disciplines. Cross-disciplinary affiliation as I practice it here does not presuppose harmony or paper over differences; indeed, I often dwell on differences, precisely to explore the unique affordances offered by each method. The historical questions addressed in these sections include the relation between eroticism and friendship; the relative salience of acts versus identities; the decision to privilege historical alterity or continuity; the assumption of a correlation between periodization and subjectivity; the varied meanings and functions of temporality; ambivalence about comprehensive period chronologies; the problem of historical teleology; the methodological resources provided by language; and the politically fraught relation between pastness, particularly the premodern, and sexualized formations of racial, ethnic, religious, and national otherness. Among the historiographic arguments developed in these pages is the idea that to do the history of sexuality is not to turn a blind eye to perennial features of the erotic system; but neither is it too quickly to assume similarity or homology in such a way that historical distance and difference are rendered inconsequential. Relations between similarity and difference in historiography might be construed less as an imperative choice than as shimmering tension. To think about resemblance can open an inquiry up to alterity—especially to how something differs from itself. To think about alterity can lead one back to similarity—to ghostly echoes and uncanny resemblances. Similarity and difference, so construed, are metabolic and metamorphic; they are not “up against” each other in the sense of opposition, but “up against” each other in the sense of up close and personal—with all the fraught tensions that this can entail.51
My effort to think sex beyond the protocols of identity history and social contextualization has involved unsettling the boundaries between hetero and homoeroticism, as well as licit and illicit, transgressive and orthodox, sexualities. Abandoning strict division between such notions, as well as between men and women, same-sex bonds and heterosexual marriage, enables different configurations of relationship to come to the fore. Emphasizing the erratic and wayward transitivity of erotic desires and acts, and questioning the categories by which “the sexual” is defined, I enact a version of “queering” now common among early modernists and queer studies scholars, advancing the idea that queer is that which most “confounds the notion of being as being at one with oneself.”52 Nonetheless, there are crucial differences in my approach that trouble a presumed consensus about what it means, methodologically and theoretically, to queer. As I have already begun to suggest, rather than focusing on how early modern sexuality defies modern categories or is itself anti-identitarian, I focus on how sexuality sets up obstacles to knowledge, not in terms of identity but in terms of sex. Second, in my effort to deploy “queer”—as a verb, a method, and a category—with analytical rigor and precision, I explore, rather than assume, its oppositional stance toward normativity. Given the principled undefinability of “queer,” its infinite mobility and mutability, one notion has provided ballast for its centrifugal expansion: the idea that it is always posed against the “normal.” Other queer studies scholars have begun to explore how “queer mobility and indefinition function within queer studies as both a disciplinary norm and a front,” and that rather than being “endlessly open-ended, polyvalent, and reattachable,” it is “sticky … with history.”53 Aligned with their efforts to explore the field habitus of queer studies but with more distant historical periods in mind, I explore what is normal for the early modern period. Third, because I attend “to sexuality’s governance across multiple and contradictory regulatory norms,”54 I also retain gender as a crucial modifier of sexuality and the meanings of queer.
Knowing Women’s Bodies
It is a central premise of what follows that our conceptual resources are impoverished when it is maintained that any attempt to account for sexuality in precisely gendered or corporeal terms results in an unwelcome policing of desire, an epistemological violence against the libido, or an exasperating confinement of bodies. My resistance to the trend to ignore, despecify, or dispatch gender in the name of queer is theoretically grounded in an appreciation of the multiple vectors (gender, sexuality, race, class) that historically have underpinned and crosshatched embodiment in sometimes congruent, sometimes incongruent ways. It also stems from a historical sense that queer studies misrecognizes its own conditions of emergence when it categorically rejects affiliation with feminism in the name of analytically separating sexuality from gender. Yes, gender and sexuality are not the same,55 and there are good reasons for initiating their tactical divergence for certain questions and certain projects.56 Nonetheless, to “distinguish sexuality from gender analytically is not [necessarily] to deny their relationship but is in fact the precondition for undertaking the study of that relationship.”57 The question of how gender and sexuality do and do not interanimate at any particular time and place remains a live question.58 This is in part because gender is continuously materialized through social and psychic practices and will operate contingently for different communities and individuals. Indeed, the intransigence of gender, as both embodied materiality and as analytic tool, is one of the opacities with which this book is most concerned. For all of these reasons, the feminism animating these pages is fueled not only by theoretical investments but by a historicist interest in the ongoing work of gender.59
One of the main arguments of this book is that the gendered specificity of female embodiment offers an especially valuable resource for thinking sex. We can approach this resource in historicist terms, noting how often early modern discourses constitute the female body as a knowledge problem. Consider the early modern medical and theological controversies about the existence of the hymen, as well as the hymen’s controversial status in the effort to “prove” virginity.60 As Margaret Ferguson argues, “for centuries, the hymen has been alleged to give ‘proof’ of a virgin’s existence; from the early modern period to the present, however, the proof is riddled by doubt. The hymen may have been destroyed by the digital searches of those charged with finding it; or it may have been lost ‘innocently,’ and in a way the female subject has forgotten; and/or it may never have existed (as an object available to ‘ocular proof’) at all.”61 Early modern medical texts also attribute the breaking of the hymen to the use of illicit “instruments” such as dildos, to overly vigorous masturbation, to the “defluxion of sharp humors,”62 and to the illicit penetration of the vagina by sexual partners, male and female.63 But such acts are not, in the end, conclusive of the presence or absence of the hymen. Who knows how a woman has lost her hymen? Who knows if it even exists? Regularly presented in medical texts as a matter of “controversy,” the existence of the hymen stymied physicians’ most dedicated efforts to secure medical “fact.”64
Representing a basic threshold of human knowledge, the enigma of the hymen is only one of a number of commonly noted “female mysteries.” Foremost among them is the truism that only women can definitely know the paternity of their children: while the reproductive effects of certain sex acts might seem obvious, the ascription of paternity onto a single man depends, absent the physical resemblance of child to father, on the performance of a woman’s word.65 Likewise dependent upon women’s performative acts is the enduring question of women’s orgasm. Because it was commonly believed that women emitted seed during orgasm, this inquiry took the form of medical debates about the physical nature of female seed (including its confusion with vaginal lubrication, secretions, menses, and leukorrhea), its comparative quality (generally thought to be thinner and weaker than men’s), the extent to which emission of seed was the source of female erotic pleasure, and the age-old question of whether women’s pleasure in sex was greater than man’s. Add to this the ability of women to fake it and the ways in which anxiety about that ability bleeds into Renaissance concerns about women’s insincerity and capacity to deceive,66 and women’s orgasm becomes another early modern sexual-knowledge problem. Such queries, controversies, and thematizations of the mystery of female bodies register the impossibility of knowing sex through them.67
The photograph included here encapsulates some of what is at stake in using women’s embodiment to think more broadly about the historical conjunctions of sex and knowledge. It depicts a statue on a column outside the Paris cathedral
