The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (review)

Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality presented scholarship on early modern sexuality with a bracing challenge. Due to the nonexistence of terms that correspond substantially to the meanings since gathered in the neologisms of modern erotic identity, scholars face a task of discursive archaeology when they seek to elucidate eroticism's historical meanings. The challenge concerns that obscure relation between representations and practices: how to attend to what early moderns themselves name and say regarding sexual phenomena and to decalibrate that from what we moderns name and say about them, while also hazarding a view about how naming and saying correspond to erotic experience. Valerie Traub's long-awaited, massively ambitious book takes up precisely these problems as organizing principle and scholarly object.

Work on early modern homoeroticism has come far in reckoning the terms of intelligibility in the case of male sexuality. The Renaissance of Lesbianism does more than transcribe research into what Traub calls "a female key" (18); it deeply complicates the sexuality-studies project itself by accounting for sex difference within it. Due in part to the occlusions of period misogyny and in part to a simple mistake (call it the phallic-necessity fallacy), diverse scholars have called pre-modern female homoeroticism impossible, invisible, inarticulable, or unthinkable. Scholars, much like the lawyers and lexicographers Traub analyzes, have deemed it even more elusive than its male counterpart. On the contrary. Indexing what she calls "a renaissance of representations" (7), Traub's wide-ranging investigation of women's roles as subjects and objects in the formation of erotic knowledge—from the anatomists' "rediscovery" of the clitoris in 1559 to the proliferation of medical, literary, and obscene narratives in the early-eighteenth century—puts to rest scholarly conceits of lesbian inscrutability. In the process, The Renaissance of Lesbianism also reevaluates the epistemic break attributed to the nineteenth century, arguing that the seventeenth-century yielded the conditions of possibility for modern erotic identity, even as a classical legacy, in turn, had informed and enabled the erotic discourses of early modernity.

The Renaissance of Lesbianism considers whether investigations of female homoeroticism are more affined with feminism and women's history (focusing discussion on generically female erotic agency) or with work that has been done on male homoeroticism and friendship (which explores surprising period terrains of the licit and the sodomitical). Traub's richly annotated book takes no methodological shortcuts: it constellates the disparate insights of feminist theory, women's history, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, sexuality studies, and early modern literary and scientific studies in order "to contravene the standard critical orthodoxy . . . regarding the invisibility of lesbianism in Western Europe prior to modernity" (3).

Two usages here seem crucial: lesbianism (a historical translation issue) and invisibility (a representational dilemma). Traub's rhetorical avowal of "pre-modern lesbianism" represents a strategic anachronism. It links an era preceding modern regimes of erotic identity with nineteenth-century sexology and (sub)cultural practices from the eighteenth century forward. Traub liberally invokes the "modern" term lesbian throughout but estranges it orthographically with italics. Traub opposes "the idea that lesbianism has any . . . transhistorical 'nature'" (221). It does challenge the reader so to suspend belief over the full course of a text of this magnitude, and—no doubt not unexpectedly—the anachronistic potential of this provocative rhetorical device will remain controversial.

This seems appropriate since simple models of chronology are themselves under scrutiny here. Traub suggestively juxtaposes the retrospective, modern figure of the lesbian with two more historical figures: the exotic "tribade" (a woman alleged to have an enlarged clitoris with which she usurped the "male" privilege of penetrating or rubbing other women) and the more familiar, chastely-imagined "friend." Both figures, while duly early modern, are also classically derived: "[t]o the extent that desire among women was a discursive phenomenon, . . . it was fashioned primarily out of two rhetorics . . . revived from the ancient past: a medico-satiric discourse of the tribade, and a literary-philosophical [End...