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James M. Bromley and Will Stockton, eds. Sex Before Sex: Figuring the Act in Early Modern England. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 329 pages. $27.50.
The title of Sex Before Sex is deliberately disorienting. That modern sexual subjectivity did not exist in early modernity is by now familiar to us, providing the impetus for the recent overview of premodern sexual historiography entitled Sex Before Sexuality. But until now, critics have been likely to assume that while early modern cultural formations of sexuality were different than our own, early modern sexual acts were much like ours. Aren't sexual acts, if not their meanings, instinctive, natural, and timeless? The essays gathered here, authored by some of the most creative scholars currently working in early modern sexuality studies, suggest that this is decidedly not the case. Taken as a whole, the collection argues for a reorientation of the field away from the axes of desires and identities and towards those of acts and their figurations, emphasizing the importance of viewing sex acts as interpretive cruxes that must be parsed before one can construct arguments about sexual desires and identities. In their provocative introduction, James M. Bromley and Will Stockton rightly point out that despite the wealth of scholarship on early modern sexuality produced since Jonathan Goldberg's landmark collection, Queering the Renaissance (1994), "the sex act itself actually remains an undertheorized and underhistoricized concept" (10). The result of this methodological focus on the " hermeneutic complexity of sexual signification" (6) is an admirably diverse series of essays that leaves the reader with a renewed appreciation for how little we know about sex before sex, and how rich the opportunities are for future research.
In addition to the introduction and an afterword, the volume contains ten essays organized into five pairs. The first two essays, by Christine Varnado and Kathryn Schwarz, analyze "the construction of sexual knowledge" (15). The collection begins with an eye-opening critical intervention, in which Varnado persuasively argues that early modern studies has yet to implement the full interpretive power of a queer analytic for understanding early modern sexual figuration. Examining on- and off-stage figurations of sex in Romeo and Juliet (1594-95), The Roaring Girl (1611), and The Changeling (1622), Varnado's essay demonstrates that our...