early work raised “formidable questions” of “ontology and epistemology”: “what sodomy is and how it may be recognized.”64 In its performance of what appears to be a strategic ambiguity carried out in the name of ethics, Bray’s final book invites, if only to defer, questions just as formidable about the ontology and epistemology of friendship, eroticism, and sexuality.
In this regard, it is useful to unpack Bray’s concluding comments in a review of books on homosexuality in which he notes, with what appears to be mixed appreciation and apprehension, that the books “have succeeded in undermining their very starting point in the questions they have steadily been drawn into asking. What then is the nature of sexual identity, or of any personal identity? What is the difference between the sexual and the nonsexual? … The history of sexuality will not provide answers to these questions, if indeed there are any, but it has disturbingly raised them; and it is there that its importance lies.”65 It is telling that Bray’s skepticism regarding the history of sexuality as a field of knowledge production is articulated in the same breath as his apparent doubt regarding the field’s ability to resolve ontological questions about the identity of and relations between sexuality and friendship. Both, I believe, are worthy cautions, and both insights inform the chapters that follow. Nonetheless, as the charge of “projection” of homoerotic desires that has been leveled in Bray’s name vividly suggests, a countervailing epistemological and political danger is that not to pursue such ontological questions—what is sexuality? what is friendship? what is the nature of the difference between them?–risks ceding authority for answering them to those who would assert their own tendentious criteria for how sexuality is to be known. Rather than “[debunk] the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians of sexuality,” Bray’s historical scholarship intersects with the theoretical work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in inviting several queries that are simultaneously epistemological and methodological: How do we know when there were no homoerotic desires between historical figures? What is the basis of our knowledge of the eroticism of the past? How do we know what (we think) we know?
Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns represents my own response to these questions, but the impetus for working them out was anticipated and inspired by Alan Bray. For the logic of Bray’s corpus (if not the deliberate proffering of methodological dicta) implies certain propositions. First, if eroticism is always embedded in other forms of social relation, if acts of bodily intimacy are rendered intelligible only from within a precise social location, if the power of eroticism to signify is variable and uncertain, if we cannot always be confident that we have interpreted its presence or absence correctly, then eroticism, like sodomy and friendship, is apprehensible as a knowledge relation—one existing not only between people but between people and history. Not only will our desires for a usable past necessarily inform the history of sexuality we create, but the epistemological opacity of sexuality will be constitutive of the methods by which we investigate it. This recognition leads me, as it did not, apparently, lead Bray, to a second proposition. If we do not know the extent to which relations may have been erotic, it is as mistaken to assume that they were not as it is to assume that they were. In her afterword to Queering the Renaissance, Margaret Hunt urged scholars to “scramble the definitions and blur the boundaries of the erotic, both so as to forestall the repressive uses to which rigid understandings of it almost inevitably lend themselves, and to gain access to a much larger analytical arena.”66 In The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England, I took that invitation as far as seemed historically responsible by adopting, as a heuristic axiom, a studied skepticism about any a priori dividing line between female friendship and female homoeroticism. It may be that the difference gender makes in this regard is particularly salient: not only did cultural images of tribades have little of the apocalyptic force conveyed by images of sodomites, but the practices of female friendship may have been more congruent with the expression of female eroticism than masculine friendship was with sodomy.67 What counts as erotic, in other words, may involve gender differentials of which we are only now becoming sufficiently aware.
Insofar as the precise criteria one might use to sequester friendship from sexuality are nowhere theorized in Bray’s work, we might approach the question of their relation as a productive fault line upon which his corpus is built—the “blindness” that enabled his considerable insight. If, as I have argued, Bray negotiated this fault line by deploying a strategic ambiguity—by seeming at one point to concede or advance an erotic interpretation while at other points explicitly denying that possibility—it may be because of some criteria of evidence known only to him. The fact remains that nowhere does he submit to systematic comparison any evidence of erotic affect in order to better delineate the homosocial from the homoerotic. Rather than preclude further investigation, the identification of this problem—and the hijacking of Bray’s work to privilege asexual friendship over sexuality—should spur us on. Indeed, just how far the rhetoric and practice of masculine friendship comprehended the expression of erotic desire and the performance of erotic acts and whether it is possible to construct a legitimate definition of such criteria remain two questions unanswered by Bray’s corpus—questions, in other words, for the rest of us.68
Additional questions embedded in Bray’s work likewise deserve consideration. In the afterword to the 1995 edition of Homosexuality in Renaissance England, for instance, Bray boldly asserts that “attitudes to homosexuality unquestionably have been symptomatic of fundamental changes in European society and in substantial part constitutive of them.”69 Sexual representation is not merely mimetic; it has an efficacy, an agency, of its own. Such an assertion urges a greater appreciation of sexuality’s ideological utility—not only its pliability and susceptibility to pressure but its ability to exert pressure on practices, discourses, and institutions external to it. But from where, one might ask, does this agency derive? Of one thing we can be sure: it is not a function of desire. Strikingly absent from Bray’s work is any concept of desire as an internal, generative mechanism or drive. Such a concept is, to his mind, alien to the psychic, emotional, and ideological landscape of early modern culture. In his discussion of the sexual dreams and fantasies expressed in the diary of Michael Wigglesworth, for instance, Bray argues that the sexual impulses over which Wigglesworth agonized (the “filthy lust … flowing from my fond affection to my pupils”) were experienced by this colonial subject as unbidden, separate from his will, not a matter of his own desire at all.70 As Bray notes in The Friend, the “desire for the gift of the friend’s body … does not correspond easily to anything in our culture several centuries on.”71 Even as Bray may contribute to what David Halperin has called “the possibility of a new queer history of affect,”72 his contribution is not to explain what intimacy tells us about the desires of an individual subject (or, for that matter, to historicize emotion), but to describe the instrumentality of intimacy in creating (or threatening) social cohesion. Sworn brotherhood, for example, is a response to the ethical uncertainty of friendship, and its meaning exists primarily in the wider social responsibility assumed by friends when they formalize their vows. So too, the “desire for the gift of the friend’s body” functions, much like the homosocial desire anatomized by Sedgwick, as the glue that holds early modern society together.
Yet, the question remains: What does it mean to assert for representations of sexuality an agency that does not depend on a subject of desire? The answer to this question is everywhere implied by the dense historical interconnections Bray excavates among religion, ethics, the family, and friendship, but the most trenchant indication of it is recorded in a memorial headnote to an essay he published in an anthology that appeared after his death. According to Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke, when Bray asked himself, “How would [his current work] change the exploratory maps constructed twenty years ago? he said this: it would be a shift from studies of sexuality into ethics and from the politics of identity into the politics of friendship.”73 There is much for historians of sexuality to ponder in that proposed shift, including the presence or absence of the body and erotic desire in ethics and friendship and the risks involved in leaving their material histories behind. Addressing that risk is a motivating force behind Chapter 6,
