Sex, Love and Marriage in the Elizabethan Age
(reviewed together with Sex and Sexuality in Tudor England by Carol McGrath)
I have reviewed these two books together as their contents clearly overlap, even though they have the same publisher and were published within a year of each other.
McGrath explains that despite its title her book covers only the ‘early Tudors’, that is, the first five of the six. So, was sex different after 1558, as Philip Larkin famously said it was after 1963? In a way, yes. The final break with the Catholic Church saw the end of chastity as the ideal condition—out with monks and nuns and celibate priests, and in with the fertile Protestant family.
Nonetheless there is a great deal of overlap. Both authors cite Shakespeare, although he was more a Jacobean than a Tudor playwright. Of course, sexuality is a wider topic than sex and marriage, so McGrath gives us a vocabulary of ‘naughty words’ and has chapters on witchcraft, aphrodisiacs and contraception. She also says much more about clothes, observing that, for the upper classes at least, women’s clothing was simpler than men’s, less flamboyant and less openly erotic. Women hid their legs, men flaunted them (and their codpieces).
Both authors cover venereal disease and homosexuality. Where they differ most is that Pritchard concentrates on courtship, marriage and married life and has a final chapter on the sex life, or at least the sexual intrigues, of Queen Elizabeth. He also says more about love in literature, although McGrath does not ignore this.
In effect both books cover the entire Tudor Age and are complementary. Since they are both quite short and very readable, I recommend reading both.
