Valerie Traub

“The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England” (2001)

“Representative statements from The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, a 1995 reference work edited by Claude Summers and notable for its thorough and scholarly treatment of a vast range of topics, provide a convenient illustration of the historical vacuum into which women’s erotic desires for one another so often continue to fall. Here are statements from three separate historical entries: ‘Lesbianism is a theme rarely treated in Latin literature. . . . though Ovid regards the love of boys as common- place, love between females is unthinkable in his world.’ ‘Female homosexual issues do not appear explicitly in medieval English literature. . . . For lesbians attempting to understand why they have been silenced for much of the English tra- dition, it is with the silence of medieval English texts that they should begin.’ ‘Lesbianism is almost invisible in the [English Renaissance].’ Such pronouncements, as mistaken as they are typical, have been proffered by some of the most esteemed scholars of early modern (male) homoeroticism. Literary critics and historians of contiguous periods largely have concurred. According to the authors of an influential study of female transvestism, “Until the end of the eighteenth century love affairs between women were not taken seriously, perhaps not often even noticed at all. . . . in the past lesbian love was inconceivable.” To many responsible, even groundbreaking scholars, female homoeroticism prior to the Enlightenment has seemed silent and invisible. Impossible.

Having pursued the silence, invisibility, and impossibility of early modern lesbianism for the last decade, I now want to propose a different way of engaging with the historical and interpretive problems it poses. I argue that early modern England witnessed a renaissance of representations of female homoerotic desire. By this I mean three things. First, references to female-female desire in English texts increased dramatically over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, widespread social, intellectual, and economic changes fostered the production and dissemination of a variety of discourses allud- ing to the physical and emotional investments of women in one another. The publication of classical texts in the vernacular; the rise of popular public and private theaters; the development of the secular visual arts; the emergence of illustrated anatomy books, travel narratives, and obscene texts; and the increase in female literacy all affected the number and kind of representations of women’s desire for other women in English society. If these phenomena were not, strictly speaking, new, their interaction and the results of that interaction were unprecedented. Within the context of a pervasive belief in women’s erotic intemperance—the insatiable lust that was woman’s inheritance from Eve—these varied cultural developments generated an extensive array of detail about what it means for women to love passionately, and have sex with, other women.

Here is a partial list of English authors who contributed to such representations, both celebratory and condemnatory, from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century—or, to invoke the two female monarchs whose reigns mark the temporal boundaries of my study, between Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne: John Lyly, Thomas Heywood, John Donne, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Warner, Robert Burton, John Fletcher, James Shirley, George Sandys, John Crowne, Edmund Waller, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and several anonymous, possibly female poets. Add to their literary texts the medical works of anatomists and midwives who diagnose the medical problem of clitoral hypertrophy in terms of women’s illicit ‘abuse’ of their clitorises with other women; the many travel writers who claim to have witnessed illicit sexual contact among Muslim women in Turkey and North Africa; the lexicographers and lawyers who grappled with the meanings of the notoriously fraught terms sodomy and buggery and their applicability to women; the visual artists who depicted women in a variety of amorous poses, particularly when treating pastoral and mythological themes; and the many Continental writers whose own treatments of female-female love and erotic contact in romances, plays, poems, medical texts, and moral treatises were translated into English during this period, and you can begin to see why renaissance might be the appropriate word to describe this discursive proliferation.” (247-248)

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