the Ernestanz was to pitch a big tent essentially, right? Kink is this huge umbrella term, as you point out. It can mean so many different things. I think the guiding principle for us has essentially been that Kink names the libidilization of something other than the sort of traditional penetrative sex, whether that's straight penetrative sex or gay penetrative sex. Kink is about cathecting or sort of infusing erotic energy onto other sorts of potentially erotic actions or feelings or scenes.

So, you know, penetrative sex might be a part of kinky practice, but maybe what makes it kinky is that you're creating a scene with your partner or with partners. You're libidinalizing or sort of eroticizing the narrative that goes along with that. And so as you point out, it's absolutely a modern category, the word kink, that sort of concept and thinking about kink as a a potential sexual identity category is something that somebody could say, like, I am kinky. That really is a very modern concept. But nevertheless, people for a very long time have found a whole range of fantasies and activities to be erotic, even if they don't fall within that sort of traditional penetrative model. And that was one of the things that we wanted to do, looking back to, you know, Jillie and I are both scholars of 16th and 17th century English literature. And we wanted to

see, like, what was happening there outside of that traditional model of sex? Can we see these writers in this period eroticizing things like, as one of our contributors points out in the volumes, sweat, right? And then just like thinking about sweat as an erotic activity. Can we see historical instances of the use of bondage, for instance? And so those are the questions I think that we were asking, not trying to take that modern identity category and impose it, but have it be a question that can open up historical sexual practice and fantasy and desire. Trying to establish, and maybe you are in this work, trying to establish what would be very carefully being called normative, heterosexual, phalicentric sexuality, and you're

kind of exploring all the goodies that can come along with that and make that even more fun. Absolutely. And I think, you know, even sex and relationships that look normative, I think one of the types of relationships that has been really interesting in our kinky work has been, you know, heterosexual pair in which the woman is submissive to a male dominant, right? That can look very normative, right? That can look like oppression. That can look like a lot of what we might imagine historical heterosexual relationships to look like where women are subordinated. What happens when that type of power dynamic gives pleasure when it's chosen and when the characters or the actors lean into those differences rather than thinking about it strictly as a woman being, you know,

dominated in the ways that they are in so many other capacities in that period. Yeah, and I would just follow up on that by saying that I think this is one of the real affordances of kink as a concept for approaching historical sexuality that queer, as a concept has been so incredibly useful for scholars who are interested in the history of sexuality. But queer is often posed as being anti-normative, right? What's queer is anti-normative? It's against the norm. It's that historical recommendation of queer is a slur that saying like, oh, you're weird, you're queer. Indeed we are. We're going to take that on and then look for in the past. What are these sexual practices that sort of go against broad-scale sexual norms? Kink does that in some ways,

but it doesn't always. Sometimes kinky practices, as Julian's pointing out, with this sort of heterosexual sub-dog relationship, sometimes kinky practices take their energy from ratcheting up norms. They take the sexual norm and they say, actually, wouldn't it be hot if we really played into this rather than just sort of letting it control our lives? What if we took control of it and consensually reproduced it in this heightened state?

And that opens up all these possibilities for thinking about lots of different historical sexualities. There is a line in the sitcom Will and Grace that I just thought of this second. And Grace is really upset because she's being told she's very vanilla and boring in bed. And I come with the exact phrasing of it, but she's talking to Will and she basically says to him, well, you don't need one because you're gay. You come with the kink built in.

Oh. And that's like, and that's sort of like what you guys are doing here is you're making the point that just because you are queer, that does not necessarily mean that you are kinky. We need to untangle those things. Yeah, absolutely. And also just because, you know, to use the straight and queer terms, even though straight, as you well know, as like a modern sexual identity category, I know you've talked about this on the podcast before. But even thinking in terms of those relationships between men and women and the Renaissance, even if they don't appear to be queer, they can also be kinky. Right. I think that's part of one of the things that we're trying to do here is to say that the assumption from the outset that if you're looking in from the outside, oh, this is a relationship that looks like it should be normative. It looks like it should conform to what the period says about, oh, sex between. a man and a woman within marriage for the purposes of reproduction, right? These are all the things that the church and the state really want to say,

like, that's what counts as proper sex in the period. Nevertheless, there's those broad-scale categories that are given to us by the church and the state don't really describe the details of people's actual sexual fantasies and even the details of actual people's sexual lives. That's a very, very good covering of what you mean by kink. So I suppose the other part of that that I've got to ask is, when you say Renaissance, what time periods are you talking about, what cultures are you talking about? Because I suppose you could hear the word Renaissance and assume that this is people doing kink in Italy.

This is Michelangelo doing kinky things. But do you have a particular focus here? Or is it just anybody being kinky at this period? Yeah, I mean, our focus is Renaissance England, which has a different historical bracket than the continental European Renaissance. It came a little later. Everything came a little later. We get there eventually.

Eventually, exactly. So we look at the period late 16th through mid-17th century. That's typically in our field. We study early modern English literature. Joey and I are both in English departments. And so that's what the Renaissance typically signifies for scholars of England, especially literary critics. But we talk about this in the beginning of the book.

We really feel that the work, that this book is doing and that we've been, the conversations that we're having should be broader than that. I mean, that's what we do. And that's the group of scholars that we assembled. And there are certain, you know, particularities of English 16th and 17th century culture that led themselves to certain kinds of kinks. But there's so much more. I mean, we could go into medieval. And some folks have gone into medieval England and certainly abroad in the continent. And there's so much more. more basically work that we would love to see happen in this field. Yeah, and I would also say that in this period, we focus on England.

That's sort of our scholarly expertise, but the sexuality in England in this period was really transnational. So early 16th century Italian pornography is circulating in late 16th century England, right? And they're getting some ideas about how to have sex and what can be kinky and exciting from some of that work. In the 17th century, you start to get really interesting French pornography that comes into English as well. pornography, I mean like literary text, right? Not just, there are some visual representations,

but there are these really fascinating prose pieces that are like dialogues between women about how they like to have sex. And so you have this sort of intermingling of lots of different national traditions in this moment in England. It's a really cosmopolitan space, actually. I'm so glad that you're focusing on England, you know, because we've never quite shaken off our Victorian reputation as being really sexually repressed and buttoned down and very thou shalt not. And if you want a nation that does that, you look to the French and you look to the Italians and the Brits, no, no, no, no. So I'm so happy that you've been able to go back to a period of like, oh my God, look at all this stuff that was going on. People will be so happy about that,

I promise. And you don't have to look in these deep dark corners. I mean, it's right there in Shakespeare's plays. It's really very widely circulated. And so, I mean, it is pornogical. as well, but it's also, you know, poetry and, you know, people were just consuming these kinds of texts in lots of places. So where do you go looking for your sources? Because as a fellow sex historian, we know the death of sources available. So few people bothered to leave us a sex diary on a scroll somewhere detail. Wouldn't that be lovely? Wouldn't that be amazing to just have that and go, oh, right, that's what they were up to? So what kind of sources have you been looking at all the people in this collection, what have they been looking at? Yeah, I think that's an incredibly important

point. It's one of the reasons why we as literary scholars are coming to this topic, right? Because there are so few actual historical sources about people's sex lives. And we get a couple in the period. So, I mean, your listeners might be interested in Simon Foreman, who was the sort of odd astrologer who left a little bit of a sex diary, actually. I don't know how many people you have sex within the late 16th century. But we turn to literature in part because sexuality is about imagination and fantasy and desire. That's the remit of literature. This is what people are doing when they are sitting down in the midst of plague and political intrigue and all the other things that are going on in this period and they're saying, you know what, actually what I'm going to do today is I'm going

to write a love poem. They're thinking about and investing energy in sex and eroticism. And so we have a really broad range of sources in the book. The book collects essays by a broad number of scholars who are working on different topics, but we have everything from an essay on whether or not sex is consensually public in like Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew to this really brilliant essay on the eroticization of sweat and things like Edmund Spencer's the Fairy Queen. Gillian, I don't know if there are other sources that you want to think. There are so many different things.

A lot of plays and poetry in this period that we're thinking about. A lot of plays and poetry. And then we have a source on cuckoldry, the sort of cuckold fetish. And that's pamphlets that work circuit is. Am I right about that, Julie? I mean, that's sort of a literary text, but sort of, I guess, just like a multi-purpose text, right? And also with woodcuts, some images as well. I would agree with Joey, and I would just add on to that, especially with kink as a form of sexuality or as a practice, turning to literature, turning to texts that are about imagination and telling stories is really at the heart of what kink is.

And so I think that this is really exciting for folks who work on literature in particular, a really exciting kind of use of literature or source reservoir, basically, of fantasies and desires and what-if's hypothetical scenarios, scenes, and especially drama from the period is, I mean, that is a lot of kink kind of focuses on setting a scene, you know, the boundaries of a scene, playing a role, plays have a very special sort of for fordances, right, for finding kinks and looking at those. When you think of the Renaissance and the Tudor and the Stewart period is in our popular imagination, we do kind of think of the theatre as being very central to that.

And it's often referred to the Golden Age of theatre. I don't know if that's true, because the theatre never went away again. It just changed. But it was certainly a period when the theatre had a reputation as quite an. naughty, scandalous, whereas today, if you say, I'm going to the theater, that you might think to yourself, what a sophisticated and posh person I'm talking to, but it had a completely different connotation in the time you guys are talking about it. What were they doing in the theatres to get that kind of reputation? Yeah, that's a really great question. And I mean, it's one of the things that I,

you know, I teach, as Julian does as well, I teach Shakespeare pretty frequently to undergraduates. And one of the first things I tell them is like, this is not actually high culture. If we're thinking about this historically, Shakespeare is bawdy. Shakespeare is very much public entertainment. He's a filth bag. He's a filth bag. Absolutely. It's so ribbled. And the conditions of theater in this period are so different from the conditions of theater now, right? The theaters were noisy. The theaters were outdoors. Often, most of the audience would be standing up, right? If you think about the historical reconstruction of the globe in London, for those of who may have been there, right, that's sort of the conditions of what theater would have been at the time. And there were a lot of people in this

period, even in the 16th and 17th centuries, who said, this is actually immoral. I think something sexual is happening here. You get all of these anti-theatricalists, as we call them, who say, you know, actually, this is going to cause people to go out and have sex. After you watch a play, every mate is going to sort to his mate, as one of the anti-theatricalists says, right? And everyone's going to kind of go off into little corners, and they're going to, and this is a direct quote, play the Sodom or worse, right? They're all going to go out and they're going to have some bad, bad from a sort of puritanical standpoint, bad sex. And so they wanted to stop this, but of course it was incredibly popular. And I think one of the key differences, I mean, there are so many different

things that are happening in the theater than are happening now, but one of the key differences is that theater at the time, because it was largely speaking, it was in these public amphitheaters that were outdoors that often didn't have roofs or not very large roofs at least, theater happened in the afternoon. So theater was something that you would kind of pop off of work and go and watch a play in the middle of the afternoon when maybe you could have been being productive. And then, oh, it's nice. Now you still have a little bit of an evening to go and like find someone to have some fun with, right? So that's, that's, find your mate. Exactly. Right. So that's, it's different. I think that sort of like traditional sort of sense of theater now where we're

indoors. It's at seven or eight p.m. and it's a little bit more posh, as you, as you said. It's not funny that no matter where you go, there's. always moralises worrying about something upsetting the masses. And you can go right back and it was theatre. And then the 18th century, it was novels. And these are all things that now you would regard as quite highbrow culture. And we're still having these conversations, aren't we, around video games and around violent films and, oh my God, what's it going to incite people to do? It's so strange that we were once doing that about Shakespeare. And we have to talk about your boy William Shakespeare, because I'm going to imagine he features quite prominently in this

collection here, on account of him being a proper filth bag, which a lot of people don't realize, do they? Yes. We have one piece on Taming of the Shrew, which is a really wonderful revisiting of that play. I mean, some people, including myself, have written about the BDSM potential of the relationship between Patricio and Catherine, the leading pair of the play. And BDSM. I think many of your listeners know what that stands for, but in case you don't. It's bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism, masochism. That's a play where a husband needs to tame his wife and does so through all sorts of really horrible measures.

He starves her. He deprives her of sleep, you know, all sorts of privileges or liberties being taken from her. And then at the end of the play, she gives this big long speech of submission. And many critics have found this play to be extremely troubling. But then there's this other camp of not only critics, but actually theater practitioners, actors, directors who've chosen to sort of embrace the kink of it and sort of play her role as more consensual. So it's an interesting play for ethics. And what our chapter looks at, this is Aaron Kelly's chapter.

she writes about the ethics of public sex in the play because it turns out that the two of them are never really alone. They're always in front of people. And so what if you're on the street and there you see something kinky, but you have not chosen to see that kinky thing, you're a bystander. What are the ethics of this kink of public sex when not every single bystander or, you know, witness does consent? I think that's the main piece. We also have someone reading Venus and Adonis, which is one of Shakespeare's long poems. Joey, are there other Shakespeare chapters?

Not in the collection, but I would just add to what you're saying about taming, right? Thinking about this question about public sex and the publicity of kink here raises really important questions about consent, both within the relationship between Patricio and Kate, but also between the audience and the players and the actors on the stage. When you walk into the theater, maybe you don't know what you're going to see. Likely you don't know what you're going to see. And so what does it mean to see Shakespeare being this filth bag in front of you, right?

Did you consent to that when you walked into the theater? What does that do to your own erotic life? Does it spark some new imagination for you? Does it create some new fantasy for you? Or does it turn you off? And you say, actually, this is not what I want. This is not who I am. I'm going to go and write a pamphlet about my theater is so bad and we shouldn't have it anymore, right?

you know, as some people did in the period. There are a number of Shakespeare plays that do feature kinky relationships that are not in our collection, but people have written about those. One piece that I write about is in a Midsummer Night Stream. Shakespeare's Helena is, you know, chasing Demetrius. And she sort of comes across sometimes like this pathetic, you know, love-lorn sort of stalker. You know, it's just sort of...

She is. Yeah, she's just begging him for love. But when she begs him, she has. the speech that she gives, she says, I am your spaniel. Use me as you would use your dog. You know, you read these lines and is it pathetic or is it kinky, right? Is she saying, please, this is what I want? I'm telling you what I want. I think that there's a tendency to just dismiss that and we don't really open our ears to that always. But if we have this idea of kink in mind, sometimes it's sort of, it really can change, drastically change,

the way we understand a character, a relationship, or a set of desires. We'll be back with Jillian and Joey after this short break. The one person in Shakespeare's Uber, I would want to sit down with a psychotherapist, I think is Hamlet. I think he has some issues with his mother that needs to be discussed at great length.

And I'm not sure if that's kink or pathological, but he spends a lot of time, really interrogating his mother about her sex life and being incredibly crude. And the way he's insulting her, just listening to what you're saying now, I think he's kink-shaming. I think we could say that because he's attacking her for basically being a slut and having sex that she wants to have. Now I'm thinking about it. That question that you raised, I don't, you sort of jokingly said, like, I don't know if it's kinky or pathological, right? I think the dividing line is, is it consensual, right?

Is this supporting someone's life? Do these practices, do people come together and say, this is what I want. I'm willing to undergo certain risks. We're aware of the risk. People in the kink community often talk about risk-aware, consensual kink, right? And we want to undergo this anyway, right? And so maybe Gertrude, Hamlet's mother there, is actually not consenting to being shamed in this way, right? But if she had been, it could be kinky, right?

Like, to be shamed could be really erotic for someone. If it's not consensual, it could be this really awful. experience. Yeah. Wow. Maybe there's a humiliation fetish going on there. I suppose I often think about the actors on the stage who are acting this stuff out. How do they feel about it? Because the figure of the actor, especially women actresses when they were allowed back on the stage, which is slightly after Shakespeare's time, isn't it? We're moving past that. But they were heavily eroticised, weren't they? Often conflated with sex workers and just by virtue of being actresses. they have a lot of sexuality and kink, I suppose, projected onto them.

And I would say the boy actors in Shakespeare's time, you know, there's been interesting work done on how audiences received them and how they were seen and a lot of them they're young. So I think the question of like that sort of transaction between the audience and what's going on on the stage, the actors, is it's a really interesting one. Even like with Gertrude and Hamlet, you know, she does not consent. but what if a number of audience members are watching this unfold and getting hot from it, right?

And then bringing that into their sexual practices, right, in their own lives. And so, I mean, I think, again, part of it is that live theater experience really adds such a complexity to it and also a lot of just interest and questions. Yeah, and I mean, these are living documents, right? I mean, we're interested in, I'm certainly interested in historically and thinking about that historical context, but people are still performing these plays all the time, right? And they continue to reinvent them in their performances of them. And I hope that one of the things that this conversation about Kink and the Renaissance might spark is in conversation among theater practitioners about what does it mean to explore that as a historical concept in our particular performances, right? I mean, I know intimacy coordinators have become really popular for great reason on film and TV sets.

And I would love to see some conversations, you know, if anyone wants to invite us out to London to come to the globe to talk about this, that would be very fun. You know, I would love to see theater practitioners thinking about what would it mean to see. stage this as a potentially kinky scene? What are the politics of that? What are the erotics of that? What does that allow us to do and to show audiences? Could we invite people into Shakespeare by doing that? Or would we be pushing people away? And how can be responsible to kinky communities in the current moment by showing potential historical relationships that can still live on the stage? Talk to me a bit about the fairy queen, that text. I have particular interest in that because that popped up in my PhD quite a lot and I remember having to slog my way through the entire fucking

thing and I know that there are devotees of it who absolutely love it and for me it was just a oh my God what is this this thing so if that has got a kinky subtext that I have missed I would love to hear about that I think that that could help me reassess this book written by Edmund Spencer about a fairy queen that's about lots of other stuff but tell me tell me about that the fairy queen is as you say, is this beautiful, awful, frustrating, gorgeous epic poem that's written in the 1590s by Eben Spencer. It's this incredibly long poem. And it has this whole world of an imagination in it. So we have an essay in the collection by a scholar named Beatrice Bradley, who is this really brilliant critic of early modern poetry. And what she's interested in the collection is sweat, actually, in all of these representations

of sweat that we get in the fairy queen. Also, she looks at Shakespeare's, Venus and Adonis and some other poetry as well. But what does it mean? Why does Spencer, I mean, there are thousands of lines in the fairy queen, right? And it's this allegory of moral virtues and faith and constancy and, you know, all of these, how do we create a good knight essentially, right? It's this sort of like old school romance. Why would he take the time to slow down and have this entire representation of what he calls the bower of bliss, right, in that poem?

and thinking about all of these different sexual actions and desires, and particularly why does he describe at such length, the sweat that rolls down the face of one of the characters, right? And so Bradley argues, I think, really smartly, that there's something kinky about this fixation on sweat, and what does it mean to sweat? How does sweat get produced? Obviously, it's from work,

but it has this sort of, like, kinky energy to it in that poem. Sweat when you're having good sex. You sweat when you're having good sex. sex, exactly, and it's happening in the context of this, you know, scenario around sexuality, around sexuality that the character supposedly is supposed to resist, right? And he ultimately destroys the Bauer Bliss. And he says, I'm not going to be taken away by these sirens and just have this whole, like, sexual life for the rest of my life. But nevertheless, Spencer gives us this window in trying to decry this and say this is bad, he gives us this window into thinking, like,

we could actually eroticize a lot of things. We could eroticize lots of different bodily fluid, it's not only sweat, but also semen, as Bradley points out, right? There are lots of different things that we could look at and say, actually, this is a fantasy for me, right? And this is embedded in the heart of, I mean, you know, Shakespeare, totally canonical. Spencer, also totally canonical English poet, like you say, it came up in your PhD, right? This is something that students grapple with still, but there's so much going on there beneath the surface. When Joey was talking about the poem slowing down, I know we've talked about drama as a really interesting resource for Kink. And I think one of the things that poetry gives us different from drama is that, you know, it can slow down.

And a lot of kinks are about slowing down. If, you know, thinking about something like bondage, for example, when someone is bound, they all of a sudden can't move forward with a sexual practice, right? Or, you know, the practice of edging where you're not allowed to have an orgasm. Your orgasm is denied, again, kind of slowing down. And I think that something that is really interesting in poetry, and I think Beatrice Bradley's essay is a, great example of this, her chapter. Even in the context of we're not supposed to do this, the knight is supposed to resist this, the poem just crawls through that. And she traces just a drop of sweat and how it rolls down the curves of a body, even the curve of a cheek. You know,

and thinking about when you do slow things down that much, it can start to sort of bleed into other forms of fluid, the exchange of fluids. And so I think that poetry has a lot to offer in that way too. Whenever you've got bodily fluids rolling around is generally literary scholars and sexuality scholars, there is perk up, don't they? It's like when you're talking about vampires, oh, look, there's blood and, you know, everyone's sucking and drinking the blood. And I suppose that's kind of like this, isn't there? But there are some poets that seem to make that link even more explicitly than there's, you know, a bead of sweat that's rolling down a very beautiful body and we're all supposed to be outraged by the temptations of lust. Okay, Spencer, whatever's.

But someone by, is it John Dunn, who does write some really quite forthright thing about rank sweaty froth on brows? That seems to be really quite aggressive and eroticized. Yeah, I think there's been some interesting work on a sort of filth dirt. Shakespeare has a sonnet. a couple actually of sonnets that are similar in the way that it describes, well, in his case, he's sort of describing ejaculate in one of Shakespeare's sonnets as rank and shameful. And, you know, of course, that's not a kink that we actually explore in this volume, although I wish we had a chapter on it as we're talking right now. But certainly that kind of going along with that erotics of humiliation, degradation,

and thinking about even that sort of self-loathing that can come through in some of those poems. you know, sort of this is wrong, but I'm leaning into it, those kinds of energies are sort of libidinized in poetry of this period. Absolutely. One of the quotes from him is he talks about the spermtic tissue of ripe, menstruous boils. I don't even know what that is. Nothing in that sentence works like that. There's not a spermatic issue of menstrual boils.

What on earth are you on about? I mean, I have to say, I think that the ripe spermatic tissue of menstrual, has come back recently in the sense of all of the videos of people popping pimples. Oh my God. I mean, I think that sort of like, you know, this is not, I am not well-versed in this. It kind of creeps me out a little bit. But for some people, it's really calming for some people, but also potentially erotic, right? And I think that's the image that Dunn has there, right? That comparing the pus that can come out of a boil or the pimple, right, to sperm, that calling it spermatic in that case. Oh, my God. Well, I was already quite horrified about

how much of this pimple popping stuff I watch on TikTok, and I think that might have just finally ended my obsession with it. If now I have to look at it and go, that's sperm, Kate, stop it, walk away. It's something so visceral about it. And even today, 2024, that's quite an aggressive line, I think, that it still has the power to shock. That's quite a thing to say. And people often don't think that about the Renaissance.

It's like when we're talking about erotic literature, we're not just talking about bowers of bliss, although that's fascinating. There's a lot of quite aggressive literature that goes on here too. Even in some of the canonical literature, I mean, we have an essay in the collection, a really smart essay on what is referred to often as piss play,

right? Sometimes it's called water sports, right? Where there are these representations of women in these plays who take their chamber pots and dump them on the heads of men, sometimes for erotic pleasure, but sometimes it really skirts the line of, as you said, it can be really aggressive, right? And so it just depends on, is there consent in this moment about whether or not we want to call that kinky or whether or not we want to call that violence, right? That line is always sort of porous and slippery. But yeah, there's absolutely, it's not just

all like beautiful, love, courtly poetry, like Petrarchan poetry about, oh, I love this person that I can't have. But there is, you know, people have been having sex in really, dirty, nasty, exciting ways for a very long time. And it pops up all over the place. If you have a concept that can help you start to think and ask questions about that, ways to get into imagining what people were imagining in that moment. I wonder if there are any examples of men submitting to women that you've found, which is also an enormous kink today, but a submission that's wildly popular. But do men do it to women? Have you found examples of?

that. I can think of one Shakespeare example, but then also I wonder if the cuckolding chapter would be kind of an interesting example. So in Shakespeare, the play Antony and Cleopatra, it's just a pretty kinky play in general. They're a kinky couple, Mark Anthony and Cleopatra.

And they really switch around a lot with who is on top. But, you know, in a number of instances, Anthony's on the bottom, either literally like she's on a higher level and talking about trying to get him up and making a lot of verbal play around trying to make him rise and get him up. But also,

you know, there's a sort of an offstage scene that's talked about where it's actually a battle scene and a naval battle and she turns her ships around and then he turns his to follow her and he talks about that he's like tied to her rudder. And this idea, I mean, always for me conjures this image of him just like behind her and worshiping her from behind and unable. And to sort of tear himself from the back of her, right? And so there's just a lot of like interesting language around, but there's also language where she's on the bottom. And I think they're really playful.

And it's a wonderful play to look at Kink. In the collection, we have a really interesting piece on Kockhilding. It's about Kuckolding communities. So there's been for a long time, you know, research in our field on kuckolding as a practice between men. So a guy wants to get back at another guy. So what is he going to do? Sleep with his wife. And it's this power move. The woman is like property, right, just transferred from one to the other. But these pamphlets that Erica Carbonara, one of the scholars in our collection, these pamphlets that she looks at, they display men who are cuckled it and seem to like it and seem to like to talk to other men who are cuckled it about it. And hang out with them and there's these interesting images of them sort of sitting around. I think they call themselves contented cuckled. And what does it mean to enjoy that? You know, for so long we thought

about it as just this humiliating practice, you know, never, what is it like for the one who's cuckled it? Is there any kind of possibility for pleasure there or for community? But those are both really big insights that come from a kind of kinky perspective. I love that. I've just thought. I've just maybe Lady Macbeth would be a good example of, and Macbeth submitting to her. You could read that through a kinky lens, perhaps. Yeah, I think that's a great example, right? I mean, she basically tells him to man up, right?

Like, you are not man enough, right? And then he does, indeed. But also there is that relationship of, like, her sort of taking the top of that situation, right? And those concepts of top and bottom can help us understand something about, obviously, you know, the politics of a situation. But if we think about the theatre as an erotic space, maybe as you suggest, like, that is sort of a kinky relationship in that moment, right?

Where he is bottoming for her in some ways, right, and being the submissive in that relationship. And then we've got the witches with beards. I mean, that's a whole other kink thing. It's just going on there. Honestly, I could talk to you about this for everyone ever and ever, but I'm not allowed to. My final question is, is there anything that anyone submitted or wrote about or have written about that really surprised you? I mean, being a sex, historian and a sex scholar is your tolerance goes way, way up. And you probably do it ideas.

You find yourself having conversations with people. And then you remember they don't study this. And then suddenly they've got that look on their face and you're like, oh, I've gone too far. But you get used to dealing with quite graphic and erotic stuff. But was there anything that came up in this collection of works that made you go, oh my God, that is quite strong? I mean, I would return to the sweat and tears, bodily fluids, piece. not because of sweat or fluids, but one of the things that was sort of shocking in reading that

piece, so the title of that chapter is early modern money shot. That's a good time. So already right there, I think both of us sat up a little straighter in our chairs. Like, oh, okay. And what Beatrice Bradley starts with and thinks about is the money shot in contemporary porn, right? So the shot where the manage accolates and how high. hard it is to show that. And especially if you want to show it in bear back sex where he ejaculates inside a partner, you can't show it. For some people, that's the kink, right? The kink is about

ejaculating inside someone. And so what she's looking at there and she looks at a lot of porn and writing about porn, this is a representational problem that porn has, right? How do we show this thing? this is like the thing and how do we show it? And then she turns to poetry and looks at how fluids are exchanged. She looks, for example, at sweaty palms that are pressed together, clasped hands, and how you can't tell who sweat is whose anymore. Like the two people's fluids get mixed together and get confused and thinking about how something that really feels very on the margins,

bear back porn and money shot and how those kinds of, questions and those kinds of problems of representation can help us understand representational problems in like a 16th century poem. It's not shocking in the sense of what's being represented in the poem, but in the connection, the connection that she was able to make by thinking about contemporary porn. And also, she just has some really great examples of the contemporary side of these money shots and the problem around money shots that I think shocked me a little bit. But that was one for me. Joey, anything to shock you?

I think it's very hard for me to be shocked anymore, but I'm not a story to sexuality. But I have to say one essay that we haven't talked about as much that I think it has a similar sort of, you know, exciting historical opening in it is an essay by Nathaniel Leonard in our volume about this play called The Maid's Tragedy, which is this revenge tragedy, right, about this woman who's taking revenge on these men who have wronged her. But in the middle of the play, she has essentially kidnapped this king who has wronged her, and she ties him down to the bed. She's planning to kill him. He doesn't know this. But she's absolutely in revenge mode. But his response to her is, oh, what pretty new device is this? Right.

Oh, what is this? Have we invented something new here? What are we going to do? How exciting that I'm tied down, right? And so that gives us a sense of an early modern representation of people thinking, oh, right? there are other things that we can do in bed, right? Here is a historical example of someone thinking that they are engaging in bondage play, but also an historical example, you know, I say someone, it's a fictional character,

but of this character thinking, oh, right, we can invent pretty new devices, right? We can invent new exciting sexual practices for our lives. Now, unfortunately, he doesn't know that he's about to die, so the play kind of takes a different turn, but I think that was one of the moments that was most exciting to me as we were working on those. Guys, you have been wonderful to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and about your work in this collection, where can they find you? The collection, I believe, is coming out later this year. We don't have an exact release date. I think it will be in the fall. And one of the great things about the Kinky Renaissance, which is coming out with ACMRS Press, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, is that it will be available open access for free. And it will also be available as a print book. So once the collection is out, anyone can read. read or share, you know, chapters or the entire book, we're hoping that it doesn't only circulate

among scholars, but also among kink practitioners, just people who are kinky and communities of kinky people. So we're really excited about that. And Jillian is too humble to say that she also has written a single author book that is really brilliant called Conceiving Desire in Shakespeare and Lilly, which is out from Edinburgh University Press, so you can find her there. I also published a book just a few months ago about how people learned how to have sex in this period and theorizing the concept of the sex life called sex lives.

It's up from the University of Pennsylvania press if you're interested in that. Very interested in that. Oh, guys, thank you so much for joining me today. You have been a kinky treat. Oh, thank you, Kate. This has been so fun. Thank you.

Thank you for listening. Thank you so much to Jillian and Joey for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review, and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hi, then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com.

We have got episodes on everything from the history of drag to Viking sex all come in your way. This podcast was edited by Tom Delaggy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.