In the most comprehensive study yet of homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral philosophy, laws, and medical books in favor of a poetics of homosexual desire. Smith isolates six different "myths" from classical literature and discusses each in relation to a particular Renaissance literary genre and to a particular part of the social structure of early modern England. Smith's new Preface places his work in the context of the continuing controversies in gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies. "The best single analysis of the homoerotic element in Renaissance English literature."—Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books "Smith's lucid and subtle book offer[s] a poetics of homosexual desire. . . . Its scholarship, impressively broad and deftly deployed, aims to further a serious social purpose: the redemptive location of homosexual desire in history and the recuperation for our own time, through an understanding of its discursive embodiments, of that desire's changing imperatives and parameters."—Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement "The great strength of Bruce Smith's book is that it does not sidestep the complex challenge of engaging in the sexual politics of the present while attending to the resistant discourses and practices of Renaissance England. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England demonstrates how a commitment to the present opens up our understanding of the past."—Peter Stallybrass, Shakespeare Quarterly "A major contribution to the understanding of homosexuality in Renaissance England and by far the best and most comprehensive account yet offered of the homoeroticism that suffuses Renaissance literature."—Claude J. Summers, Journal of Homosexuality

The Ebbs and Flows of Fortune is the first comprehensive biography of Norfolk. In this study David M. Head confronts the central paradox of Norfolk's career - one that lies in his unpleasant personality, marked by vain and tyrannical behavior. Ultimately these flaws prohibited him from achieving the social position he believed was owed to him, mainly because of his family's status and wealth. Essentially a conservative, socially and religiously, Norfolk was uncomfortable with reformation ideology and the "low-brow" men of the court. The duke sought a primary position within the court on the model of that earned by Cromwell and Wolsey but was unwilling to perform the sustained hard work required to achieve that stature. By the 1540s Norfolk was probably the richest man in England, but nonetheless, at the hands of Cromwell and Wolsey, he was repeatedly exiled from the court for emotional excesses. He found himself assigned to posts at considerable distances from the crown - military assignments in France and diplomatic appointments to Ireland and Scotland. While in France he illustrated the cruelty of his character by hanging dozens of men and lamenting his lack of authority to execute more.