Abstract
Over the twenty-three years since the publication of Alan Bray’s first, ground-breaking book, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), his work has had its greatest influence in the field of the history of sexuality. Bray’s work provided the starting point for an emerging field, in which scholars began to study the texts and histories of Renaissance England and Europe with an ear to the fluctuating, transforming meanings of sodomy and homosexuality. Importantly, Bray’s work put the whole category of homosexuality in Renaissance England in question, and those who followed him took inspiration from the questions he had asked.
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Notes
A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1977);
see Alan Stewart’s discussion of the two, ‘Homosexuals in History: A.L. Rowse and the Queer Archive’, in K. O’Donnell and M. O’Rourke (eds), Love, Sex, Friendship and Intimacy Between Men, 1550–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 51–67.
M. Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 148.
See, for example, B. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991);
J. Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992);
A. Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997);
M. DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
A. Bray, ‘Epilogue’ to T. Betteridge (ed.), Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 164–8; see also Stewart, ‘Homosexuals in History’.
J. Goldberg, ‘Margaret Cavendish, Scribe’, GLQ 10/3 (2004), 433–52, on p. 450 (n. 7).
A. Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1990), 1–19.
A. Bray and M. Rey, ‘The Body of the Friend: Continuity and Change in Masculine Friendship in the Seventeenth Century’, in T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds), English Masculinities 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 65–84.
P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow: Longman, 2000).
A. Bray, ‘To Be a Man in Early Modern Society: The Curious Case of Michael Wigglesworth’, History Workshop Journal, 41 (1996), 155–65.
On the social and economic anxieties of manhood, see A. Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
J. Masten, ‘Toward a Queer Address: The Taste of Letters and Early Modern Male Friendship’, GLQ, 10/3 (2004), 367–84.
J. Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (London: Verso, 1992).
F. Harris, Transformations of Love: The Friendship of John Evelyn and Margaret Godolphin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
M. de Montaigne, The Essays, trans. John Florio (London; 1603, facsimile; Menston: Scolar Press, 1969), p. 91.
See for example D. O’Hara, Courtship and Constraint: Rethinking the Making of Marriage in Tudor England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
L. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977).
N. Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
For details, E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 260;
K. Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Britain (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 223.
B.P. McGuire, Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350–1250 (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1988);
J. Haseldine, ‘Friendship and Rivalry: The Role of amicitia in Twelfth-Century Monastic Relations’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 44 (1993), 390–414;
J. Haseldine, ‘Understanding the Language of amicitia: The Friendship Circle of Peter of Celle (c.1115–1183)’, Journal of Medieval History, 20 (1994), 237–60.
E. Bos, ‘The Literature of Spiritual Formation for Women in France and England, 1080–1180’, in C. Mews (ed.), Listen Daughter: The Speculum Virginum and the Formation of Religious Women in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 201–20.
The longue durée encourages smoother chronologies: see J.M. Bennett and A.M. Froide (eds), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
On brotherhoods see M. Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), ch. 4;
M. Rubin, Charity and Community in Medieval Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 250–9;
V. Bainbridge, Gilds in the Medieval Countryside: Religion and Social Change in Cambridgeshire, 1350–1558 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996); on Italy
see J. Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
See for example B. Rizzo, Companions Without Vows: Relationships among Eighteenth-Century British Women (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994);
S. Mendelson and P. Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ch. 4.
P. Cullum, ‘“And hir name was Charite”: Charitable Giving by and for Women in Late Medieval Yorkshire’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Woman is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society c.1200–1500 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), pp. 182–211;
K.J. Lewis, ‘Women, Testamentary Discourse and Life-Writing in Later Medieval England’, in N. Menuge (ed.), Medieval Women and the Law (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 57–75.
The artist Bill Viola created the video installation ‘The Visitation’: see the catalogue Bill Viola: The Passions, ed. J. Walsh (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2003).
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© 2005 Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter and Miri Rubin
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Gowing, L., Hunter, M., Rubin, M. (2005). Introduction. In: Gowing, L., Hunter, M., Rubin, M. (eds) Love, Friendship and Faith in Europe, 1300–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524330_1
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