This chapter explores the civil wrong of seduction to establish its nature and parameters and draw out its associations with deception. It argues that, as the earliest legal response to deceptive sex, seduction is in some senses the civil law analogue of later criminal laws. The chapter then shows how the action of seduction was rooted in the idea that deception was wrongful because it was one way of leading a woman off the ‘right’ path and that the harms it caused reflected the gendered significance of marriage and other ‘moral’ forms of intimacy. Furthermore, it highlights how these features of the action provided a framework within which the range of qualifying deceptions was limited and the temporal dimensions of the wrong were set. Finally, the chapter offers some reflections on how the distinctions between private and public introduced in Chapter 1 bore on the decision to keep seduction a civil wrong before foregrounding how these observations, and those made throughout the rest of the chapter, are pertinent to contemporary discussions about criminalising deceptive sex.

This chapter analyses legal responses to three situations: someone pretending to intend marriage, someone entering marriage or a civil partnership for ‘ulterior motives’ and someone entering marriage or a civil partnership when an existing relationship disqualifies them from doing so. It argues that, historically, marriage was used to compensate women who experienced the first form of deception and to punish the men who deceived them; that in ‘ulterior motive’ cases, marriage might have been withheld from the deceptive party; and that bigamy provided legal recognition of the harms and wrongs experienced by duped individuals at the same time as it protected the state’s interest in shoring up marriage. The chapter concludes by arguing that the move away from each of these positions over time means that the extent to which the law protects individuals’ interests in avoiding deceptively induced intimate relationships has decreased. It further argues that this development has implications for how we assess the adequacy of contemporary legal responses to inducing intimacy.

This chapter addresses Jacobi’s literary contributions, Edward Allwill’s Collection of Letters and Woldemar, in the context of his critique of both Enlightenment reason and feeling. Both, Jacobi argues, undermined human individuality and freedom.

Research has proliferated on several topics that have invited new methodological approaches: the rural setting, gendered relations between men and women, communal status of minorities (Christians and Jews), and religious diversity among Muslims, in particular among those who identified as Sufi mystics. New sources and revisionist interpretations of them continue to transform the field of Mamluk Studies. Yet in many instances, findings on these subjects are confined to discoveries of information on discrete conditions or isolated events that do not lend themselves to comprehensive analysis. They often depend on a single source or fragmentary data set, and require imaginative speculation to formulate hypotheses that apply to questions about their broader contexts in society. The chapter will outline the state of research on these subjects and their potential to open new lines of inquiry by highlighting examples that have influenced revisionist interpretations.

This chapter considers ethical prototypes, which give needed specificity to the very general ethical orientations defined by principles and parameters. In ethical decision and behavior, we are concerned with sequences of actions and the motivations guiding these actions. In other words, we are concerned with stories. In this chapter, I argue that the prototypes at issue in specifying our ethical orientations are, most importantly, the universal story structures that I have sought to isolate in earlier works – heroic, romantic, sacrificial, family separation, seduction, revenge, and criminal investigation. These narrative structures are inseparable from human emotion systems. Indeed, story universals are shaped by emotion–motivation systems (along with some general patterns in emotion intensification); those systems (and patterns) account for their universality. In addition, these story genres are of crucial importance for the way we think about and respond to various worldly concerns, such as politics. The third chapter extends these arguments to ethics.

This chapter asks how the early modern association of eroticism with sweetness, and romantic betrayal with bitterness, correlates to the affiliation between taste and knowledge described in preceding chapters. I suggest that authors including Richard Barnfield, Shakespeare, and Thomas Carew forge links between sensual pleasure and non-ratiocinative epistemologies, using the bitter/sweet opposition to endorse a rhetorical conception of knowledge as innately relational. Erotic experience is reconceptualised as a source of epistemological mastery, and the language of taste emerges as instrumental within what Faramerz Dabhoiwala terms the seventeenth-century ‘sexual revolution’.

Courtship behaviour varied not just across social class but also depended on individual inclination and disposition.There were agreed patterns of behaviour, particularly in middle-class society, that signalled to family, friends and the wider community that a couple were courting and the expectation was that the courtship would end in marriage. Not everyone observed or followed the rules of courtship, particularly around the issue of pre-marital sex.Courtships sometimes broke down and led to breach of promise to marry cases.While impossible to quantify, one of the facts to emerge from a study of breach of promise cases is the prevalence of sex as part of courtship. While the Presbyterian church authorities were tolerant, if not approving, of couples who consummated their relationship before marriage, the statistical evidence slowly emerging from scattered sources also indicates a significant number of pregnant Catholic brides.The single mother may have been shunned by society but there was less shame attached to the birth of children within seven or eight months of marriage.There is evidence in middle-class urban society of changing attitudes to courtship in the early decades of the twentieth century with more men and women anxious to make their own choice of spouse.