Making the History of Sexuality
CHAPTER 2
Friendship’s Loss
Alan Bray’s Making of History
Explaining the motives and procedures of an “intellectual history that is correlated with critical theory,” Dominick LaCapra emphasizes that such a project focuses “on modes of conceptualization and argument—the way material is or is not thought out, ‘emplotted,’ worked over, and set forth.”1 Furthermore, it “often moves on the ‘meta’ level by inquiring into its objects of study, along with the ways they have been studied, through interrogating and at times contesting their assumptions or sense of what is or is not worthwhile and valid. Thought here takes an insistently dialogic form in interrogating the work of others and in opening itself to interrogating in the interest of both disclosing questionable assumptions or arguments and enabling intellectual movement toward more desirable alternatives.”2
I am not an intellectual historian. And my poles of orientation are less post-structuralism and disciplinary history than queer theory and feminism. However, the impetus for the chapters that follow share with LaCapra an interest in “modes of conceptualization and argument,” and they enact my response to “the very way problems are articulated.”3 This motive necessitates returning to constitutive formulations of a field, as well as raising basic questions about its genesis in order to examine the “prereflective disciplinary habitus” within which practitioners engage.4 I thus begin with some of the concepts devised by one of the originators of the history of early modern sexuality in an effort both to honor his intellectual legacy and to ask how scholars might work with and through the questions that this legacy raises.
In the headnote that precedes his essay “The Body of the Friend,” Alan Bray describes the painful occasion that gave impetus to his work:
In 1987 I heard Michel Rey, a student of J.-L. Flandrin in the University of Paris, give a lecture entitled “The Body of My Friend.” The lecture was only an outline, and his early death left his doctoral thesis uncompleted and his loss keenly felt by many. But in the years that followed that lecture Michel and I often discussed the history of friendship, and I have sought in this paper to complete that paper as he might have done had he lived, as a tribute to his memory. It is a paper about the body of the friend at the onset of the modern world and its loss.5
In a position not unlike that of Bray, I—along with you—confront the loss of a scholar who has done more, perhaps, than any other to return the body of the friend, and with it the complex meanings of intimacy, to historical consciousness. Although it did not fall to me to complete the monumental piece of scholarship that is The Friend, the manuscript Alan Bray was finishing at the time of his death, it does fall to me to try to do justice to a scholarly legacy that has had a singular, indispensable, and galvanizing effect on the history of sexuality, and that has, in its complete form, transformed the histories of friendship and the family.6
Bray’s first book, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, forcefully exposed a cultural contradiction: whereas sodomy was associated apocalyptically with debauchery, heresy, foreignness, and sedition, and thus the dissolution of the social order, intimate male friendship enabled all manner of legitimate social ties and mutually beneficial obligations, advancing homosocial relations within the patriarchal social order.7 There was nonetheless an affinity and a symmetry between representations of universally admired masculine friendship and officially condemned sodomy—as Bray later put it, “they occupied a similar terrain.”8 The result of this “unacknowledged connection between the unmentionable vice of Sodom and the friendship which all accounted commendable” was widespread cognitive dissonance, a reluctance to recognize in idealized friendship the dreaded signs of sodomy.9 The disparity between the rhetoric of unspeakability that governed public discourses and those social and erotic practices in which many men engaged indicated to Bray a “quiet, nominal adjustment,” perhaps unique to Renaissance England.10 This accommodation began to show signs of strain by the end of the sixteenth century, when changes in social relations and modes of symbolizing them caused the overlap in legitimate and illegitimate forms of male intimacy to become an identifiable social problem. With the rise of economic individualism and social pluralism—represented most visibly in the advent of London molly houses—male homoeroticism was dissociated from the broad nexus of homosociality. Newly legible as a secular social ill, it increasingly was prosecuted, as raids on molly houses arranged by the Society for the Reformation of Manners from 1699 to 1738 attest.
In advancing this thesis, Bray’s book demonstrated that homosexuality is not a stable, unchanging fact of sexual life, but a dynamic field of signification that possesses a history of its own, a history closely tied to other social phenomena: the structure of the household, the growth of cities, the emergence of individualism. To make these connections was to extricate the historiography of homosexuality from its preoccupation with the identification of gay individuals and to refocus it on the analysis of social structures and processes that regulate the intelligibility of same-gender attachments. Thus, despite the proliferation of scholarship on male homoeroticism and queer readings since the publication of Bray’s book in 1982, what Jonathan Goldberg said in his 1994 introduction to Queering the Renaissance is still true today: “Homosexuality in Renaissance England remains the groundbreaking and unsurpassed historical investigation for the period.”11
As if to make explicit the larger historical narrative of which Homosexuality in Renaissance England is a part, The Friend, offered as volume 2 to Bray’s history of male bonds, broadens out temporally in both directions. Tracing protocols of masculine friendship from the eleventh to the nineteenth century, Bray constructs an immensely learned archaeology of the “formal and objective” expressions of intimacy and obligation that are part of a forgotten history of the family, religion, and what he calls traditional society.12 Rather than function as the only basis of social cohesion, the early modern family subsisted within larger structures of relation, including those of Christian ritual, service, and “voluntary kinship”—the kinship created by ritual or promise, as in the bonds forged by adoption or sworn brotherhood.13 Insofar as the role of Christianity in traditional society was, according to Bray, to help members of the community to live in peace, its rites recognized several forms of binding commitment, including marriage, kinship, and friendship.14 Focused on the public witnessing of such unions in baptism, the Eucharist, the kiss of peace, and burial, as well as the sharing of beds and familiar correspondence, The Friend demonstrates friendship’s equivocal role not only in giving a social shape to masculine bonds but in threatening them. Friendship, Bray insists, was not an unreserved good; it could be compromised by expectations of material interest, influence, and advancement. Given the precariousness of relations in the public sphere, he argues, even the best of friendships could be shadowed by suspicions of collusion, misuse, and enmity, imparting an ethical uncertainty to friendship even when it was most clearly a matter of love. In a characteristic hermeneutic move, Bray discovers traces of the equivocal nature of friendship not only in the rites of traditional Christianity but in the idealized rhetoric of love and fidelity through which friendship was inscribed in letters, poetry, and burial monuments. Such idealized constructions, which we might assume to be empty conventions, were, in part because of their conventionality, replete with affect; in particular, they negotiated the fear that one’s friend might prove to be one’s enemy. By excavating the remains of friendship in public sites and rituals heretofore obscured by a historical enterprise intent on recognizing only the kinship created by marriage, by locating the family within an encompassing network of friendship that kinship also created, and by interpreting friendship from the standpoint of the Christian ethics it embodies, Bray’s compelling narrative returns to the praxis of friendship a social and historical efficacy that, until his work, had largely been