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 forgotten. Why it was forgotten as the Enlightenment ushered in civil society will be of considerable interest to those who seek to understand how the past paved the way for our present.
The influence of Bray’s first book and published essays can be seen in all subsequent treatments of male homoeroticism from 1550 to 1800 in England, in no small part because of his activist commitment to “play[ing] a part in changing” “the world around us as history has given us it.”15 Yet it implies a serious underestimate of the value of Homosexuality in Renaissance England that the book most often is cited only for its exposure of cognitive dissonance and its narrative regarding the emergence of a homosexual identity. Because of the stranglehold that questions of identity and the dating of its consolidation have had on the history of homosexuality, and because the critical accent has been on the content of Bray’s historical scheme rather than the method by which he composed it, the considerable conceptual advances he made in charting an epistemic shift in the intelligibility of male bonds have not been fully assessed.16 By highlighting some of his additional contributions to historiographic method, I hope to draw attention to the opportunities and challenges they offer for future engagement and critical dialogue, including the extent to which his work intersects with yet also challenges certain dispositions within queer studies.
It is one of the paradoxes of Bray’s scholarly career that the history of sexuality is not the discipline in which he would have located his work. Repeatedly he insists that to begin with the question of sexuality is to misconstrue the issue.17 The point, articulated throughout his corpus, is to view sexuality in a wider social and interpretive frame, whereas “the effect of a shaping concern with sexuality is precisely to obscure that wider frame.”18 This is true because “what is missing [in Renaissance discourses] is any social expression of homosexuality based on the fact of homosexuality itself…. What we look for in vain are any features peculiar to it alone.”19 Bray’s determined ambivalence regarding the disciplinary field of sexuality studies is, I suggest, simultaneously a product of his historical inquiry and the ground out of which his historiography emerged. His insistence that sexuality—by which I mean not only the identity categories of homo and hetero, but the very idea of an autonomous field of erotic relations—was a post-seventeenth-century phenomenon motivates what I believe is his most decisive contribution: the location of male intimacy in a range of early modern social systems. Having described in his first book the forms of social life in which homosexuality was embedded—the village, the household, the educational system, apprenticeship, prostitution, the theater—in subsequent work he situates male bonds within the symbolic gift systems of patronage, preferment, and service associated with the medieval great house. What he calls “the gift of the friend’s body”—signified by public kisses and embraces, eating at the common table, the sharing of beds, the familiar letter—functioned up through the sixteenth century as a crucial form of “countenance.”20 Such public signs of favor and intimacy, Bray argues, were not only normative but instrumentally oiled the wheels of social relations. With the demise of the openhanded household—a change both architectural and social—the public conveyance of countenance through the friend’s body ceased to be advantageous; lacking its prior symbolic capital, it became unintelligible. As England was transformed into a modern, civil society, friendship was recast as a noninstrumental affinity: “rational, objective, universal,” and for the most part irrelevant to Christian ethics and public affairs.21 Situating this change within a new regime of visibility—the disappearance of lower servants from view, of gentlemen from service, of crowds drinking in the great hall—Bray offers a causal explanation for the growth of suspicion regarding behaviors previously deemed unexceptional, as well as for the persecution of mollies. Just as the “sodomite” took on a “new actuality,” so too a “radically new meaning to the desire for the body of the friend” took shape.22 As Bray memorably describes this shift, the public kiss and embrace were replaced by the handshake.23
Michel Foucault’s corpus is often credited, rightly, with articulating the theoretical import of reading for silences, absences, and exclusions. Alan Bray’s corpus, it seems to me, demonstrates the payoff of this approach. Characteristic of Bray’s rhetorical stance is the adoption of the persona of the sleuth, embarked on a slow process of detection: painstakingly following a “forensic trail” of clues, sharing his mind as it works through assumptions and doubts, examining evidence from multiple angles, entertaining objections, and devising alternative methods in light of them.24 The discovery of clues, of course, often is an effect of what is not said, and Bray’s favored trope for this function
