The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (review)

Valerie Traub's book analyzes with scrupulous attention to detail the genealogy of female same-sex eroticism in early modern England. The book is centered on the exploration of five key concepts through which early modern culture represented female homoerotic desire: pleasure, generation, chastity, tribadism, and friendship. In Traub's cultural analysis, "lesbianism" features as a representational image rather than "a stable epistemological or historical category" (15). Because of the cultural instability of the category of lesbian and to distinguish that category from the modern category of lesbian identification, Traub uses it in italics throughout her book. Looking at the scope and the diversity of discourses that Traub uses to generate her arguments, one has the impression that Traub has searched through every nook and cranny of early modern archives. Among those discourses we find works dealing with theology, law, lexicography, medicine, anatomy, travel, marriage, the visual and plastic arts, obscenity, theater, and classical and early modern literature. The result of her "strategic historicism" (32) is to make visible what was hidden and invisible in the cultural constructions of lesbianism in early modern England and what has been occluded in current critical writing about the female body, desire, and sexuality. The result is a book of an encyclopedic breadth. Traub's historicist method engages with some of the arguments of poststructuralist theory, queer theory, and feminism. At the core of Traub's method lies an attempt to uncover "tensions between visibility and invisibility, possibility and impossibility, significance and insignificance" (33) in the ambiguous representations of Renaissance lesbianism.

The book's introduction delineates methodological and theoretical paradigms and provides an overview of a number of major discourses through which female same-sex sexuality was articulated in early modern Europe. In addition to uncovering from Renaissance archives languages and representations of lesbianism, Traub's book also renegotiates the theoretical and methodological terms in which lesbianism is discussed in early modern queer criticism. Tracing the genealogy of Renaissance lesbianism from the discovery of the clitoris, through medical and humoral constructions of the female body and women's eroticism, to the representations of Queen Elizabeth I's body politic and body erotic in portraiture and literature, and to "women who resisted marriage" (125), Traub expands the possibilities for queer historicism in early modern studies. She does so not only by providing new evidence of same-sex desire but also by challenging some of queer theory's focus on the dominance of the phallus in early modern queer discourses.

After a detailed introduction and the first chapter, in which Traub provides a critical overview of some of the major strands of contemporary queer historiography as it pertains to the uncovering of the history of Renaissance lesbianism, follow seven more chapters and an afterword. Each of the seven chapters offers a systematic reading of one specific aspect of the representation of either female pleasure or female same-sex eroticism. The chapter on the anatomical pudica discusses the rediscovery of the female body and its somatic pleasures in Renaissance anatomical manuals. A chapter on the politics of chastity explores "female specificity" (153) in the performance of sexuality in the political and corporeal representations of Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne.

The chapter "The (In)Significance of Lesbian Desire" is a version of an earlier piece by Traub, filling in the lacunae in early modern English culture, whose legal and theological discourses ignore the representations of female-female desires. This chapter maps the history of Renaissance representations of lesbianism in England using sources that range from wall paintings in English castles to engravings, Shakespeare's plays, and various nonliterary documents. This chapter also explores the genres of pastoral and elegy as conduits for the discourses of the (in)significance of lesbianism in early modern English literature. Travel literature, especially texts on Turkey, and descriptions of...