Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns. Valerie Traub

is not just that leveling a charge of projection in this way is inaccurate and offensive; more important, it circumvents, and thereby obscures, questions tacitly raised by Bray’s scholarship but not resolved in it: namely, the relations between emotional and bodily intimacy, and what we make of them. Indeed, it is one of the legacies of his work that, although the tension between friendship and eroticism informs it at almost every turn, nowhere is the unstable line separating these forms of intimacy brought into direct focus and treated as an object of analysis. Bray casts his eye first on the conventions of friendship and then on those of sodomy, but in analyzing their connection, he seems to take his cue from early moderns themselves, who were unwilling “to take seriously the ambiguous borderland between the ‘sodomite’ and the shared beds and bonding of its male companionship.”⁵⁷ For a historian to “take seriously” this “ambiguous borderland” would mean to submit to analytic scrutiny the movement across borders, the places where and the moments when (and not simply the processes by which) one thing becomes another. Bray’s apparent preference was much like that of the early modern society he describes, which “knew that the gaps—and the overlaps—between one thing and its other had their utility.”⁵⁸ Rather in the manner of the “accommodating ambiguity” he identifies elsewhere,⁵⁹ Bray does not parse his terms too precisely, as evinced by the sleight of hand in his remark that “the word ‘love’ in this society could comprehend as easily the public relation of friends as the more private meaning we give the word today, but wherever on that wide spectrum the gift of a friend’s body might lie, it gestured toward a place of comforting safety in an insecure world.”⁶⁰ Indeed, if one substitutes the term “eroticism” for “friendship” in Bray’s statement that “the indirection of the language of friendship provided a circumspect path around it,”⁶¹ one comes close to describing the rhetorical strategy he deployed in regard to the confused relations among the sexual, the physical, the subjective, and the affective.

      Examining the ambiguous borderland, the overlap, between one thing and another might particularly have paid off in relation to one of Bray’s key terms: voluntary kinship. It is striking that Bray ignores the applicability of voluntary kinship to the social structure of the molly house. Because of the tight link between sodomy and social disorder—a link that for Bray goes to the heart of what sodomy is—he fails to consider whether the vows of mollies, some of which follow the traditional script of marriage, might not also operate as an alternative form of kinship. The analytic division between friendship and sodomy, social disorder and social cohesion, enables him to recognize bonds of kinship only within the received structure of traditional society: in the form of male couples whose formal vows are backed by Christian ritual.

      It may well be wrong to characterize Bray’s circumspection in this regard as reticence or reluctance to confront the radical implications of his own work. As a historian, he appears to have approached the relation between friendship and eroticism primarily from the standpoint of evidence. In his final chapter, for instance, he asks of the body of the friend:

      But did it not also have the body’s genitals? Did its symbolic significance stop short there? The laughter that closed an earlier chapter suggested that it did not. Yet the sexual potential in these gestures has repeatedly come into view only to slip away again…. This is not, of course, to say that the erotic has not been part of this history. But sexuality in a more narrow sense has eluded it whenever it has come into view. With the diary of Anne Lister that problem falls away.⁶²

      Yet even as the evaluation of evidence must persist as a preoccupation of historians, important questions of method and theory remain untouched by it. Whether Bray’s disinclination to probe, rather than work adroitly around, the precise means of the overlap of friendship and eroticism as a theoretical problem indicates the historian’s discomfort with the deconstructive ramifications of his own radical history or whether, conversely and paradoxically, it is a further measure of his own deconstructive commitments is a question about which I remain unsure. Bray delights, for instance, in the enigma of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, which he calls a “dazzling tour de force” that “can be read both as asserting the chastity of friendship in the most transcendent of terms and as rejecting it in the most bawdy and explicit of terms.”⁶³ In puzzling through this problem, I am reminded that Goldberg recognized that Bray’s early work raised “formidable questions” of “ontology and epistemology”: “what sodomy is and how it may be recognized.”⁶⁴ In its performance of what appears to be a strategic ambiguity carried out in the name of ethics, Bray’s final book invites, if only to defer, questions just as formidable about the ontology and epistemology of friendship, eroticism, and sexuality.

      In this regard, it is useful to unpack Bray’s concluding comments in a review of books on homosexuality in which he notes, with what appears to be mixed appreciation and apprehension, that the books “have succeeded in undermining their very starting point in the questions they have steadily been drawn into asking. What then is the nature of sexual identity, or of any personal identity? What is the difference between the sexual and the nonsexual? … The history of sexuality will not provide answers to these questions, if indeed there are any, but it has disturbingly raised them; and it is there that its importance lies.”⁶⁵ It is telling that Bray’s skepticism regarding the history of sexuality as a field of knowledge production is articulated in the same breath as his apparent doubt regarding the field’s ability to resolve ontological questions about the identity of and relations between sexuality and friendship. Both, I believe, are worthy cautions, and both insights inform the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, as the charge of “projection” of homoerotic desires that has been leveled in Bray’s name vividly suggests, a countervailing epistemological and political danger is that not to pursue such ontological questions—what is sexuality? what is friendship? what is the nature of the difference between them?–risks ceding authority for answering them to those who would assert their own tendentious criteria for how sexuality is to be known. Rather than “[debunk] the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians of sexuality,” Bray’s historical scholarship intersects with the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in inviting several queries that are simultaneously epistemological and methodological: How do we know when there were no homoerotic desires between historical figures? What is the basis of our knowledge of the eroticism of the past? How do we know what (we think) we know?

      Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns represents my own response to these questions, but the impetus for working them out was anticipated and inspired by Alan Bray. For the logic of Bray’s corpus (if not the deliberate proffering of methodological dicta) implies certain propositions. First, if eroticism is always embedded in other forms of social relation, if acts of bodily intimacy are rendered intelligible only from within a precise social location, if the power of eroticism to signify is variable and uncertain, if we cannot always be confident that we have interpreted its presence or absence correctly, then eroticism, like sodomy and friendship, is apprehensible as a knowledge relation—one existing not only between people but between people and history. Not only will our desires for a usable past necessarily inform the history of sexuality we create, but the epistemological opacity of sexuality will be constitutive of the methods by which we investigate it. This recognition leads me, as it did not, apparently, lead Bray, to a second proposition. If we do not know the extent to which relations may have been erotic, it is as mistaken to assume that they were not as it is to assume that they were. In her afterword to Queering the Renaissance, Margaret Hunt urged scholars to “scramble the definitions and blur the boundaries of the erotic, both so as to forestall the repressive uses to which rigid understandings of it almost inevitably lend themselves, and to gain access to a much larger analytical arena.”⁶⁶ In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, I took that invitation as far as seemed historically responsible by adopting, as a heuristic axiom, a studied skepticism about any a priori dividing line between female friendship and female homoeroticism. It may be that the difference gender makes in this regard is particularly salient: not only did cultural images of tribades have little of the apocalyptic force conveyed by images of sodomites, but the practices of female friendship may have been more congruent with the expression of female eroticism than masculine friendship was with sodomy.⁶⁷ What counts as erotic, in other words, may involve gender differentials of which we are