ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, ‘I Wooed Thee With My Sword’: Violence and Liminal Sexuality in Renaissance Literature and Culture, considers violence in combination with love and attraction between masculine, or even hyper-masculine, men and between seemingly feminine women, troubling the conflation of gender presentation and attraction in the period. Through a focus on the activities of sword fighting and hunting; the martial man or woman; and chaste women’s community, this chapter concerns those inhabiting the border between the sexual and non-sexual, whose relational modes are codified and legitimised in literary space in ways that do not presuppose, privilege, or necessarily deny any particular activity or desire.
