ABSTRACT
According to John Aubrey, Mr Caisho Burroughs was ‘one of the most beautiful men in England’, reputedly valiant, proud, and bloodthirsty. Satirical sentiments like these chimed with Puritan denunciations of sin in the face of plague outbreaks, and were echoed in a number of pamphlets and plays at the time. Elizabeth’s reign was marked by a series of well-known cataclysmic difficulties: the Northern Rebellion, the Ridolfi Plot, potential accession by Mary Stuart, the Armada, the Irish question and Essex’s demise, and the deepening problem of succession. Edward Chaney’s The Evolution of the Grand Tour provides a valuable study of early English travellers abroad, presenting detailed accounts of the sojourns of Sir Thomas Hoby, Robert Dallington, Inigo Jones, John Milton and others in Italy and Sicily. Attitudes towards aspiring courtesans divided in England as they did in Italy between admiration and denigration, a divide that had much to do with wealth, degree, social class and the commodification of sex.
