queer masculinities

Goran V. Stanivukovic: England 249
between men that we now call homoerotic, or even queer, not within
the context of power, violence, and domination, but within the
context of emotions, love, and friendship where desire and passion are
not clearly demarcated or reduced to one meaning. Looking at passions
between men in this way, we may come closer to what the elusive early
modern queer sexuality, and queer masculinity, against which every
other subjectivity was measured, might have meant to early modern
England.
Notes
1 Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: U of California P, 1986) 291.
2 I am grateful to Natasha Hurley, Ian McAdam, and Alan Stewart for their
advice while I was at work on this essay. I thank Michael O’Rourke for his
generous comments on an earlier draft of this essay. The research for this
essay was funded by The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada, and by Saint Mary’s University through a Faculty of Graduate
Studies Research Grant.
3 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol.1, trans. Robert Hurley (New
York: Vintage Books, 1990) 37.
4 Robert Cleaver, A godly form of hovseholde gournment: for the ordering of
private families according to the directions of God (London: by Thomas Creede,
1598) E7 v .
5 Tom Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester and New
York: Manchester UP, 2002) 1.
6 Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia UP,
1995) 34.
7 Bray, Homosexuality 43.
8 B[enjamin] C[arrier], PVRITANISME The Mother, SINNE THE DAUGHTER, or
A Treatise, wherein is demonstrated from Twenty seuerall Doctrines, and
Positions of Puritanisme; that the Fayth and Religion of the Puritans, doth
forcibly induce its Professours to the perpetrating of Sinne, and doth warrant the
committing of the same (St. Omer: English College P, 1633) 4 v –5 v .
9 Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992) 22–3.
10 Ian McCormick, ed., Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17 th and 18 th Century
Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) 10.
11 Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca
and London: Cornell UP, 2002) 170.
12 Stephen Orgel, The Authentic Shakespeare and Other Problems of the Early
Modern Stage (New York and London: Routledge, 2002) 211.
13 Orgel 219.
14 Mario DiGangi, ‘How Queer Was the Renaissance?’, Love, Sex, Intimacy and
Friendship between Men, 1550–1800, eds Katherine O’Donnell and Michael
O’Rourke (Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 129.
15 DiGangi, ‘How Queer Was the Renaissance?’ 129.