advance the epistemological direction inaugurated by his historical work.
A further consideration is the relation of Bray’s work to the category of gender. On the face of it, Bray’s corpus seems to offer little to the history of female friendship or female sexuality. Although I tend to think otherwise, certain problems with his approach to gender deserve acknowledgment. Bray duly noted the restricted scope of Homosexuality in Renaissance England: “Female homosexuality was rarely linked in popular thought with male homosexuality, if indeed it was recognized at all. Its history is, I believe, best to be understood as part of the developing recognition of a specifically female sexuality.”74 This may have been true when this book was written; whether it remains true is a question to which I will return. To his credit, Bray recognized then that the dissonance between friendship and sodomy was in part a function of gender: “So long as homosexual activity did not disturb the peace or the social order, and in particular so long as it was consistent with patriarchal mores, it was largely in practice ignored.”75 Yet, because of the asymmetrical application of the legal and theological category of sodomy to early modern English men and women, Bray’s first book does not provide ready analytical purchase to scholars working on women. Perhaps predictably, major studies of female homoeroticism have limited their engagement with his thesis primarily to the perception of parallels between a growing stigma regarding female intimacies and the increasing legibility of sodomy.76
Bray’s published essays on friendship likewise retain a focus on men, in part because the formal displays of intimacy that characterized male patronage in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, he argues, less relevant to women, who on the whole were denied access to the public sphere. As Bray remarks in “The Body of the Friend,” it was precisely because of the male body’s privileged ability to confer cultural capital that the gift of the friend’s body was definitively male. In addition, much of Bray’s analysis of the symbolic gift exchanges among men hinges on the fact that “the daily cycle of working, eating and drinking, the bodily functions, and sleeping was carried on outside the marital home.” “Service in the great houses was men’s work,” Bray contends, and although women served as washerwomen, herdswomen, and traders, they did so from outside the great house walls.77 Where, one might ask, did these women live? Given the importance of the patriarchal household, it seems unlikely that they resided in all-female collectives. Does the mere fact that they were not mentioned in household records provide sufficient support for Bray’s claim?78
A portion of The Friend’s long final chapter concerns female relations, mainly by means of the figure of Anne Lister. Prior to this chapter the book treats female friendship as “the silence between the lines” of male friendship, referring briefly and sporadically to a few female burial monuments.79 Lister’s voluble diary breaks this silence, both because of its erotic explicitness and because Lister was intent on enacting with two of her lovers the kind of formal, public, and binding union that sworn brothers had vowed for centuries. She thus provides Bray with a “vantage point” for reconsidering the congruity between a relationship that was “unquestionably sexual” and “the confirmation of a sworn friendship in the Eucharist,” as well as a frame for thinking about the extent to which “that traditional world of kinship and friendship at the heart of religion’s role” survived in the byways of the nineteenth century.80 Nonetheless, the criteria Bray uses to admit women’s entrance into the historical picture imply that there is little evidence with which to track the path of female friendship prior to Lister’s relatively late incarnation. Bray admits that the friendship between Ann Chitting and Mary Barber “had a sufficiently formal and objective character for them to be buried together” in the early seventeenth century, but this does not impact his general view that women’s role in the history of friendship is the “silence between the lines.”81 One is left to wonder whether Lady Anne Clifford’s apology, in a letter to her mother, for her inability to travel “to Oxford, according to your Ladyship’s desire with my Lady Arbella [Stuart], and to have slept in her chamber, which she much desired, for I am the more bound to her than can be,” demonstrates something of the public conveyance of countenance that Bray charts in familiar letters between men.82 In other words, there is the question of how Bray actually reads the lives of the women whom he includes, and what these readings do to broaden the terms of feminist and lesbian histories. Finally, one is left to wonder about the historiographic irony that a woman should have been the means to reinsert sex back into the historical narrative. Early in the historiography of homosexuality, the boys had sodomy and the girls had romantic friendship; in The Friend, as in other recent work, the history of male homosexuality is all about love.
If we shift our focus from what Bray says about women to what his work makes available to those of us working on women, however, a more enabling set of procedures emerges. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, methods of analysis and interpretation derived from scholarship on men can be usefully applied on behalf of women; such methodological cross-gender identification, I argue, may even have some advantages over the supposedly gender-neutral rubric of “queer.” Adoption of Bray’s insights about the unstable nature of erotic signification and consideration of the ontological and epistemological issues raised by his work would greatly nuance scholarship on women’s sexuality, which has tended to presuppose a certain knowingness about it. Indeed, insofar as a central question in the history of female homoeroticism has been how to talk about “lesbianism” before the advent of modern identity categories, we would do well to consider how this question of anachronistic terminology can morph into an ontological question—what is lesbianism in any given era?—as well as how these queries might be supplemented with the epistemological question: how do we know it?
Although nothing in Bray’s corpus provides clear answers to these questions, in its performance of ambiguity, tension, and irresolution his work urges us to ask them. In the expanse of its historical sweep, The Friend, in particular, gestures in a direction that might draw us closer to some answers. Perhaps not since Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present has a responsible scholar of gay/lesbian/queer history approached large-scale historical change and continuity with such confidence and ambition. In part because the postmodern suspicion toward the explanatory power of metanarratives has taken firm hold in those subfields where the history of homosexuality is most often written (social and cultural history, gender and women’s history, cultural studies, literary studies),83 the creation of densely local and socially contextualized knowledges has been constitutive of the field.
Bray’s widening of the temporal lens in The Friend allows us to consider anew how the retrospective fiction of periodization has functioned as an epistemic force field, permitting certain questions to advance while occluding others. To the extent that the suitability of assuming a longer vantage has been raised within the history of homosexuality, it has been approached primarily via the debate between acts and identities or, in its more historiographical formulation, between the assertion of alterity or continuism. In the context of this debate, responsible reconsideration of taking the long view has gone precisely nowhere. Yet, as archival materials come to light that support more nuanced conceptions of identity, orientation, and predisposition than early social constructivist accounts would have allowed, these debates have begun to diminish in importance.84 Recent attempts to move beyond the impasse produced by these debates have demonstrated that it is the precise nature and interrelations of continuities and discontinuities that are of interest, not the analytical predominance of one over the other.85
Bray’s final book is perhaps the most subtle mediation between the claims of historical continuity and historical difference in this field to date. It thus provides the springboard for the consideration of historiography, including issues of alterity, continuism, and periodization, pursued in the next two chapters. In addition, by insisting that friendship can be understood only in terms of the wider context that gives it meaning, The Friend confutes a basic, if undertheorized, premise of the historiography of homosexuality: that we must conceptualize
