Beauty, Voice, and Wit: Learning Courtship and Sex through Song in Early Eighteenth-Century England

Abstract:In early eighteenth-century England, love songs published in musical miscellanies offered audiences the chance to learn about love in all of its forms. Love songs covered a wide range of subjects, with advice that a man or a woman could follow from the earliest stages of courtship to the later stages of a marriage. Other songs were explicit and erotic, introducing the singer or listener to aspects of sexual conduct and intercourse that might inform or caution them on how to behave. This essay compares eighteenth-century song culture to the didactic purposes of conduct books and erotic literature in the eighteenth century. I argue that by purchasing and performing songs, men and women learned new ways of engaging with the opposite sex across a variety of social contexts. As England's attitude towards courtship, marriage, and sex continued to change in the early eighteenth century, song culture connected men and women to the realities of courtship through the performance of shared emotion that elaborated upon their personal experiences. Love songs helped men and women navigate the tensions between their own desire and the behavioral rules and limitations placed on each sex.