The Elizabethan Renaissance: The Life of the Society (Penguin Classic History S.) - Softcover

This book is a brilliant contribution to social history. It portrays the life of each class from the Court downwards: nobles, gentry, middle-class, country folk and their mentality, conscious or unconscious, to which the way of life gave rise, in town and parish, with its folklore and beliefs, customs and sport. Particularly new is the light thrown on the sex-life of the age as never before, from the unpublished casebooks of the astrologer-psychiatrist, Dr Forman - in more intimate detail than that of Pepys or Boswell. The central section of the book - on sex, astrology and witchcraft, has much that is exciting and new, and is deeply revealing of the age of Shakespeare and Bacon.

Renowned Fellow of All Souls and widely respected Elizabethan scholar, A. L. Rowse's many other published titles include books on William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and the England of Elizabeth.