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As a rhetorician, I might mention that "imaginary sex" is an oxymoron. As a passionate woman, I might say I have little interest in bodies which are beyond excavation, and no prurient or other interest in the lives of people whose bodies are not touchable and (passionately) alive. As a scholar of Renaissance pastoral poetry AND a rhetorician I would say, yet again, as I and Stephen Whitworth have been arguing in print too for quite a while now, that much of the sexual and the erotic (two distinct categories) is evident in the *forms* of Renaissance pastoral poetry and its classical heritage, which included, besides Virgil, the rhetorics of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, which, when re-articulated by Sherry, Peacham, Puttenham, Fraunce, and others, are distinctly eroticized. Closely scrutinizing the ways in which these rhetoricians (and sometimes, as in the case of Fraunce, at the same time translators of Virgil's second eclogue and passsionate enough admirers of Sidney and Spenser to the point of entitling treatises *The Arcadian Rhetorike* and *The Shepheardes Logike*, or, in the case of Puttenham, passionate enough lovers of pastoral and its classical heritage to describe the genre as the poetic site of "first amorous musicks") theorized rhetorical forms (such as oxymoron, or the subjunctive tense of desire in which I am striving to write this message) can teach us remarkably much about the very nuanced forms in which they thought about desire and sexuality within their culture. I would insist, and, the future tense being another form nuancing the erotic in early modern rhetorical theory and poetry, will continue to insist, precisely on the classical education/heritage as what we might read, and in depth, to understand early modern sexuality. We might consider, for example, as Stephen Whitworth does in his article on Barnfield, how Barnfield uses the subjunctive and future tenses, the category of the mean, and the figure of zeugma, to poeticize oral sex between men. Who these men may or may not have been biographically is not at all relevant to our understanding of the specifics of this oral sex, which unfold rhetorically. We might also want to consider the psychic and physical specifics of such oral sex as they unfold in the noun-verb ambiguity in Shekspeare's sonnets 134 and 135. But, as I said, such unfolding requires mastering a tradition which was an integral part of a classical education in the Renaissance but which includes many words like "anapodoton" and "tasis" and "tapinosis" which are still evident after all those years but not part of "our" cultural repertoire and which Renaissance scholars tend to neglect when they gesture toward the humanists' "classical education." As for the parts of this education more palatable to most current critics, such as Virgil's second eclogue (or Theocritus's less often mentioned but no less relevant eighth idyll), we might want to consider the aesthetic/rhetorical/semiotic stakes involved in its reworkings by Spenser, Barnfield, and Fraunce, or the many appearances of the "name" Corydon in Renaissance pastorals. If we do not care to learn to read with our minds re-tuned to the categories of classical education undergone by the humanists, upon all their nuanced rhetorical, mythological, and literary conceptually and psychologically laden vocabularies, and with teh same apssionate investment in our work they had in theirs, what a very poor chance have we of ever intellectually excavating anything but dead relics, ever accessing the subtle and variegated ways they thought about their sexuality, from which we could learn much with which to understand our own. affectionately, Shirley Sharon-Zisser %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%