"Knights in armes"

the homoerotics of the English renaissance prose romances

Göran V. Stanivukovic

pp. 171-192

in: Constance C. Relihan, Göran V. Stanivukovic (eds), Prose fiction and early modern sexualities in England, 1570–1640, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003

Abstract

In a 1563 German edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, there is a curious engraving (figure 9.1).¹ Preceding the Latin text of Book I, entitled the Golden Age. III. (Aetas aurea. III.), this engraving depicts, in the forefront, three scantily clad couples. Two male-female ones (courting?) on the right of the tree are in a state that suggests, ambiguously, rest and weariness, intimacy and detachment. On the left of the tree, however, with their backs turned to the viewer, two men sit close to, and look at each other. The one on the far left, seemingly older than the other, is holding the younger around his waist, tight to his body, intimately, casually slipping his hand down toward the younger man's groin. The apparent age difference suggests one of the most conventional ways in which male same-sex eroticism was culturally manifested in the Renaissance.