Through his excavation of two fifteenth-century Latin comedies about the entrapment of a priest who is eager for sexual activity with men—Janus the Priest and The False Hypocrite—Ralph Hexter shows how characters deployed coded language to navigate same-sex relationships. Includes the first published English translations of both plays.

Showing how sex, including sexual racism, structured everyday life in early modernity, Sex Lives reshapes how we understand Renaissance literature, the history of sexuality, and the meaning of sex in both early modern Europe and our own moment.

Beginning with the beguiling queerness of the Renaissance letter Q, Jeffrey Masten's stylishly written and extensively illustrated Queer Philologies demonstrates the intimate relation between the history of sexuality and the history of the language.