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The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England
By Valerie Traub
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002
Critics and historians have traditionally thought of early modern lesbianism as largely invisible, a shadowy essence failing to register in a prevailingly patriarchal culture. Valerie Traub has worked for a decade to challenge that idea, and in The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, she tackles the problem in two ways: by increasing the magnification on a wide range of cultural documents to reveal a tracery of female-female eroticism, and by challenging established definitions and hermeneutic methods. Through both approaches, but especially the second, the book inquires into the foundations of the erotic and sexual taxonomies that result in modern definitions of heterosexual, homosexual, gay, and lesbian identities. For Traub, there is nothing pre-given about erotic arrangements (361). Accordingly, eroticism functions here as a "heuristic tool" and "category of analysis" (21), with the definition of the "sexual" submitted to careful scrutiny. Traub illuminates how fully patriarchal concepts of sexuality have dominated traditional critical as well as literary discourses. Her significant achievement is to suggest what a nonphallocentric sexuality looks like and to enable a vision of how it flourished in early modern England.
Throughout the book "lesbian" and "lesbianism" are italicized to register their use as "strategic anachronism[s]" (16), a tactic less intrusive than one initially fears. While Traub presents compelling evidence for the presence of female-female eroticism in the earlier period, she steadfastly resists the idea of a transhistorical lesbian identity. She differs from gay historians who look to the past for a mirror and indeed presents a sophisticated analysis of such a desire as a species of melancholia. Traub believes her genealogical project, showing the historical development of the concept of lesbianism, can "pry apart the terms" and "disarticulatfe the] links" of modern homophobic discourses (228). The Renaissance of Lesbianism amply demonstrates the mutability of epistemological categories and supports Traub's contention that the cultural signification of various erotic arrangements is not inevitable. She successfully remaps the...