Queering the Renaissance

Series Q

by Jonathan Goldberg, Alan Bray (Contributor), Carla Freccero (Contributor)

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

Genres: Queer, History, Nonfiction, Theory, Queer Studies, Renaissance, LGBT

424 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Targaryen]

Good book

[Ryan Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jonathan Goldberg’s Queering the Renaissance occupies a seminal, perhaps even radical, place in queer literary and historical studies, particularly for readers interested in how same-sex love and desire, along with gender, functioned before the emergence of modern sexual identities. Goldberg brings together essays by sixteen scholars in gay and lesbian studies, including Alan Bray, Valerie Traub, and Michael Warner, but rather than offering a celebratory recovery of “gay people” from the past, this work deliberately unsettles that expectation.

For a gay male reader, like myself, this approach can feel both thought-provoking and emotionally disorienting, as the book insists that the very categories through which we understand ourselves today did not exist in the Renaissance. What emerges is not a history of gay men and women as such, but a sustained challenge to how desire, masculinity, femininity, and intimacy between men and between women have been traditionally understood.

The collection challenges how one thinks about desire, identity, and historical continuity. (And yes, it’s equally important for non-LGBTQ+ individuals to engage in this as well.) Rather than asking readers to find themselves in the past, it asks them to examine and question the assumptions that shape that desire for recognition.
Read my full review over on www.ryanlawrenceauthor.ca

[Greta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Warner's essay ("New English Sodom") was useful.