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CHAPTER 2

Friendship’s Loss

Alan Bray’s Making of History

Explaining the motives and procedures of an “intellectual history that is correlated with critical theory,” Dominick LaCapra emphasizes that such a project focuses “on modes of conceptualization and argument—the way material is or is not thought out, ‘emplotted,’ worked over, and set forth.”¹ Furthermore, it “often moves on the ‘meta’ level by inquiring into its objects of study, along with the ways they have been studied, through interrogating and at times contesting their assumptions or sense of what is or is not worthwhile and valid. Thought here takes an insistently dialogic form in interrogating the work of others and in opening itself to interrogating in the interest of both disclosing questionable assumptions or arguments and enabling intellectual movement toward more desirable alternatives.”²

I am not an intellectual historian. And my poles of orientation are less post-structuralism and disciplinary history than queer theory and feminism. However, the impetus for the chapters that follow share with LaCapra an interest in “modes of conceptualization and argument,” and they enact my response to “the very way problems are articulated.”³ This motive necessitates returning to constitutive formulations of a field, as well as raising basic questions about its genesis in order to examine the “prereflective disciplinary habitus” within which practitioners engage.⁴ I thus begin with some of the concepts devised by one of the originators of the history of early modern sexuality in an effort both to honor his intellectual legacy and to ask how scholars might work with and through the questions that this legacy raises.

In the headnote that precedes his essay “The Body of the Friend,” Alan Bray describes the painful occasion that gave impetus to his work:

In 1987 I heard Michel Rey, a student of J.-L. Flandrin in the University of Paris, give a lecture entitled “The Body of My Friend.” The lecture was only an outline, and his early death left his doctoral thesis uncompleted and his loss keenly felt by many. But in the years that followed that lecture Michel and I often discussed the history of friendship, and I have sought in this paper to complete that paper as he might have done had he lived, as a tribute to his memory. It is a paper about the body of the friend at the onset of the modern world and its loss.⁵

In a position not unlike that of Bray, I—along with you—confront the loss of a scholar who has done more, perhaps, than any other to return the body of the friend, and with it the complex meanings of intimacy, to historical consciousness. Although it did not fall to me to complete the monumental piece of scholarship that is The Friend, the manuscript Alan Bray was finishing at the time of his death, it does fall to me to try to do justice to a scholarly legacy that has had a singular, indispensable, and galvanizing effect on the history of sexuality, and that has, in its complete form, transformed the histories of friendship and the family.⁶

Bray’s first book, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, forcefully exposed a cultural contradiction: whereas sodomy was associated apocalyptically with debauchery, heresy, foreignness, and sedition, and thus the dissolution of the social order, intimate male friendship enabled all manner of legitimate social ties and mutually beneficial obligations, advancing homosocial relations within the patriarchal social order.⁷ There was nonetheless an affinity and a symmetry between representations of universally admired masculine friendship and officially condemned sodomy—as Bray later put it, “they occupied a similar terrain.”⁸ The result of this “unacknowledged connection between the unmentionable vice of Sodom and the friendship which all accounted commendable” was widespread cognitive dissonance, a reluctance to recognize in idealized friendship the dreaded signs of sodomy.⁹ The disparity between the rhetoric of unspeakability that governed public discourses and those social and erotic practices in which many men engaged indicated to Bray a “quiet, nominal adjustment,” perhaps unique to Renaissance England.¹⁰ This accommodation began to show signs of strain by the end of the sixteenth century, when changes in social relations and modes of symbolizing them caused the overlap in legitimate and illegitimate forms of male intimacy to become an identifiable social problem. With 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 in his own work—as well as that of others—was “the detective story where the clue was that the dog did not bark.”²⁵ With steady tough-mindedness, he draws significance out of what is, and what is not, available in the archive. In so doing, the archive is reconfigured: it is not a storehouse or treasure chest waiting to be opened but a palimpsest of fragments, on the ragged edges of which hang unexpected meanings. Bray’s articulation of the difference between Elizabethan and later discourses of male intimacy, for instance, hinges on “what is left out” in idealized expressions of friendship: the “tactful omission of those bonds of mutual interest of which the everyday signs were such conventions.”²⁶ When suspicion is generated by accounts of friendship, as it increasingly was, it is because “some of the conventions of friendship are missing … and the missing ones are precisely those that ensured that the intimacy of these conventions was read in an acceptable frame of reference.”²⁷ What could convert signs of male friendship into signs of sodomy, it turns out, was partly the mixing of status or degree—and it was only by looking for “the silence between the lines” that Bray hit upon the significance of social inequality to the sodomy-friendship interrelation.²⁸ For a social historian generally committed to traditional protocols of evidence, this emphasis on silence and insignificance, on traces and fragments and the difficulties of intelligibility they pose, was, especially at the time, a strikingly unconventional move.²⁹

That erotic behavior might not signify in or by itself implicitly links the problem of representation to the issue of social embeddedness. The combined effect of this connection is to emphasize the uncertainty of sexuality’s power of signification. As I noted in Chapter 1, Laurie Shannon has cogently rearticulated and extended Bray’s argument, maintaining that there is nothing fully dispositive about eroticism to convey particular meanings; erotic acts operate only unreliably as a trigger for articulation.³⁰ Correlating the gift of the friend’s body to the changing fate of homosexuality, for instance, Bray argues that the proximity of exalted and excoriated male bonds means that erotic affects and acts could be an element of both—it depends on how you look at it. How you look at it is itself influenced by historical factors, including what counts as sex in a given culture. What counts, of course, can be highly contingent, variable, and incoherent, even within a single culture and historical moment—as was brought home to everyone in the United States when President Bill Clinton avowed that whatever he did with Monica Lewinsky, it was not sex.³¹

One effect of showing that sodomy and friendship could be recognized at one moment as utterly distinct and at another moment as close to the same thing was to deconstruct, from a historically specific angle, the boundary between them. The complex elaboration of male intimacy throughout early modern society, coupled with the potential for erotic acts not to signify, creates the interpretative field into which all erotic behaviors fall: “Mediated as homosexuality then was by social relationships that did not take their form from homosexuality and were not exclusive to it, the barrier between heterosexual and homosexual behaviour … was in practice vague and imprecise.”³² One might expect, then, that changes in the social articulation of male bonds might affect the meanings of male intimacy with women—and indeed they did. Just as the sodomite became identifiable as a perversion of normative cross-sex alliance, so these alliances increasingly relied on the sodomite to secure their own status as natural and inevitable. Arguing that the transformation in male intimacy “placed a burden of social meaning on the heterosexual bond between husband and wife that before it had not been required to carry alone,” and that, with the ascendance of civil society, the gift of the body came to be acknowledged “only as a sexual gift between men and women,”³³ Bray brings to the theoretical dictum of the dependence of the hetero on the homo a historical specificity it otherwise often lacks.³⁴

Yet, it is important to acknowledge that, despite this deconstructive impulse, Bray never adopted the inversive desideratum of queer theory: that the burden of proof belongs to those who assume the presence of heterosexuality. Committed as he was to the historian’s protocols of evidence, and taking seriously sexuality’s lack of dispositive power, he was cautious about assigning erotic signification to particular gestures, behaviors, texts, people. He especially discounted the truth value of Renaissance accusations of sodomy, whose evidentiary basis he rightly judged to be unreliable:

We will misunderstand these accusations if, beguiled by them, we uncritically assume the existence of the sexual relationship which they appear to point to, for the material from which they could be constructed was rather open and public to all…. Homosexual relationships did indeed occur within social contexts which an Elizabethan would have called friendship…. But accusations [of sodomy] are not evidence of it.³⁵

It is here, perhaps, that we can catch a glimpse of an unacknowledged tension in Bray’s corpus: on the one hand, the open and public nature of friendship protected early modern men from suspicion of sodomy; on the other, it somehow provides an indication in the present that they were not involved in a “sexual relationship.” In his first book, after noting the difficulties involved in using modern conceptual categories, Bray adopted the solution of using “the term homosexuality but in as directly physical—and hence culturally neutral—a sense as possible.”³⁶ How “culturally neutral” derives from “directly physical” has long puzzled me, especially since the meaning of “physical” seems here, by default, to imply anal intercourse—perhaps the least culturally neutral, most overdetermined erotic activity during the early modern period and today. Throughout the first book, then, homosexuality, implicitly conflated with a single erotic practice, is also functionally equated with sodomy. One result of this series of conflations is that the baseline meaning of homosexuality, its status as an analytical object, is foreknown and foreclosed—even as the locations in which it is expressed and the significations it accrues change over time.³⁷ Another result is that friendship—for all its structural affinity with and proximity to homosexuality—is definitionally posited as something other than homosexuality: not, as it were, “directly physical.”³⁸

This is in fact Mario DiGangi’s critique of the way that Bray manages the tension between sodomy, homosexuality, and friendship: “Bray effectively conflates ‘homosexuality’ with ‘sodomy,’ implicitly reduces both to the commission of sexual acts, and then cordons off these proscribed sexual acts from the nonsexual intimacy appropriate for ‘friends.’”³⁹ In contrast, Jonathan Goldberg confidently affirms that the combined theses of Homosexuality in Renaissance England and the influential essay “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” imply that “much in the ordinary transactions between men in the period … took place sexually.”⁴⁰ The possibility of two such opposed interpretations of Bray’s core argument is symptomatic not of misreading or misappropriation but of a pervasive ambiguity animating his work. The analytic tension between eroticism and friendship became clearer to me while reading the manuscript of The Friend, where the embedding of intimacy in a vast range of social relations and the foregrounding of ethical considerations had the subtle but persistent effect of minimizing the possibility that the bonds being described were at all sexual. Throughout Bray’s work, there is a recurring expression of concern that the reader might be “misled” by the appearance of erotic meanings, leading him or her to “misconstrue” the forces at work in the construction of male intimacy.⁴¹ The Friend’s brief for the ethical import of friendship is particularly punctuated by such cautions against misconstruction. Indeed, the ambiguities and tensions present in Bray’s earlier work are heightened in his final book.

On the one hand, the intense emotional affects Bray excavates in The Friend—affects that give rituals and conventions their experiential salience and contribute to their social efficacy—would seem to belie any strict dichotomy between friendship and eroticism.⁴² Early on Bray notes that the ethical praxis he aims to uncover need not have excluded the erotic: “The ethics of friendship in the world I describe began with the concrete and the actual, and the only way to exclude anything would be by abandoning that starting point. That hard-edged world included the potential for the erotic, as it included much else.”⁴³ And, throughout the book he acknowledges the erotic potential of the physical closeness that, at any given moment, might signify one way or the other: bonds that, because of their association with social excess and disorder, signified sodomy; bonds that, due to their coherence with legitimate forms of social organization, signified friendship, kinship, obligation, love. On the other hand, sometimes Bray dismisses the historian’s access to “the possible motives and nature of [a] physical relationship” by reducing such interpretation to “no more than speculations”—as in his discussion of Amy Poulter’s marriage to Arabella Hunt.⁴⁴ Sometimes the potential eroticism of friends is specifically, even categorically, denied—most emphatically, perhaps, in the exposition of John Henry Cardinal Newman’s shared grave with Ambrose St. John, which forms the coda of Bray’s book: “Their bond was spiritual…. Their love was not the less intense for being spiritual. Perhaps, it was more so.”⁴⁵ Whereas Bray in his final chapter pointedly asks (in response to the sexual escapades recorded in the diary of Anne Lister), “Would a sexual potential have stood in the way of the confirmation of a sworn friendship in the Eucharist? The answer must be that it would not, in that it evidently did not do so here,”⁴⁶ at the telos of his argument he resurrects, seemingly without hesitation, a stark division between spiritual and carnal love.⁴⁷ This division is apparent as well in Bray’s objections to John Boswell’s scholarship on same-sex unions; one of Boswell’s mistakes was his inability to grasp “that the expected ideals of the rite would not have comprehended sexual intercourse.”⁴⁸ Here, however, the circumspection of the qualifier “expected” perhaps carries Bray’s central point: that is, the ease with which a distinction between love and sodomy was maintained in the official discourse of traditional society, whatever the actual nature of the relation.⁴⁹ The analytic ambiguity at the heart of The Friend’s emphasis on erotic potential thus pulls in two contradictory directions. At times this ambiguity expands the meaning of homoerotic affect, rendering it as something more than “just sex,” a point about which Bray was explicit: “The inability to conceive of relationships in other than sexual terms says something of contemporary poverty.”⁵⁰ But when this ambiguity slides into a categorical denial of eroticism, it risks conceding the defining terms of the argument to those who would protect the study of intimacy from eroticism’s embodied materiality.

The risk of dematerializing eroticism was articulated two decades ago when Goldberg warned that sexuality “can always be explained in other terms, and in ways in which anything like sex disappears.”⁵¹ This caution will be examined in Chapter 6. It is worth noting that, despite the symbolic centrality of the gift of the friend’s body in Bray’s book, bodies themselves play a very small part in his discussion. One is tempted to say that the materiality of the body is displaced onto the memorials—the gravestones and churches—that populate his account.⁵² Nonetheless, I wonder what Bray would have made of the triumphant proclamation on the inside dust jacket cover of The Friend: “He debunks the now-familiar readings of friendship by historians of sexuality who project homoerotic desires onto their subjects when there were none.”⁵³ Certainly, Bray warned repeatedly against anachronism and misconstrual: he considered them bad history. But his own negotiation of this problem was considerably more nuanced than an effort to “debunk” the assertions of others; nor does the preemptive rejection of the mutual engagement between past and present implied in the term “projection” accurately convey his own historical method.⁵⁴ “Readers of this book can and will appropriate the past for themselves, if I stick to my job of presenting the past first in its own terms,” he declares in the introduction to The Friend, and he follows up that remark with a pointed reference to the politics of the present: “Could it be that that very appropriation might prelude a resolution of the conflict between homosexual people and the Christian church today?”⁵⁵ Insofar as Bray stressed repeatedly that his scholarship grew out of an activist engagement with contemporary gay life, I suspect that any denigration of contemporary identification with a homoerotic past may have given him pause.⁵⁶

It is not just that leveling a charge of projection in this way is inaccurate and offensive; more important, it circumvents, and thereby obscures, questions tacitly raised by Bray’s scholarship but not resolved in it: namely, the relations between emotional and bodily intimacy, and what we make of them. Indeed, it is one of the legacies of his work that, although the tension between friendship and eroticism informs it at almost every turn, nowhere is the unstable line separating these forms of intimacy brought into direct focus and treated as an object of analysis. Bray casts his eye first on the conventions of friendship and then on those of sodomy, but in analyzing their connection, he seems to take his cue from early moderns themselves, who were unwilling “to take seriously the ambiguous borderland between the ‘sodomite’ and the shared beds and bonding of its male companionship.”⁵⁷ For a historian to “take seriously” this “ambiguous borderland” would mean to submit to analytic scrutiny the movement across borders, the places where and the moments when (and not simply the processes by which) one thing becomes another. Bray’s apparent preference was much like that of the early modern society he describes, which “knew that the gaps—and the overlaps—between one thing and its other had their utility.”⁵⁸ Rather in the manner of the “accommodating ambiguity” he identifies elsewhere,⁵⁹ Bray does not parse his terms too precisely, as evinced by the sleight of hand in his remark that “the word ‘love’ in this society could comprehend as easily the public relation of friends as the more private meaning we give the word today, but wherever on that wide spectrum the gift of a friend’s body might lie, it gestured toward a place of comforting safety in an insecure world.”⁶⁰ Indeed, if one substitutes the term “eroticism” for “friendship” in Bray’s statement that “the indirection of the language of friendship provided a circumspect path around it,”⁶¹ one comes close to describing the rhetorical strategy he deployed in regard to the confused relations among the sexual, the physical, the subjective, and the affective.

Examining the ambiguous borderland, the overlap, between one thing and another might particularly have paid off in relation to one of Bray’s key terms: voluntary kinship. It is striking that Bray ignores the applicability of voluntary kinship to the social structure of the molly house. Because of the tight link between sodomy and social disorder—a link that for Bray goes to the heart of what sodomy is—he fails to consider whether the vows of mollies, some of which follow the traditional script of marriage, might not also operate as an alternative form of kinship. The analytic division between friendship and sodomy, social disorder and social cohesion, enables him to recognize bonds of kinship only within the received structure of traditional society: in the form of male couples whose formal vows are backed by Christian ritual.

It may well be wrong to characterize Bray’s circumspection in this regard as reticence or reluctance to confront the radical implications of his own work. As a historian, he appears to have approached the relation between friendship and eroticism primarily from the standpoint of evidence. In his final chapter, for instance, he asks of the body of the friend:

But did it not also have the body’s genitals? Did its symbolic significance stop short there? The laughter that closed an earlier chapter suggested that it did not. Yet the sexual potential in these gestures has repeatedly come into view only to slip away again…. This is not, of course, to say that the erotic has not been part of this history. But sexuality in a more narrow sense has eluded it whenever it has come into view. With the diary of Anne Lister that problem falls away.⁶²

Yet even as the evaluation of evidence must persist as a preoccupation of historians, important questions of method and theory remain untouched by it. Whether Bray’s disinclination to probe, rather than work adroitly around, the precise means of the overlap of friendship and eroticism as a theoretical problem indicates the historian’s discomfort with the deconstructive ramifications of his own radical history or whether, conversely and paradoxically, it is a further measure of his own deconstructive commitments is a question about which I remain unsure. Bray delights, for instance, in the enigma of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, which he calls a “dazzling tour de force” that “can be read both as asserting the chastity of friendship in the most transcendent of terms and as rejecting it in the most bawdy and explicit of terms.”⁶³ In puzzling through this problem, I am reminded that Goldberg recognized that Bray’s 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, which, in an explicit departure from Bray’s own strategy, contemplates early modern sex acts in order to 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 our object of analysis by provisionally isolating its parameters and claiming for it, however tacitly, a relatively independent social status. That is, whether one historicizes the sodomite or the molly, tribadism, sapphism, or queer virginity, in order to gain a foothold for these phenomena in a landscape unmarked by modern identity categories, scholars have tended to approach the phenomena as discrete, internally unified, and relatively bounded. Despite our adoption of Bray’s argument that homoeroticism is part of a networked system of social relations, we have failed to recognize the full ramifications of that insight and so have treated homoeroticism much like the historical periods in which we locate it.

Could it be that this bounded conceptualization of our analytical object is related to the problem of period boundaries? I am not sure, but it seems no accident that Bray’s final book flouts both at once. There is no question that many of the issues prominent in the history of homosexuality traverse historical domains. Chapter 4 will enumerate these issues with a particular focus on lesbianism, identifying them as “perennial axes of social definition” that crop up as “cycles of salience,” while also arguing against a view of seamless continuity by which the past is directly laminated onto later social formations. While the mandate of that chapter is to advance analytically the history of women’s sexuality, the more general point is to foster the creation of a temporally capacious, conceptually organized, gender-comparative history of sexuality. Fitted together in a dialogic rather than a teleological mold, this history might not only find a form that is conceptually coherent yet rife with tensions; through its parataxis and juxtapositions, it might also energize new areas of inquiry, ones that beckon beyond the protocols that have organized research for the past two decades. The conversation I want to enable is not principally one between the past and the present—queer theory, influenced by Foucaultian genealogy, has provided an ample set of procedures for that, usable even by as devout a social historian as Bray. What requires new theorizing, I suggest, is how to stage a dialogue between one past and another. It is to this problem that the next two chapters turn.

It may seem that I have strayed far from the terrain mapped out by Alan Bray. These were not his questions, to be sure. Nonetheless, they are the questions that arise out of the exploratory maps that he so diligently and generously offered. Following the signposts in his work, much of what follows attempts to chart more precisely the overlapping coordinates of love, friendship, eroticism, and sexuality present in his historiographic vista, while also placing these coordinates in more compelling relation to gender, as well as in relation to issues that have emerged since his death. Perhaps the most humbling legacy of the friend whom we have lost—and of friendship’s loss—is this: just as Alan Bray’s first book provided guidance for much of the historical work that followed, his final gift of friendship beckons us to a new landscape, which is also, as he eloquently testifies, quite old yet, because of his work, quite near.