Queering the Renaissance

Jonathan Goldberg, Michèle Aina Barale, Michael Moon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 1993
• Print ISBN: 9780822313854, 9780822313816
• eBook ISBN: 9780822382607
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: Social Sciences

Queering the Renaissance offers a major reassessment of the field of Renaissance studies. Gathering essays by sixteen critics working within the perspective of gay and lesbian studies, this collection redraws the map of sexuality and gender studies in the Renaissance. Taken together, these essays move beyond limiting notions of identity politics by locating historically forms of same-sex desire that are not organized in terms of modern definitions of homosexual and heterosexual.
The presence of contemporary history can be felt throughout the volume, beginning with an investigation of the uses of Renaissance precedents in the 1986 U.S. Supreme Court decision Bowers v. Hardwick, to a piece on the foundations of 'our' national imaginary, and an afterword that addresses how identity politics has shaped the work of early modern historians. The volume examines canonical and noncanonical texts, including highly coded poems of the fifteenth-century Italian poet Burchiello, a tale from Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, and Erasmus's letters to a young male acolyte. English texts provide a central focus, including works by Spenser, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne, Beaumont and Fletcher, Crashaw, and Dryden. Broad suveys of the complex terrains of friendship and sodomy are explored in one essay, while another offers a cross-cultural reading of the discursive sites of lesbian desire.

Contributors. Alan Bray, Marcie Frank, Carla Freccero, Jonathan Goldberg, Janet Halley, Graham Hammill, Margaret Hunt, Donald N. Mager, Jeff Masten, Elizabeth Pittenger, Richard Rambuss, Alan K. Smith, Dorothy Stephens, Forrest Tyler Stevens, Valerie Traub, Michael Warner

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction
• Bowers v. Hardwick in the Renaissance
• Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England
• The (In) Significance of “Lesbian” Desire in Early Modern England
• Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello
• Practicing Queer Philology with Marguerite de Navarre: Nationalism and the Castigation of Desire
• Erasmus’s “Tigress”: The Language of Friendship, Pleasure, and the Renaissance Letter
• John Bale and Early Tudor Sodomy Discourse
• “To Serve the Queere”: Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels
• Into Other Arms: Amoret’s Evasion
• Romeo and Juliet’s Open Rs
• The Epistemology of Expurgation: Bacon and The Masculine Birth of Time
• Pleasure and Devotion: The Body of Jesus and Seventeenh-Century Religious Lyric
• My Two Dads: Collaboration and the Reproduction of Beaumont and Fletcher
• Fighting Women and Loving Men: Dryden’s Representation of Shakespeare in All for Love
• New English Sodom
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors
• Index