ENGLISH 611:
Seminar in Renaissance Literature
The Construction of Sexuality in Early Modern England

 Professor Harriette Andreadis

Oxford University Press introduces "Ideologies of Desire," its series devoted to the cultural study of sex and sexuality, with the following comments: "New scholarship in cultural studies has removed the study of sex from exclusively biological, medical, psychological, and Darwinian models, stressing instead how culture and social class construct sexual experience in each historical moment. Further, it has revealed the means by which cultures define sex, and how sex performs the work of culture. Common to this line of thinking is the belief that only within socially conditioned representational practices within ideology do human beings see themselves as the subjects of sexual experience." Inasmuch as one of the key historical moments recognized by the recent study of sexual ideologies is the early modern period, during which sexual identities and behaviors as modern ideologies now recognize them seem to have coalesced, this course will address the issues at stake in the study of the construction and representation of sexualities in early modern England, that is, from about 1550 to 1750. The methodology of the course will be to explore recent theoretical formulations about the construction of sexualities at the same time as we examine the literary/cultural representations of sexualities in the works of both familiar canonical writers and others not so well-known. It is assumed that students will have at least some rudimentary acquaintance with the historical, cultural, and scientific currents in England during this period and that they are concerned with discovering the fashion in which sex and sexualities are embedded in and constructed by what pass for cultural norms.

Literary and other Contemporary Texts

John Lyly, Sapho and Phao

William Shakespeare, Sonnets

Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander

Richard Barnfield, Sonnets

John Donne, Sapho to Philaenis

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Poems

Renaissance translations of Ovid's Heroides, 15th Epistle, Sapho to Phao

Elizabeth 1, selected poems and speeches

Katherine Philips, selected poems

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Convent of Pleasure

Ephelia, selected poems

Aphra Behn, selected poems

Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis (excerpts)

Mary Leapor, selected poems

excerpts from Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, as well as medical texts (e.g.

Bartholin père et fils), travel narratives (e.g. Nicholas de Nicholay), midwifery handbooks

(e.g. Jane Sharpe), marriage manuals (e.g. Nicholas Venette), quasi-pornographic texts, etc.

Theoretical and Historico-Cultural Readings

Some familiarity with the work and influence of Michel Foucault, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Judith Butler will be taken for granted, though there will be a brief review of their ideas at the start of the course. Chapters from the following texts will be assigned:

Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (1989)

Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982)

Warren Chernaik, Sexual Freedom in Restoration Literature (1995)

Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British lesbian culture 1668-1807 (1993)

Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma, eds., The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe ( 1989)

Jonathan Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (1994)

Robert Purks Maccubbin, ed., 'Tis Nature's fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment (1985)

Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Reproduction 1300-1840 (1986)

lan Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A study in the fortunes of scholasticism and medical science in European intellectual life (1980)

Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830 (1992)

Roy Porter and Lesley Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain,1650-1950 (1995)

Claude Summers, ed., Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (1992)

Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., Renaissance Discourses of Desire (1993)

path-breaking articles from The Journal of the History of Sexuality and GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies

Tentative Assignments

In addition to required reading and class participation, students will be responsible for a series of 6 brief response papers of 1-2 pages each on the assigned readings (30%), for class presentations and participation (20%), and for a final research essay (15+ pages exclusive of apparatus)(50%).