"I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer"

A fascinating collection of questions and answersabout courtship, marriage, love, and sexfrom a seventeenth-century periodical The Athenian Mercurya one-page, two-sided periodical published in 1690s Londonincluded the worlds first personal advice column. Acclaimed historian and Pulitzer Prizefinalist Mary Beth Nortons I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer is a remarkable collection of questions and answers drawn from this groundbreaking publication. In these exchanges, anonymous readers look for help with their most intimate romantic problemsabout courting, picking a spouse, getting married, securing or avoiding parental consent, engaging in premarital sex and extramarital affairs, and much more. Spouses ask how to handle contentious marriages and tense relationships with in-laws. Some correspondents seek ways to ease a conscience troubled by romantic and sexual misbehavior. The lonely wonder how to meet a potential partneror how to spark a warmer relationship with someone they already have an eye on. And both men and women inquire about how to extract themselves from relationships turned sour. Many of these concerns will be familiar to readers of todays advice columns. But others are delightfully strange and surprising, reflecting forgotten social and romantic customs and using charmingly unfamiliar language in which, for example, kissing is a luscious diet, a marriage might provide much love and moderate conveniency, and an amorous disposition can lead to trouble. Delightful and entertaining, I Humbly Beg Your Speedy Answer provides a unique, intriguing, and revealing picture of what hasand hasntchanged over the past three centuries when it comes to love, sex, and relationships.