The French word for rape is viol. It signals the violence and violation inherent to the acts it names. Since early September, Dominique Pelicot, a 71-year-old Frenchman, has been on trial in Avignon ...
For Mendoza , the ambitious courtier in John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603), being in favour is ‘delicious heaven’; he is quite ‘drunk’ with it. Walter Raleigh pined like a spurned lover when ...
In the preface to the Decameron Boccaccio describes Florentine society laid waste by bubonic plague in the mid-14th century. But before he gets to that he has a confession for the reader: he has been ...