HomeAuthor: MATTHEW HAYS

Author: MATTHEW HAYS

MATTHEW HAYS

Current Issue:
Age of Enlightenment
Special 25th Anniversary Book
Features From Current Issue

Essays

Cyrano’s Sodomitical Circle

The ringleader of these “forceful minds” (esprits forts) was the gifted poet Théophile de Viau. His blasphemies and boasts of “unnatural” sex shocked the godly, in particular two Jesuits who intrigued to get him banished from Paris. His exile was eased by the companionship of Jacques Des Barreaux, a nineteen-year-old of surpassing beauty and intelligence.

Features

‘The sapphic is far from a site of silence.’

The G&LR talks with the author of The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser, professor emerita of English, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Comparative Literature at Brandeis University, and a specialist in 18th-century European literature, with a focus on women writers and issues related to gender and sexuality.

Essays

‘Warm Brothers’ in 18th-century Berlin

Briefe über den Galantieren von Berlin, a travelogue by an anonymous Austrian officer published in Vienna in 1782, might make it into such an anthology, albeit in a different section. For this eyewitness account of sexual mores observed during a sojourn of fifteen months in Berlin is far from lyrical in its praise.

Essays

Rev. Bentley’s Man of Curious Habits

Rev. William Bentley’s diaries constitute a record of life in Salem between 1784 and 1814. The fact that Gibaut came to his attention, first as protégé and later as a close friend and companion—plus his artfully revealing references to Gibaut’s unusual “habits”—is thus of some note.
Blog
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