Introduction

Abstract The Introduction establishes the argument of the monograph, clarifies its methodology, and details its critical intervention. Following an introductory reading that establishes early modern whoredom as a nexus of power and knowledge relations that masquerades as an agreement in signification, it revisits the sign of early modern whoredom and unfold the importance of the categorical confusions that it incorporates and engenders; pursues an act of critical imagining that animates the experience of sexual-conceptual incoherence in and across historical time; identifies fifteen principles that inform the meanings and makings of English whoredom; examines the political, legal, ideological, and geographic contours of illicit sex in early modern London, as well as also the ambiguities and opacities that attend and unsettle them; details how my queer epistemological approach intervenes in the contemporary scholarship and offers a new analytic framework for accessing and interpreting issues that extend far beyond the ‘whore’ as a historical personage or literary trope; and concludes by detailing the questions, texts, and contexts that inform the book’s six chapters, and which collectively constitute its broader argument.