This work is a contribution to social history and portrays the life of each class from the court downwards - nobles, gentry, the middle class, country folk - and their mentality, conscious or unconscious, to which their way of life gave rise, with its folklore and beliefs, customs and sport. In particular, the book throws fresh light ton the sex life of the time, A.L. Rowse draws on the unpublished casebooks of the astrologer-psychiatrist, Dr Forman, which provide fascinating insight into this aspect of Elizabethan life - in more intimate detail than that of Pepys or Boswell. The book's central section on sex, astrology and witchcraft also has much that is exciting and new, and is deeply revealing of the age of Shakespeare and bacon.