Why were the writers of the English Renaissance so obsessed with sex? What did they and the people reading, seeing, and hearing their work think about sex and sexuality? The fundamental premise of this course is that understanding what they thought of sex then can help us understand what we think of it now. By reading widely in early modern English literature, we will trace some of the contours of historical thought about desire, love, sex, marriage, infidelity, friendship, intimacy, identity, pleasure, violence, gender, race, and religion. A substantial portion of the course will be concerned with female-female and male-male homoeroticism. By the end of the course, we will have a thick sense of the ways in which early moderns used literature to work through the day-to-day processes of thinking, wanting, having, liking, and disliking sex — a thick sense, that is, of the sex lives of the early moderns.