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The elopement of the famous castrato Giustro Ferdinando Tenducci and his young Dublin singing pupil Dorothea Maunsell gripped Georgian society. Historian Helen Berry tells the story of a scandalous marriage and of the castration of a young boy in a Tuscan hill town. It is a story of ambiguous sexuality, of a relationship that hovers on the wrong side of the law, of a ‘kiss and tell novel’ and ultimately of financial ruin and the collapse of the relationship.

Through Tenducci’s story, Berry, an author and reader in early modern history at Newcastle University, throws light on the meaning of marriage in 18th-century society and examines patronage and the artistic elite.