Hi Sam I am a little over a third of the way through Trumbach’s big Sex and the Gender Revolution book and found myself making the timeline below because he does not often seem to provide much of the relevant political context and my own sense of it is pretty much zero after the ban on theaters that accompanied the beginning of the English Civil War. It does seem to me that the activities of something like the Society for the Reformation of Manners need a more explicitly political context than (so far) I am finding Trumbach giving them. 1559: Elizabethan Settlement 1593: Death of Marlowe 1603: James I succeeds Elizabeth I 1616: Death of Shakespeare 1625: Charles I succeeds James I 1642: English Civil War begins; Long Parliament orders the closure of London theaters 1649: Execution of Charles I 1660: Stuart Restoration (Charles II) 1662: Women permitted to act on the English stage 1666: Great Fire of London 1688: Glorious Revolution (James II deposed) 1701: Act of Settlement requires the next English monarch to be Protestant 1706: Treaty of Union between England and Scotland 1714: Hanoverian succession (George I through death of Victoria in 1901) 1719: Jacobite rising and Spanish invasion defeated at the Battle of Glen Shiel 1740 – 1748: War of the Austrian Succession 1755: Johnson’s Dictionary 1756 – 1763: Seven Years War 1765: Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England 1783: Treaty of Paris ends American War of Independence My apologies if this is too basic or unhelpful but having done it I thought it worth sharing. There is an awful lot about sex between men and women in the book and my attention sometimes wanders, but I am trying to persevere. hugzu ;-p |