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Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature
A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds.
In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.
In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.
In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery.
In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.
270 pages, Paperback
Published September 6, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
November 15, 2025
Please do not take the fact that it took me over a year to read this book as a sign of it being bad; on the contrary, it is life-changingly good. I do not know how to properly articulate what Glorious Bodies means to me. My career as an Early Modernist (and as a trans person lol) is divided into a before reading it and an after. Its careful articulation of the material realness of transition in the Renaissance, combined with Gordon's excellent close readings of a variety of texts, makes this a fantastically readable work of literary criticism.
All of this to say, if you do any work in Early Modern literature (or trans studies) this is a must read.
All of this to say, if you do any work in Early Modern literature (or trans studies) this is a must read.
July 27, 2025
Really excellent. I would have liked a little more about racialism and its connections with transness, but very helpful in guiding my dissertation and my thinking about early modern trans studies as a whole.
I kinda wish Antonio de Erauso was in here.
ALSO Goodreads kept recommending me As You Like It because I was reading this, which, if you've read the book, is hysterical.
I kinda wish Antonio de Erauso was in here.
ALSO Goodreads kept recommending me As You Like It because I was reading this, which, if you've read the book, is hysterical.
June 4, 2025
Where Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex opened new doors for me on how nonbinary subjects could be understood across history, Colby Gordon's Glorious Bodies led me down the same passages queer theory has been treading for decades. There's nothing wrong with Colby's book, but it's literary criticism at its most conventional—reading canonical texts through a radical lens. If you're into that give it a shot. There's a lot to mine from popular culture by viewing it outside of heteronormative dictates. Personally, having read Leah's Shape of Sex and Kit Heyam's Before We Were Trans, I find queer identities drawn from anthropological records, and analysed through a social constructionist lens, far more convincing interpretations of gender, than those presented through literary criticism.
In Leah and Kit's work, gender is materially discursive—gender emerges through segregation, obligation, labour, sex, medicine, maps, theological tracts. Colby touches on some of these elements in Glorious Bodies, but his work is more sporadic. By the second chapter, it became clear to me that this wasn't a cohesive book with a strong narrative arc, but a collection of essays. We hop around without rhyme or reason: the dick disappearing acts of witches is a trans panic, terfs read the prodigious signs of the trans body as criminal perversity, John Donne (a 17th century English poet) was an eggy sadboi who could imagine the end of the body before the end of the binary.
Despite the profusion of citations, I couldn't understand what Colby's point was. Where was my beautiful trans theology? Where were my genderqueer angels? Lost in the insularity of another's mind palace, I yearned for a shared lifeworld, a living culture, a trans touch across the gap of centuries that would anoint my body with a grace to ward off terrors innumerable now. I did not find that here, but perhaps others will.
In Leah and Kit's work, gender is materially discursive—gender emerges through segregation, obligation, labour, sex, medicine, maps, theological tracts. Colby touches on some of these elements in Glorious Bodies, but his work is more sporadic. By the second chapter, it became clear to me that this wasn't a cohesive book with a strong narrative arc, but a collection of essays. We hop around without rhyme or reason: the dick disappearing acts of witches is a trans panic, terfs read the prodigious signs of the trans body as criminal perversity, John Donne (a 17th century English poet) was an eggy sadboi who could imagine the end of the body before the end of the binary.
Despite the profusion of citations, I couldn't understand what Colby's point was. Where was my beautiful trans theology? Where were my genderqueer angels? Lost in the insularity of another's mind palace, I yearned for a shared lifeworld, a living culture, a trans touch across the gap of centuries that would anoint my body with a grace to ward off terrors innumerable now. I did not find that here, but perhaps others will.
June 26, 2025
Some of this definitely went a bit over my head, but overall it was a very interesting read that made me rethink my approach to trans theory and literature.
9/10
9/10
June 26, 2025
Giving this a 4.25!
I think this was an incredibly powerful book with a lot of information on theology and renaissance writing that I may have never encountered if I never read this book. It even allowed me to be more open-minded about Christianity. Although I don't think I'll ever like the religion for all the pain and suffering it has caused me, my loved ones, my culture, and many people around the world, it's nice to think of how if certain things were picked up throughout history, perhaps Christianity would have been different. Maybe it would have been a more loving and open-minded religion with love and respect towards people of all races, cultures, religions, and gender identities. Transness is beautiful and diving and religion itself can prove it. We may never know the true intentions of writers, poets, etc, but everything from history has to be interpreted. Let's just interpret it more queerly (with a grain of salt, of course).
I think this was an incredibly powerful book with a lot of information on theology and renaissance writing that I may have never encountered if I never read this book. It even allowed me to be more open-minded about Christianity. Although I don't think I'll ever like the religion for all the pain and suffering it has caused me, my loved ones, my culture, and many people around the world, it's nice to think of how if certain things were picked up throughout history, perhaps Christianity would have been different. Maybe it would have been a more loving and open-minded religion with love and respect towards people of all races, cultures, religions, and gender identities. Transness is beautiful and diving and religion itself can prove it. We may never know the true intentions of writers, poets, etc, but everything from history has to be interpreted. Let's just interpret it more queerly (with a grain of salt, of course).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews