What Do Concubines Have to Do with It? Gender, Sexuality, and Status in the Premodern World

Intimate relationships outside the scope of marriage were everywhere in the medieval world. Often associated with notions of romanticism and ‘illicit love’ in the modern imagination, the individuals involved in these relationships had to grapple with a variety of sociocultural and legal realities to pursue such ends as economic or legal independence or obtaining positions of autonomy and power. Drawing upon a range of sources, this course considers both the constraining and transgressive possibilities of non-marital intimate relationships across the medieval and early modern periods (roughly c.600-1700). This thematic focus provides a new way of exploring the premodern world, considering such issues as gender, sexuality, class, race, drawing comparisons across seemingly disparate regions – from the Iberian Peninsula to the colonial Transatlantic to Tang China – while also attending to historical contingencies on the level of the local and personal.