Before the eighteenth-century rise of the ideology of intimacy, sexuality was defined not by social affiliations but by bodies. In Before Intimacy, Daniel Juan Gil examines sixteenth-century English literary concepts of sexuality that frame erotic ties as neither bound by social customs nor transgressive of them, but rather as "loopholes" in people's experiences and associations.

Engaging the poems of Wyatt, Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, Spenser's Amoretti and The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and the Sonnets, Gil...