Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800 ed. by Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda (review)

269 whereby we tend to ‘Cloath our Ideas with our Sentiments, or if you will[,] assume our Sentiments into our Ideas as essential Parts of them, and so out of both make up . . . one intire sensible Object.’’’ One senses here the foundation for Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), although the relationship between Norris and Smith has just begun to be explored in the work of J. T. Parnell. Equally significant are Norris’s many discussions of ‘‘Love,’’ handled in a separate chapter by Mr. Mander. Norris suggests that Plato’s two loves be divided into ‘‘Concupiscence or Desire’’ on the one hand, ‘‘Benevolence or Charity’’ on the other, but this becomes especially fascinating when he points out that our love of God must be of the first sort, since there is nothing we can do or give to a perfect God; it is ‘‘a sheer delight in the thing itself.’’ The problem is to know the proper objects of desire and that, Norris said (following Malebranche ), requires the utmost attention to the various possibilities. Similarly, attention can distinguish between the benevolent love that wishes good for oneself , and the benevolence that moves toward social amelioration: ‘‘Norris reveals here the flexibility and contextualism of his ethical thinking; there can be no absolute valuations for due attention must always be paid to individual circumstances.’’ Of great import here is Mr. Mander’s section, ‘‘Love of Community,’’ in which he rightfully observes ‘‘the high value which Norris places on the good of the community. It is, he thinks, next to God Himself, ‘the greatest possible Good.’’’ Here, more than anywhere else, Norris’s stature as a Christian moralist should be recognized, because for him that high valuation of social good is directly tied to our love of self and our pervasive self-interest; nothing, Norris splendidly argues, is more important than identifying one’s true self and true interest —the salvation of one’s mortal soul, promised by revelation to those whose caring for others surpasses caring for themselves. In this manner, Norris weds the Word and the World, Revelation and Philosophy. It never was a question for him, however, which was paramount, and a companion volume to Mr. Mander ’s good work remains to be written: ‘‘The Christian Moralism of John Norris .’’ While we await that volume, investing in Norris may be as good as gold. Melvyn New University of Florida Queer People: Negotiations and Expressions of Homosexuality, 1700–1800, ed. Chris Mounsey and Caroline Gonda. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2007. Pp. 305. $65. As an established scholar outside the field of queer studies, Ellen T. Harris was unprepared for the professional and personal attacks that her Handel as Orpheus (2001) would provoke. On the publisher’s press release announcing the book, which contextualizes some of Handel’s cantatas—‘‘musical miniatures based on texts that tell of the pleasures and pains of love’’—in the homoerotic culture of his aristocratic patrons, London ’s Sunday Telegraph trumpeted, ‘‘Handel was gay—his music proves it, claims academic.’’ Ms. Harris’s account of the British, gay, and academic presses ’ reduction of her nuanced treatment of homoerotic themes and gender play in this music into a crude binary defi- 270 nition of sexual identity, accompanied by odd queries into her own gender, sexuality, and personal agenda, serves as a poignant point of departure for this collection. Five of the essays employ social constructionism for understanding early modern sexualities, demonstrating how expressions of desire work within discursive systems. Seven others take an essentialist approach as they focus on the queerness of particular persons and texts. Together they address the misconceptions wrought by artificially distinguishing between these two modes of analysis, and by forcing eighteenth-century sexual desires into anachronistic gay, straight, or bisexual categories. In the Introduction, Mr. Mounsey and Ms. Gonda discuss the current state of this methodological debate in light of other conceptual challenges raised by recent studies of same-sex sexuality as they underscore how the essays transcend these distorting categorizations. Writing as a social constructivist, Thomas A. King presents the closest parallel to the Handel as Orpheus controversy in his discussion of Freudian analyses of Boswell’s latent homosexuality . He explains Boswell’s...