Jeffrey Merrick

Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan have assembled a valuable collection of articles dealing with various aspects of homosexuality in France from the later years of The Old Regime through the last part of the twentieth century. The ten articles are arranged in approximately chronological order, although there is some overlapping. Ragan and Merrick contributed the first two pieces; their areas of concentration appear to be on the Old Regime. Two of the articles focus on women, two are, to some degree mixed, and the remaining six deal exclusively with men. The articles vary from social history in the form of trends, patterns and statistics, to case studies involving one or more particular events or persons, to personal accounts of specific influential individuals. The sources differ as widely as the nature, tone, purpose and subjects of the articles. Considering the prominent roles lesbians and homosexual men have played in early modern France, and the frequent perception of Paris as a center of hedonism and loose morals, this book fills a niche in the research.… (more)