Erotic works involving religious celibates have been much more a continental than an English product. Such works always had as their secondary and sometimes as their primary aim, the discrediting of the Roman church, and may have begun in the Middle Ages after Gregory VII (1015-1085) first stringently imposed celibacy on the clergy. (It will be recalled that Sappho’s works were burned by the Church in 1073.) With the growth of rationalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries anti-clerical erotic writing increased in volume, and once the French Revolution had broken the hold of Catholicism in France, tales about the cloistered orders degenerated there into almost unalloyed pornography. In England, where Roman church and monasticism had been crushed by Henry VIII, the anti-clerical category of erotica did not flourish; in the Puritan-influenced American colonies it seems never to have taken root at all. Perhaps as a corollary of this religious conservatism, homosexual works were equally rare. Of the continental writers named above only Boccaccio and Rabelais are generally acceptable to English readers, possibly because of the absence of homosexuality from their works. Even after the Restoration in England the natural anti-Puritan outburst of risqué drama and picaresque novel went no farther than heterosexual freedom. The only variant literary traces of the court’s sojourn in France are Anthony Hamilton’s lesbian anecdote cited above, and a vicious poetic satire written anonymously in 1732. It was actually penned by Sir William King, principal of St. Mary’s Hall at Oxford, and was directed against a female relative who had done him out of a fortune. He describes the lady as one endowed with some of the attributes of a witch and addicted to indecencies with a titled woman friend who figured as her “familiar.” The occult details Sir William seems to have incorporated not only to render his picture more repulsive, but to supply etiology for his subject’s homosexual bent, which apparently he did not care to import gratuitously. England has little else to contribute to the early variant record save an incident or two included in stereotyped histories of prostitutes, and some rather juvenile whipping stories laid in boarding schools or in households dominated by sadistic step-mothers or governesses, and even in these lesbian activity is infrequent.