Studies in Early Modern Sexuality

Citation
Huntington Library Quarterly
September 2004, Vol. 67, No. 3, Pages 481–487
Posted online on December 3, 2004.
(doi:10.1525/hlq.2004.67.3.481)

Studies in Early Modern Sexuality
Ian Frederick Moulton‌
ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY WEST

Katherine O'Donnell and Michael O'Rourke, editors
Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship between Men, 1550-1800
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. XIV = 206 pages

Margaret A. Gallucci
Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. XVI = 214 pages

Jim Ellis
Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphosis in Elizabethan Erotic Verse
Toronto: University of Toronto press, 2003, VII + 272 pages

Few books have opened a field of study as definitively as did Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England, published by Gay Men's Press in 1982. Along with the first volume of Michel Foucalt's History of Sexuality, Bray's work historicized same-sex desire, demonstrating that the seemingly immutable categories of sexual orientation, homo/hetero/bi, were in fact culturally constructed, and of fairly recent vintage. Bray and Foucault separated sexual activity from identity, asserting that before the nineteenth century, homoerotic activity was just that: activity. A man might have sex with other males, but this did not define who and what he was.

The legacy of this insight has been complex and conflicted, both within queer studies, for which Bray's book is a founding text, and for early modern cultural history more generally. It was a godsend to those historians who tend to see social and sexual identities as culturally constructed rather than biologically determined.