The influence of Bray’s first book and published essays can be seen in all subsequent treatments of male homoeroticism from 1550 to 1800 in England, in no small part because of his activist commitment to “play[ing] a part in changing” “the world around us as history has given us it.”15 Yet it implies a serious underestimate of the value of Homosexuality in Renaissance England that the book most often is cited only for its exposure of cognitive dissonance and its narrative regarding the emergence of a homosexual identity. Because of the stranglehold that questions of identity and the dating of its consolidation have had on the history of homosexuality, and because the critical accent has been on the content of Bray’s historical scheme rather than the method by which he composed it, the considerable conceptual advances he made in charting an epistemic shift in the intelligibility of male bonds have not been fully assessed.16 By highlighting some of his additional contributions to historiographic method, I hope to draw attention to the opportunities and challenges they offer for future engagement and critical dialogue, including the extent to which his work intersects with yet also challenges certain dispositions within queer studies.
It is one of the paradoxes of Bray’s scholarly career that the history of sexuality is not the discipline in which he would have located his work. Repeatedly he insists that to begin with the question of sexuality is to misconstrue the issue.17 The point, articulated throughout his corpus, is to view sexuality in a wider social and interpretive frame, whereas “the effect of a shaping concern with sexuality is precisely to obscure that wider frame.”18 This is true because “what is missing [in Renaissance discourses] is any social expression of homosexuality based on the fact of homosexuality itself…. What we look for in vain are any features peculiar to it alone.”19 Bray’s determined ambivalence regarding the disciplinary field of sexuality studies is, I suggest, simultaneously a product of his historical inquiry and the ground out of which his historiography emerged. His insistence that sexuality—by which I mean not only the identity categories of homo and hetero, but the very idea of an autonomous field of erotic relations—was a post-seventeenth-century phenomenon motivates what I believe is his most decisive contribution: the location of male intimacy in a range of early modern social systems. Having described in his first book the forms of social life in which homosexuality was embedded—the village, the household, the educational system, apprenticeship, prostitution, the theater—in subsequent work he situates male bonds within the symbolic gift systems of patronage, preferment, and service associated with the medieval great house. What he calls “the gift of the friend’s body”—signified by public kisses and embraces, eating at the common table, the sharing of beds, the familiar letter—functioned up through the sixteenth century as a crucial form of “countenance.”20 Such public signs of favor and intimacy, Bray argues, were not only normative but instrumentally oiled the wheels of social relations. With the demise of the openhanded household—a change both architectural and social—the public conveyance of countenance through the friend’s body ceased to be advantageous; lacking its prior symbolic capital, it became unintelligible. As England was transformed into a modern, civil society, friendship was recast as a noninstrumental affinity: “rational, objective, universal,” and for the most part irrelevant to Christian ethics and public affairs.21 Situating this change within a new regime of visibility—the disappearance of lower servants from view, of gentlemen from service, of crowds drinking in the great hall—Bray offers a causal explanation for the growth of suspicion regarding behaviors previously deemed unexceptional, as well as for the persecution of mollies. Just as the “sodomite” took on a “new actuality,” so too a “radically new meaning to the desire for the body of the friend” took shape.22 As Bray memorably describes this shift, the public kiss and embrace were replaced by the handshake.23
Michel Foucault’s corpus is often credited, rightly, with articulating the theoretical import of reading for silences, absences, and exclusions. Alan Bray’s corpus, it seems to me, demonstrates the payoff of this approach. Characteristic of Bray’s rhetorical stance is the adoption of the persona of the sleuth, embarked on a slow process of detection: painstakingly following a “forensic trail” of clues, sharing his mind as it works through assumptions and doubts, examining evidence from multiple angles, entertaining objections, and devising alternative methods in light of them.24 The discovery of clues, of course, often is an effect of what is not said, and Bray’s favored trope for this function in his own work—as well as that of others—was “the detective story where the clue was that the dog did not bark.”25 With steady tough-mindedness, he draws significance out of what is, and what is not, available in the archive. In so doing, the archive is reconfigured: it is not a storehouse or treasure chest waiting to be opened but a palimpsest of fragments, on the ragged edges of which hang unexpected meanings. Bray’s articulation of the difference between Elizabethan and later discourses of male intimacy, for instance, hinges on “what is left out” in idealized expressions of friendship: the “tactful omission of those bonds of mutual interest of which the everyday signs were such conventions.”26 When suspicion is generated by accounts of friendship, as it increasingly was, it is because “some of the conventions of friendship are missing … and the missing ones are precisely those that ensured that the intimacy of these conventions was read in an acceptable frame of reference.”27 What could convert signs of male friendship into signs of sodomy, it turns out, was partly the mixing of status or degree—and it was only by looking for “the silence between the lines” that Bray hit upon the significance of social inequality to the sodomy-friendship interrelation.28 For a social historian generally committed to traditional protocols of evidence, this emphasis on silence and insignificance, on traces and fragments and the difficulties of intelligibility they pose, was, especially at the time, a strikingly unconventional move.29
That erotic behavior might not signify in or by itself implicitly links the problem of representation to the issue of social embeddedness. The combined effect of this connection is to emphasize the uncertainty of sexuality’s power of signification. As I noted in Chapter 1, Laurie Shannon has cogently rearticulated and extended Bray’s argument, maintaining that there is nothing fully dispositive about eroticism to convey particular meanings; erotic acts operate only unreliably as a trigger for articulation.30 Correlating the gift of the friend’s body to the changing fate of homosexuality, for instance, Bray argues that the proximity of exalted and excoriated male bonds means that erotic affects and acts could be an element of both—it depends on how you look at it. How you look at it is itself influenced by historical factors, including what counts as sex in a given culture. What counts, of course, can be highly contingent, variable, and incoherent, even within a single culture and historical moment—as was brought home to everyone in the United States when President Bill Clinton avowed that whatever he did with Monica Lewinsky, it was not sex.31
One effect of showing that sodomy and friendship could be recognized at one moment as utterly distinct and at another moment as close to the same thing was to deconstruct, from a historically specific angle, the boundary between them. The complex elaboration of male intimacy throughout early modern society, coupled with the potential for erotic acts not to signify, creates the interpretative field into which all erotic behaviors fall: “Mediated as homosexuality then was by social relationships that did not take their form from homosexuality and were not exclusive to it, the barrier between heterosexual and homosexual behaviour … was in practice vague and imprecise.”32 One might expect, then, that changes in the social articulation of male bonds might affect the meanings of male intimacy with women—and indeed they did. Just as the sodomite became identifiable as a perversion of normative cross-sex alliance, so these alliances increasingly relied on the sodomite to secure their own status as natural and inevitable. Arguing that the transformation in male intimacy “placed a burden of social meaning on the heterosexual bond between husband and wife that before it had not been required to carry alone,” and that, with the ascendance of civil society, the gift of the body came to be acknowledged “only as a sexual gift between men and women,”33 Bray brings to the theoretical dictum of the dependence of the hetero on the homo a historical specificity it otherwise