“… this volume is not a glimpse at activities on the margins or in the shadows, but works to redefine the centre…” – Jonathan Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance
EDITOR Jonathan Goldberg’s Queering the Renaissance (Duke University Press, 1993) occupies a
seminal, perhaps even radical, place in queer literary and historical studies, particularly for readers interested in how same-sex love and desire, along with gender, functioned before the emergence of modern sexual identities. Goldberg brings together essays by sixteen scholars in gay and lesbian studies, including Alan Bray, Valerie Traub, and Michael Warner, but rather than offering a celebratory recovery of “gay people” from the past, this work deliberately unsettles that expectation.
For a gay male reader, like myself, this approach can feel both thought-provoking and emotionally disorienting, as the book insists that the very categories through which we understand ourselves today did not exist in the Renaissance. What emerges is not a history of gay men and women as such, but a sustained challenge to how desire, masculinity, femininity, and intimacy between men and between women have been traditionally understood.
One of the primary goals of the book is to challenge the idea of a universal model of homosexuality. As a gay man accustomed to understanding same-sex desire—both physical and emotional—as central to identity, which is a perfectly valid perspective, reading Queering the Renaissance does require a significant conceptual shift, at least in relation to the period it examines. The essays collectively argue that early modern societies organized sexuality around acts, social roles, and hierarchies, rather than solely around fixed identities.
This does not erase same-sex romantic love and desire from the period; rather, it reframes them. This collection argues that romance and desire between men and between women existed, but they did not necessarily define a person’s entire social being. The text overall seems to reject the comfort of historical continuity in favour of a broader understanding of how queerness can exist outside current, commonly accepted identity categories.
Particularly compelling are the essays, such as Bray’s, that explore male friendship, intimacy, and homosocial bonds. These chapters depict a world in which emotional and physical closeness between men was not only common but often idealized. Men expressed affection openly, shared beds, wrote passionate letters, and formed lifelong attachments, none of which were automatically considered sexual or deviant. (I swear, you could play a drinking game with how many times the word “sodomite” is used.) This pattern continued well into the Victorian era, when, as the 20th century approached, social attitudes toward masculinity and homosocial behaviour began to shift in more restrictive and problematic ways.
From a modern gay/queer male perspective, this material is both fascinating and bittersweet. On one hand, it exposes a historical moment in which intimacy between men could flourish without the surveillance imposed by modern attitudes, both negative and affirming; however, on the other hand, it reminds the reader that this tolerance was fragile, contingent, and always subject to moral, cultural, and/or legal/political scrutiny when desire crossed certain boundaries.
As far as heteronormativity is concerned, Goldberg’s own critical contributions further destabilize assumptions. By highlighting male-male desire and rivalry in works traditionally interpreted as heterosexual love stories, he shows how queerness operates within structures that appear most normative. For gay male readers, who have often been exposed only to sanitized versions of literary history, these readings can feel revelatory.
These essayists do not assert that Shakespeare, Marlowe, or other Renaissance writers were “gay” in a modern sense. They argue that calling an Elizabethan “gay” in the contemporary sense is tricky, for people in these times, such terms were more likely used to describe specific sexual acts or homoerotic feelings, rather than a fixed sexual orientation or identity as we understand it and put into use today.
Instead, these essays reveal how same-sex desire plays a central role in many texts, challenging superficial heterosexual interpretations. The focus is less on the writers’ personal behaviours and associations and more on the expression of their queerness, their same-sex feelings and desires, as encoded or poetically sublimated on the page.
Queering the Renaissance is not an easy-to-read or universally satisfying book. Its theoretical density can be alienating, particularly for readers seeking an emotionally resonant or narrative-driven account of gay history. The prose is often demanding, and the arguments assume familiarity with critical theory, including late-20th-century Queer Theory. The book’s refusal to provide clearly identifiable gay figures may frustrate readers who long for historical representation.
As a gay man searching for forerunners, I felt that the book constantly pulls away just as recognition seems possible. Yet this frustration is most likely an intentional part of the project’s ethical stance: it resists imposing modern identities on historical subjects in ways that would distort their lived realities, realities we will never fully know (until time-travel is perfected, that is). Perhaps this ultimately strengthens the volume by reminding readers that queerness in the Renaissance cannot be reduced to a single experience or orientation.
The complexity of Queering the Renaissance will not resonate with all gay, bisexual, or queer-identifying people who read this compendium, and this is perfectly reasonable—there are scholarly elements I still question. Nevertheless, it remains a profoundly insightful work. It does not offer a straightforward gay historical past; instead, I believe its purpose is to equip contemporary readers with more nuanced tools for understanding how sexuality, masculinity, femininity, and social power have been, and continue to be, constructed.
In the end, Queering the Renaissance offers LGBTQ+ readers not affirmation, but transformation. It challenges how one thinks about desire, identity, and historical continuity. (And yes, it’s equally important for non-LGBTQ+ individuals to engage in this as well.) Rather than asking readers to find themselves in the past, it asks them to examine and question the assumptions that shape that desire for recognition. The book’s greatest achievement lies in its insistence that queerness is not a stable object waiting to be discovered, but a set of questions that must be continually reexamined.
