Marie H. Loughlin, ed. Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. Illustrations. 464 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-8207-8; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7190-8208-5.
Reviewed by Sara Read (Loughborough University)
Published on H-Histsex (September, 2015)
Commissioned by Chiara Beccalossi (University of Lincoln)
Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735 is a substantial anthology that aims to achieve a balanced representation of lesser-known and more well-known early writings “dealing with same-sex love, desire, sexual acts, and relationships,” and to give equal space to male and female expressions of the same. Its editor, Marie H. Loughlin, describes how the anthology is framed “in a period when the representation and meanings attached to these realities underwent enormous change” (p. 1). The anthology also includes a number of plates, for example, “Jupiter and Callisto,” from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which provide welcome visual representations. The collection is multi-genre and incorporates literary texts, such as excerpts from plays, poetry, and prose works, with less conventionally literary but increasingly studied texts, such as epistolary pieces, criminal pamphlets, and pseudo-medical texts. Texts range from extracts from the early poetry of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596) to the anonymous treatise Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1728?) which was later republished as Satan’s Harvest Home (1749).
Texts are grouped systematically into sections, each of which begins with a short but specific introduction, and the anthology closes with the two most substantial groupings: “Literature: Representing Male Same-Sex Erotic Relationships and Desires” followed by “Literature: Representing Female Same-Sex Erotic Relationships and Desires” which closes the edition. In line with the editor’s stated aim of equal representation, these sections are almost of equal size with the male section the larger by around fifteen pages, which is a small percentage of the almost three hundred pages that the two parts occupy. Sections are broken down into subsections and include a prefatory biographic note about the author. There is a slip in the accuracy of at least one of the biographical headnotes, however, which would need correcting when the anthology is used in the classroom. The note for the poet Katherine Philips repeats the once-popular claim that she was married at sixteen to a fifty-four-year-old colonel, James Philips (p. 493). However, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry for Philips explains, “Elizabeth Hageman has shown conclusively that the statement on the marriage licence, indicating that he was twenty-four, is accurate.”[1]
In addition to the three main sections—the two discussed above and chapter 7, “The Classical Tradition in Translation,” which is populated with so many excerpts that it fills 124 pages, or almost a quarter of the book—the anthology includes a shorter collection of texts grouped in the section titled “The New ‘Homosexual’ Subculture, 1700-1730.” This section outlines the context of the formation of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners in 1691, which were not just concerned with challenging same-sex desires but also swearing, Sabbath breaking, and general lewdness. The aims of this movement stood in contrast to the excesses associated with the Restoration era. One of the first targets for the Societies was a naval commander, Edward Rigby, and an account of his late seventeenth-century trial for sodomy is therefore rightly included in this section. In the early eighteenth century, “the Societies instigated mass arrests of ‘homosexuals’, taken in raids on meeting places throughout London, including the so-called ‘molly-houses’, as well as public parks and the Royal Exchange” (p. 116). These shorter sections mean that the anthology is somewhat uneven in its approach, however, with the opening chapter, “Religious and Moral Writing,” containing just three extracts (from the authorized version of the Bible, Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements [1597], and William Prynne’s Histrio-mastix [1633]). Similarly, chapter 2, “Pseudo-Medical Writings,” contains just two eighteenth-century works (namely, Giles Jacob’s Tractatus de Hermaphroditis [1718] and the anonymous Supplement to the Onania [1725?]) and only fills fifteen pages. These early chapters contrast with the size of the main sections, although, as noted above, these large sections are broken down into logical subsections. The remaining sections are “Criminal Pamphlets and the Law,” “Travel Writings,” and “Letters.” Loughlin acknowledges the difficulties in the task she faced whittling down a wealth of source material into the selection for the book. This is somewhat countered by the inclusion of a url (link to http://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/43470) tucked away in the prefatory material which links to a number of additional texts and “brief interpretative essays” (p. xvii).
The anthology opens with a detailed and informative twenty-six-page general introduction. Here, Loughlin argues that historians have generally subscribed to one of two models of sexuality: an essentialist form that “sees homosexual identity as having existed in a largely unchanged form across time, culture, and geographic space,” or a “social-constructionist model [that] sees homosexual identity as comprising a number of historically specific roles that vary across time, culture, and geographic space, and thus resists modern labels as anachronistic,” but acknowledges that explorations of this issue are more nuanced than the binary implies (p. 2). The introduction provides a thorough starting point to the topic of the anthology and links both to current historiography and literary debate and to the extracts in the book throughout. So, while this book is not the first anthology on this topic, with Kenneth Borris’s Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650 (2003) coming to mind, it does encompass a later chronology bringing in eighteenth-century texts into the collection, and allows for the exploration of attitudes toward male homosexuality in the early eighteenth century, as discussed above. This book was first published in 2014 simultaneously in hardback and paperback meaning that the latter makes for an affordable teaching edition. Taken in conjunction with the online companion website, this anthology will be of use to those working in the fields of literary studies, the history of sexuality, and many more areas of study.
Note
[1]. Warren Chernaik, “Philips , Katherine (1632–1664),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-histsex.
Citation:
Sara Read. Review of Loughlin, Marie H., ed., Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts.
H-Histsex, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43998
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |