Volume 60 Issue 2 February 2010

Sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage, as Lucie Skeaping explains. 

The ‘Milan Kundera affair’, in which the eponymous Czech novelist was recently accused of denouncing a ‘spy’ to the security services in 1950, illustrates how the Communist past has become a battlefield for Czech historians of different generations, writes Aviezer Tucker. 

Roger Crowley finds that modern European concerns about Turkey are anticipated in an article by Bernard Lewis, first published in 1953.

R.C. Richardson describes the fortunes of young women driven by poverty into domestic service. A number fell victim to predatory masters and ended up with illegitimate children, only to be ejected from households.