The Kalender of Shepherdes is of particular importance because it establishes the assimilation into popular culture, by commercial publishers for a mass audience, of the official educational programme of the Church. It was once again a commercial speculation, emphatically a lay book. The success of that assimilation is of course a moot point: many clergy would have been disturbed by the placing of theology cheek by jowl with popular astrology and prognostication. Yet the Kalender certainly found a readership which would have considered unpalatable many more sober didactic treatises, for it was a commonplace of the time, despite the efforts of the clergy and the torrents of paper discharged from the presses, that people were often resistant to catechesis. In 1510 Wynkyn de Worde published an amusing pamphlet in lively doggerel, illustrating this truism, "a lytell geste how the plowman lerned his pater noster".

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (84)

Gengoroh Tagame, My Brother's Husband: Volume 1 (50)

On the simplest level the molly houses offered a relatively safe way of making sexual contacts, far safer than engaging someone in conversation at a dissenting meeting-house, or at work or in the streets. But they also offered something more. Firstly, sexual contacts or not, you were no longer alone. And this meant more than friendship, although no doubt that was important; what it gave the individual was the support of an aggressive and resilient culture. 'They...swore they would massacre anybody that should betray them' was the response of one molly house to the possibility that they were indeed in danger. These were not idle words. When a molly house in Covent Garden was broken up in 1725, the crowded household, many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent resistance.

Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (96)