Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns by Valerie Traub (review)

What is it that we study when we study sex? What do we seek to access when we search for sexual practices and what are the implications of such knowledge, both for us and for our predecessors? Is the significance of sex just its positioning within systems of meaning, or does sex matter by itself, for itself? Just as importantly, how do we know sex and how do we know when we know it? These are not new questions for queer studies scholars, who in trying to historicise current sexual identities have often found themselves struggling to signify bodily acts within systems where they were, at best, opaque. Valerie Traub’s Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is not a new history of early modern sex, although new analyses of early modern sex can be found within it; it is a methodological intervention on the question of what it is we know, or think we know, when we study sex, today and in the past.

The example that perhaps best acts as a starting point for these questions – although it appears half way through the book – is the character Martha Joyless in Richard Brome’s play, The Antipodes (c. 1638). Martha Joyless is melancholic because, after three years, her marriage has not been consummated. She turns to a female friend and expresses her ignorance of how children are conceived, her only previous sexual experience having been with a fellow maid. She asks Barbara to provide her, or her husband, with practical sexual experience so that the couple has the requisite knowledge of sex to produce a child. Traub places Martha’s sexual knowledge, and lack thereof, as a ‘problem of pedagogy’ (p. 105), with implications for how we know sex in the past. If Martha does not know sex, how can the historian know the sex that Martha does not know? How do we take seriously the ambiguities in understanding, the innocences, the lack of knowledge, and incorporate them into our methodological approach? How do we know what a people did not know and yet, like Martha’s ‘innocent’ rendition of her previous sexual practices with a woman suggests, may nonetheless practice? And how does such a space of not knowing become a site of knowledge for historians?

Traub structures her book into three parts. The first section acts as a magnificent overview of the scholarship of the history of early modern sexuality, particularly Alan Bray’s contribution, queer studies theorists, mostly of a literary bent, and lesbian historiography. It provides a key synopsis of this scholarship, its tensions, and how it has led us to the question of knowledge with which Traub seeks to engage. Part II seeks to provide a survey of the current state of knowledge on early modern sexuality, with key new research designed to ask new questions of how we know what we know, what we do not, and why not knowing might matter to history and theory. It includes a wonderful discussion of the words that early moderns used to describe sex, with an emphasis on their multiple and opaque meanings. Sex was constructed through language as ambiguous, never quite known.

The final section, consisting of a chapter on Shakespeare’s sonnets and another on contemporary lesbian theory, acts as an application of the questions raised by the first part of the book. Her choice to use a traditional historical literary analysis to engage in a popular scholarly debate (was Shakespeare queer?) and pair it with an argument of what history does for the sign of the lesbian, is designed to drive home the importance of interdisciplinary conversation between history and literary queer studies in producing sexual knowledge: we need both. Traub’s concluding chapter takes her argument into the politics of the present and discussions of sex education. If the problematics of labelling sexualities and how to teach that to students has been discussed...