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Article: The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750.(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Canadian Journal of History
- Article date:
- August 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Canadian Journal of History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Yard of Wit: Male Creativity and Sexuality, 1650-1750, by Raymond Stephanson. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. xv, 292 pp. $55.00 US (cloth).
When early eighteenth-century moralists decried the disorder wrought by servants going to masquerades as finely dressed as their masters, when Samuel Richardson's Pamela asserted that although she was poor, her soul was as valuable as the soul of a princess, they testified to and actively promoted a growing tendency to know and value others through and for interior, personal qualities, rather than external, socially assigned markers of status. Any book beginning with the simple, alliterating phrase ...