Gloves

Alert readers of Gramont's Memoirs of the Restoration court know that women's gloves, as well as their muffs and fans, were sometimes used as agents of clandestine conveyance. Such amorous conduits had a long tradition in pre-Restoration literature, of course, as discussed by Paula Sommers in "The Hand, The Glove, The Finger, The Heart: Comic Infidelity & Substitution in the Heptameron," which appeared in Dora Polachek's collection, Heroic Virtue, Comic Infidelity: Reassessing Marguerite de Navarre's 'Heptameron' (Amherst: Hestia Press, 1993), 132-41. See also James V. Mirroll, Mannerism & Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988)