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Copyright © 2001 Duke University Press. All rights reserved.

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7.2 (2001) 245-263

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The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern

England
Valerie Traub

Amaryllis and Mirtillo (fig. 1), a pastoral scene painted by Anthony Van Dyck between
1631 and 1632, depicts a moment from Giovanni Battista Guarini's late-sixteenth-
century tragicomedy, Il Pastor Fido. At the center of Van Dyck's frame is the
shepherd Mirtillo, disguised as a shepherdess to gain access to the woman he loves.
His playful beloved, Amaryllis, is overseeing a kissing war among her female friends;
her mouth already having been judged the fairest, her role is to judge whose kisses most
please. The painting focuses on the moment when Mirtillo, having won the contest, chivalrously
places his floral crown on the head of his beloved. Although in Guarini's play, as well as in the
  1647 English translation by Sir Richard Fanshaw (The Faithful Shepherd), Mirtillo's real gender  
identity is not revealed in this scene--indeed, Mirtillo languishes in unrequited, unarticulated
love for much of the play--in Van Dyck's painting the reassertion of masculinity is
superimposed on an implied declaration of heteroerotic love. Indeed, as a synchronic snapshot
of a longer narrative, the moment of chivalrous crowning is presented as a visual
consummation of both the story and Mirtillo's desire.

The fact that Mirtillo wins the "war" would seem to confirm the status of men as superior lovers,
a status reinforced by the visual hierarchy of Van Dyck's composition: not only is the male-
female couple positioned centrally in the group and their faces and pastoral crown located at
the vanishing point of the canvas, but the postures of the nymphs and putti direct the viewer's
gaze toward that focal point. The centralization of male-female eroticism is supported, too, by
the manipulation of a racialized aesthetic, whereby the gesture of the one black nymph cuts
laterally across the field of vision. Her dark, muscular arm, similar in color and [End Page 245]
shape to the limbs of the tree above, contrasts warmly yet decisively against all the pale,
circular, connective activity conveyed by the postures of the other nymphs. Her left hand,
grasping the palm of a nymph still engaged in kissing, links her to the circuit of female erotic
contact even as she points to the reason for its interruption.

The painting's affirmation of the superiority of heteroeroticism, however, is destabilized by the

narrative predicate of the story, as well as by the fact that Mirtillo's victory has not, apparently,
stopped the war. What are we to make of an all-female kissing war? Is this standard sport
among female rustics? And what exactly is a kissing war, anyway? Once we begin to ask these
questions, the pairs of kissing nymphs come into sharper focus. Insofar as the sensual poses
of the partially clad nymphs provide contrast and added frisson to the embrace of shepherd
2

and shepherdess, heteroeroticism and its attendant pleasures seem to depend on the
performance of a prior and idyllic homoeroticism, safely ensconced in a canopied [End Page
246] bower. Furthermore, the degree to which Amaryllis and Mirtillo embody stable gender
positions is called into question by the use of cross-dressing as the vehicle for Mirtillo's erotic
access. How hetero is Amaryllis's desire if, in the prehistory of the painting and more explicitly
in the play, she has believed this fabulous kisser to be a woman?

Such representations and the questions they raise give us a means to contravene the standard
critical orthodoxy, both gay and straight, regarding the invisibility of lesbianism in Western
Europe prior to modernity. Representative statements from The Gay and Lesbian Literary
Heritage, a 1995 reference work edited by Claude Summers and notable for its thorough and
scholarly treatment of a vast range of topics, provide a convenient illustration of the historical
vacuum into which women's erotic desires for one another so often continue to fall. Here are
statements from three separate historical entries: "Lesbianism is a theme rarely treated in Latin
literature. . . . though Ovid regards the love of boys as commonplace, love between females is
unthinkable in his world." "Female homosexual issues do not appear explicitly in medieval
English literature. . . . For lesbians attempting to understand why they have been silenced for
much of the English tradition, it is with the silence of medieval English texts that they should
begin." "Lesbianism is almost invisible in the [English Renaissance]." 1 Such pronouncements,
as mistaken as they are typical, have been proffered by some of the most esteemed scholars
of early modern (male) homoeroticism. Literary critics and historians of contiguous periods
largely have concurred. According to the authors of an influential study of female transvestism,
"Until the end of the eighteenth century love affairs between women were not taken seriously,
perhaps not often even noticed at all. . . . in the past lesbian love was inconceivable." 2 To
many responsible, even groundbreaking scholars, female homoeroticism prior to the
Enlightenment has seemed silent and invisible. Impossible.

Having pursued the silence, invisibility, and impossibility of early modern lesbianism for the last
decade, I now want to propose a different way of engaging with the historical and interpretive
problems it poses. I argue that early modern England witnessed a renaissance of
representations of female homoerotic desire. By this I mean three things. First, references to
female-female desire in English texts increased dramatically over the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, widespread social, intellectual,
and economic changes fostered the production and dissemination of a variety of discourses
alluding to the physical and emotional investments of women in one another. The publication of
classical texts in the vernacular; the rise of popular public and private theaters; the
development of the secular visual arts; the emergence of illustrated [End Page 247] anatomy
books, travel narratives, and obscene texts; and the increase in female literacy all affected the
number and kind of representations of women's desire for other women in English society. If
these phenomena were not, strictly speaking, new, their interaction and the results of that
interaction were unprecedented. Within the context of a pervasive belief in women's erotic
intemperance--the insatiable lust that was woman's inheritance from Eve--these varied cultural
developments generated an extensive array of detail about what it means for women to love
passionately, and have sex with, other women.

Here is a partial list of English authors who contributed to such representations, both
celebratory and condemnatory, from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century--or, to
invoke the two female monarchs whose reigns mark the temporal boundaries of my study,
between Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne: John Lyly, Thomas Heywood, John Donne, Ben
Jonson, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, William Warner, Robert Burton, John
Fletcher, James Shirley, George Sandys, John Crowne, Edmund Waller, Andrew Marvell,
Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and several anonymous, possibly female
poets. Add to their literary texts the medical works of anatomists and midwives who diagnose
the medical problem of clitoral hypertrophy in terms of women's illicit "abuse" of their clitorises
3

with other women; the many travel writers who claim to have witnessed illicit sexual contact
among Muslim women in Turkey and North Africa; the lexicographers and lawyers who
grappled with the meanings of the notoriously fraught terms sodomy and buggery and their
applicability to women; the visual artists who depicted women in a variety of amorous poses,
particularly when treating pastoral and mythological themes; and the many Continental writers
whose own treatments of female-female love and erotic contact in romances, plays, poems,
medical texts, and moral treatises were translated into English during this period, and you can
begin to see why renaissance might be the appropriate word to describe this discursive
proliferation.

Although some of the phenomena I will discuss were aspects of a manuscript culture, it was
the technology of print that fostered this proliferation of representations. I thus am making no
quantitative claims regarding an increase in portrayals of female-female love and lust that are
not true for countless other phenomena. Nor do I mean to elide classical or medieval
discussions, whether they be in the form of allusions to female acts contra naturum in theology,
penitential manuals, or convent rules, in references to tribadism in medical and astrological
treatises, and in the desiring stances taken by women in their letters and poems. Indeed, John
Gower's late-fourteenth-century treatment of Ovid's tale of Iphis and Ianthe--a classical
narrative whose Renaissance translations I shall treat in [End Page 248] detail in a moment--
seems to open up the textual possibility that female-female desire is natural. 3 Nor do I argue
for a quantifiable increase in female-female sex, a "renaissance" of female erotic pleasure--
indeed, I would not know how to measure it. I do contend that the increased availability of
textual references to female intimacies, the graphic explicitness of some of these depictions,
and the range of themes and tones expressed therein all initiate a profusion and variety of
representations unique to the early modern era.

My use of renaissance also is meant to suggest that representations of female-female desire

during this period depend heavily on classical antecedents for their modes of comprehension.
It is through, quite literally, a rebirth of classical idioms, rhetorics, tropes, and illustrative
examples that female homoeroticism gained intelligibility in early modern England. By
renovating the discourses of the ancients, writers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
attempted to legitimize their own formulations, drawing on authoritative precedents such as
Ovid, Martial, and Soranus for risqué or troubling ideas. To the extent that desire among
women was a discursive phenomenon, then, it was fashioned primarily out of two rhetorics,
both of which were revived from the ancient past: a medico-satiric discourse of the tribade, and
a literary-philosophical discourse of idealized friendship. The classical discourse of tribadism
tended to vilify female erotic transgression, while the classical discourse of amicitia--translated
in early modern English as amity--celebrated ties among men. Both of these classical
discourses were revised and reworked by early modern authors as they translated old stories
into new contexts.

My use of the term renaissance, finally, is meant to reclaim, ironize, and redeploy the meaning
of the Renaissance itself. With a single paradigm-breaking question, "Did women have a
Renaissance?" Joan Kelly upset the picture of the Renaissance as a Burckhardtian epiphany
of individual accomplishment, transforming it into a period of social and political retrenchment. 4
Since the publication of Kelly's essay in 1977, other commentators have argued that the
Renaissance has stood for an implicitly masculine, humanist, elite culture that excluded most
of the female and laboring population. In appropriating the term renaissance to refer to
women's status as both subjects and objects of homoerotic representations, then, I do not
mean to imply that women were the privileged recipients of intellectual, social, or economic
favor, nor that they participated in a golden age of female intimacy. Rather than intimating the
presence of cultural support or ideological indulgence, my use of renaissance is meant to
convey the dynamic interactions of a range of knowledges about the anatomical and
physiological body, about licit and illicit desires, and about prescribed and proscribed erotic
4

practices. The renaissance [End Page 249] of lesbianism arose when new discourses made
certain interests in the body salient and innovative modes of investigation possible. During this
period of discursive cross-fertilization, there also emerged a more public discourse of
homoerotic desire articulated by women themselves. Although women did not originate the
terms used to describe their desires, they did appropriate and revise prevailing tropes and
rhetorics, participating in a cultural dialogue that put the meanings of same-gender love and
eroticism under increasing scrutiny and pressure.

How did early modern authors represent female-female love, desire, eroticism? Ovid's story of
Iphis and Ianthe from the ninth book of his Metamorphoses is the classical urtext for many
early modern writers. Cross-dressed from infancy by her mother to protect her from her father's
decree that any female born to his wife be killed, the adolescent Iphis is betrothed by her
unsuspecting father to the maiden Ianthe. Both girls are deeply in love with each other.
Nonetheless, Iphis cannot see her way toward marriage. Arthur Golding's 1567 verse
translation of the Metamorphoses emphasizes the unnaturalness of Iphis's love:

Herself a Mayden with a Mayd (ryght straunge) in love became.

Shee scarce could stay her teares. What end remaynes for mee (quoth shee)
How straunge a love? How uncoth? How prodigious reygnes in mee?
If that the Gods did favor mee, they should destroy mee quyght.
Or if they would not mee destroy, at leastwyse yit they myght
Have given mee such a maladie as myght with nature stond,
Or nature were acquainted with. A cow is never fond
Uppon a Cow, nor Mare on Mare. The Ram delyghts the Eawe,
The Stag the Hynde, the Cocke the Hen. But never man could shew
That female yit was tane in love with female kynd. O would
Too God I never had beene borne. 5

Knowing of her daughter's plight, Iphis's mother prays to Isis for a miracle; her prayer is
answered. As Iphis walks toward the church to be married, she is magically transformed into a
boy. Ovid's tale thus bequeaths two conventions that would prove crucial to the representation
of female-female love in the early modern period: the voicing of a private lament about the
impossibility of one's love, and the concluding miracle of sex transformation that makes such
love possible.

Which is not to say that Renaissance writers merely imitated their classical forebears. Far from
it. In the courtier-poet John Lyly's dramatic retelling of Ovid's tale in Gallathea, that which in
Ovid is voiced only as a heartsick lament is [End Page 250] imbued with comedic energies--as
when, for instance, an impish Cupid titillates an audience of aristocratic ladies with a
mischievous scheme he has devised.Referring to a group of Diana's virgin nymphs, he says, "I
will make their pains my pastimes, and so confound their loves in their own sex that they shall
dote in their desires, delight in their affections, and practice only impossibilities." 6 Cupid's
oxymoronic representation of what it means for women mutually to "dote in their desires" and
"delight in their affections" extends to the love that develops between Gallathea and Phyllida,
two girls cross-dressed by their fathers to escape an annual ritual sacrifice of pretty virgins.
This being a Renaissance romantic comedy, of course, disguise enables desire: Gallathea and
Phyllida fall in love, and although each suspects the other to be female, they spend as much
time as possible exploring and, as they put it, "making much" of each other (3.2.58-59). The
cross-dressed Phyllida confronts her love for the cross-dressed Gallathea in a rhetoric similar
to that of Iphis: "Poor Phyllida, what shouldst thou think of thyself, that lovest one that I fear me
is as thyself is? . . . . If it be so, Phyllida, how desperate is thy case! If it be not, how doubtful!
For if she be a maiden, there is no hope of my love; if a boy, a hazard" (4.4.40-50). Enhancing
the dramatic conflict of disguised identities with a subplot rivalry between the goddesses Venus
and Diana, Lyly positions the goddess of love, as the magician of sex change, against Diana,
5

the spokesperson for Nature. Although the play leaves unspoken which girl will be transformed
into a boy, it makes clear that such a transformation is the only means for a happy conclusion:

Diana: Now, things falling out as they do, you must leave these fond, fond affections. Nature
will have it so, necessity must.
Gallathea: I will never love any but Phyllida. Her love is engraven in my heart with her eyes.
Phyllida: Nor I any but Gallathea, whose faith is imprinted in my thoughts by her words.
Neptune: An idle choice, strange and foolish, for one virgin to dote on another and to imagine a
constant faith where there can be no cause of affection. How like you this, Venus?
Venus: I like well and allow it. They shall both be possessed of their wishes, for never shall it
be said that nature or fortune shall overthrow love and faith. . . . Then shall it be seen that I can
turn one of them into a man, and that I will. [End Page 251]
Diana: Is it possible?
Venus: What is to love or the mistress of love unpossible? Was it not Venus that did the like to
Iphis and Ianthes? (5.3.148-74)

In response to Diana's arrogation of the terms of Nature and Neptune's assumption that,
absent a penis, "there can be no cause of affection," Venus takes matters, quite literally, in
hand. Rewriting Ovid's Isis with her own name, and disdaining the possibility that mere Nature
should overthrow love, Venus trumps Diana by maintaining that nothing is "unpossible" to the
mistress of love. With this move against her rival, Venus begins to disengage the terms of the
Ovidian amor impossibilia, for love or amor is precisely what makes the consummation of these
desires possible. Although Lyly's play reproduces social orthodoxy, it also gestures toward the
enactment of erotic passion for one's own sex and, in the interest of maintaining the girlish
similitude of its two central characters, defers the sex transformation beyond the dramatic
frame. By mining a tension between what can and cannot be practiced, Gallathea helps to
make the impossible intelligible and the unintelligible possible.

The notion of practicing impossibilities thematized by Gallathea neatly encapsulates the

dilemma of lesbian representation in the early modern period. On the one hand, women's erotic
desires for other women were considered improbable, implausible, insignificant, subject to all
the force of negativity condensed within the early modern definitions of impossibility: that which
cannot be, inability,and impotence. On the other hand, such desires were culturally practiced
and represented in a variety of ways, although often according to a governing logic that
attempted to reinscribe their impossibility. Taking Lyly's cue, I adopt the paradox of practicing
impossibilities as my framework for analysis. I not only demonstrate the existence of a cultural
awareness of women who desired other women in the early modern period, but detail the
complex and often contradictory modes of representation through which such desire was
articulated. How was same-gender female desire rendered intelligible? What tropes, what
images, figured such desire? What strategies were employed to maintain the status of such
desire as impossible? Were those strategies successful? And did those strategies change over
time--specifically, over the course of the seventeenth century--as the emergence of new
epistemologies and social practices generated unprecedented understandings of the body and
the self? Practicing impossibilities thus is not so much a matter of how to make love to another
woman, as Lyly's meddling Cupid would have it, but a description of the problem, both in the
past and in the present, of how to represent women who would make such love. [End Page
252]

What it means to make love, of course, depends on understandings of the physical body. With
the social construction of the body, as well as desire, in mind, my study takes as its point of
historical origin the European rediscovery of the clitoris in the middle of the sixteenth century.
6

Whatever information women possessed about their own bodies prior to the anatomical
investigations of Gabriele Falloppia and Realdo Colombo, the rediscovery of the clitoris under
the new science of dissection gave this organ an enhanced discursive presence. Described by
Colombo as "the seat of woman's delight"--without which women would fail to conceive
children--the clitoris medically and ideologically legitimized female erotic pleasure. At the same
time, this scientific finding raised questions about the female body's potential autonomy: the
"delights" of the clitoris, it was widely recognized, did not necessarily depend on the
ministrations of men. Anatomical surveys of the size, use, and function of the clitoris invariably
were followed by warnings about its misuse--or in the vernacular of the day, its abuse. Indeed,
it is not accidental that accompanying, influencing, haunting every anatomical discussion of the
clitoris and its pleasures was the monstrous figure of the tribade.

Tribade is a French term derived from the Greek tribas and tribein, to rub --and hence the Latin
fricatrix and theEnglish rubster. According to David M. Halperin, "The female same-sex sexual
practice that imperial Greek and Roman writers alike singled out for comment was 'tribadism,'
the sexual penetration of women (and men) by other women, by means of either a dildo or a
fantastically large clitoris. The tribade makes memorable appearances, though not always
under that name. . . : she is represented as a shaven-headed butch, adept at wrestling, able to
subjugate men and to satisfy women." 7 Classical views on the tribade, however, were confined
largely to learned Latin literature throughout the medieval period, until newly available Greek,
Roman, and Arabic texts were translated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The
dissemination of classical literature and medical texts, concurrent with the anatomical
rediscovery of the clitoris in the mid-sixteenth century, reintroduced the tribade to western
Europe. Indeed, I believe that the cultural rebirth of the clitoris and the reemergence of her
ghostly yet monstrous twin, the tribade, inaugurated a crisis in the representation of female
bodies and bonds. This crisis generated a discursive amplification of same-gender female
desire: more texts, and more kinds of texts, including travel narratives, marital advice books,
midwiferies, and pornography, began to speak of the enlarged clitoris and the lusty tribade,
appropriating and extending one another's stories and tropes.

In England the first explicit discussion of the clitoris was that of Helkiah Crooke in his
anatomical treatise, Microcosmographia; or, A Description of the [End Page 253] Body of Man
(1615). After detailing the size, function, and purpose of the clitoris, Crooke picked up on
earlier French anatomists' assertions that an enlarged clitoris is associated with "unnatural"
desires in women: "Sometimes [the clitoris] groweth to such a length that it hangeth without the
cleft like a mans member, especially when it is fretted with the touch of the cloaths, and so
strutteth and groweth to a rigiditie as doth the yarde [penis] of a man. And this part it is which
those wicked women do abuse called Tribades (often mentioned by many authors, and in
some states worthily punished) to their mutual and unnatural lusts." 8

The link forged here between clitoral hypertrophy and female-female eroticism was only
strengthened in medical texts throughout the seventeenth century, which added to Crooke's
brief discussion literary and biblical allusions to bolster their medical claims. Representative of
this discursive amplification is the influential Latin anatomy of Caspar Bartholin, translated into
English and augmented by his son Thomas at midcentury. After noting the link between an
enlarged clitoris and tribadism, and then terming tribades Confricatrices or Rubsters, Bartholin
introduced a reference to the "lascivious Practice" of Philaenis and Sappho. Then, after citing
Romans 1:26 ("for this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did
change the natural use unto that which is against nature"), he asserted that the lascivious
practices of tribades cause the clitoris to be called Contemptusviorum or "the Contempt of
Mankind." 9

Despite the use of such colorful rhetoric, medical writers throughout the seventeenth century
neglected to ascribe a definite cause to tribadism. Working within the dominant Galenic
7

dispensation of the regulation of the body through the four humors, they all agreed that clitoral
size correlates with quantity of desire, and that both body parts and emotions are governed by
humoral heat. Anatomists also agreed that some kind of motion (whether internal humoral flux,
as suggested by the midwife Jane Sharp, or external "fretting" by clothing or fingers, as
suggested by Crooke and Bartholin) could cause the clitoris to grow. Other than locating such
growth within a humoral economy, however, medical writers failed to distinguish whether an
enlarged clitoris incited unnatural lust or sexual "abuse" of the clitoris caused it to grow
monstrously large. Although different authors implied various interpretations based on the
details they selected, none of them definitively asserted a causal explanation, and none of
them posed the question as foundational. This indifference is partly due to the model of
reciprocal causality endemic to early modern psychophysiology, the ease of slippage in
humoralism between body and behavior. Nonetheless, even within the Galenic model it would
make sense to pursue questions raised by the correlation of quantity of lust, size of organ, and
tendency toward illicit behavior. For instance, if the clitoris is the [End Page 254] female yard,
is it governed, as the penis is, by an involuntary mechanics of erection? Does it possess, as
anatomists alleged of the penis, a will of its own? Or is the tribade's will, and not her unruly
organ, to blame?

Such questions, occulted as they are within medical discourse, constitute a crux of early
modern erotic ideology. As a logical extension of the terms of medical discourse, they are
necessarily implied, but within those terms, they are utterly unanswerable. Despite the
production of medical knowledge about tribadism, no one really knew what caused it--and that,
precisely, was the trouble. Every woman possessed the necessary clitoral equipment as well
as a predisposition to immoderate lust. Given the inherent instability of the humors and the
capriciousness of female desire, then, any woman's genitals might grow to monstrous
proportions. In contrast to later periods, when a woman's desire for another woman signified
primarily a deviation of gender (and thus was intelligible within a paradigm of inversion), in the
early modern period, despite the imitative masculinity generally ascribed to the tribade, her
behavior was a logical extension--indeed, a confirmation--of femininity in all its heavenly
ordained intemperance.

The implications of this nexus of gender are important to our understanding of the various
interpretative matrices imposed on early modern eroticism. One might have thought that the
tribade's clitoral hypertrophy--described as a long-term somatic condition correlated with a
specific erotic predisposition--would confer upon her a coherent erotic identity. Michel Foucault,
after all, described the "nineteenth-century homosexual" as "a type of life, a life form, and a
morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology." 10 The anatomy
of the early modern tribade was nothing if not indiscreet; her body was, above all, defined as
an excessive morphology. But even as the tribade was understood in such minoritarian terms,
she always was in danger of being universalized. In the absence of an unambiguous boundary
between the size of a "normal" clitoris and the size of a tribade's, clitoral hypertrophy
threatened, at the level of unspoken ideology, to become hypertypic.

Although the figure of the tribade is represented as the outgrowth of a monstrous morphology,
insofar as she functions more generally as a metaphor for excessive female desire, she
threatens to come into contact with, indeed to contaminate, women whose bodies do not
produce legible signs of homoerotic desire. It is within the context of such dangerous proximity
that I suggest we approach the depiction of intimate friendships among conventionally
"feminine" women in Renaissance literature and the arts. In exploring and exploiting the
sensuality of feminine bodies, literary texts and visual images install their own, seemingly quite
different figure of homoerotic desire: the eroticized yet chaste adolescent [End Page 255]
female friend. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, presents two female
friends whose affective investments in each other are passionately articulated. 11 When Hermia
compares the "primrose beds where" she and Helena "were wont to lie" (1.2.215) to the
8

meeting place, and later the bedding place, of Hermia and Lysander, we are encouraged, in
the context of a culture in which the sharing of beds was common, to notice a repetition and
displacement of one bedmate for another. Indeed, in this play so thoroughly concerned with the
tension between unity and duality, merger and separation, oneness and twoness, Lysander's
seductive come-on, "One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth" (2.2.42), is presented as
no different--qualitatively, emotionally, physically--from Helena's pained admonition to Hermia:

Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd,

The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us--O, is all forgot?
All school-days friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles created both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition;
Two lovely berries molded on one stem;
So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart.
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest. (3.2.198-214)

Helena concludes this passionate appeal with the question, "And will you rent our ancient love
asunder?" (3.2.215).

So too, Celia's speeches to Rosalind in As You Like It are as emotionally and erotically
compelling as anything spoken in the heteroerotic moments in these comedies. Even before
Rosalind's incarnation as the saucy youth, Ganymede, it is the "feminine" Celia who urges
Rosalind to "love no man in good earnest" (1.2.26) and who asserts, [End Page 256]

We still have slept together,

Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable. (1.3.71-74)

In Ovid swans accompany Venus, goddess of love, not Juno, goddess of marriage; Celia's
transposition thus conflates erotic love and marriage in the service of female amity. Their love
is presented as both exceptional in quantity and unexceptionable in type: "never two ladies
lov'd as they do" (1.1.107), says Charles, and Le Beau describes their love as "dearer than the
natural bond of sisters" (1.2.265). Helena's sense of betrayal is reiterated by Celia, who
complains,

Rosalind lacks then the love

Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one.
Shall we be sund'red? (1.3.94-96)

Helena and Celia's poignant questions, which echo the rhetoric of the Anglican marriage
ceremony, "Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder," ask us to
recognize female amity as analogous in its emotional intensity and physical closeness to
marriage. Indeed, Helena's reference to "Two of the first" heightens this comparison, as it
9

refers to the first quartering in a coat of arms that occurs when two houses are joined through
patriarchal marriage; like the separate coats of arms of a marital pair, she and Hermia have
been not only emotionally unified but materially and symbolically conjoined, "crowned with one
crest."

The eroticized depiction of intimate friendships among women--what the early moderns called
amity and what I call fem-fem love--occurs not only in Renaissance stage plays but in closet
drama, love lyrics, pastoral paintings, and opera. Together these genres suggest that no
affective contradiction existed between homo and hetero modes of desire. As in Van Dyck's
painting, however, so too with many of these texts; often represented at the moment of its
passing, female homoerotic desire and contact can be glimpsedby attending to textual edges
and margins. Particularly in the narrative forms of stage plays and prose, homoerotic friendship
tends to be excluded, negated, overwritten, as it were, by the structural imperatives of marital
alliance, in a process that generations of literary critics have naturalized as the sine qua non of
comedic closure. In fact, the repetition of this structure and the enforcement of this exclusion
suggest that the eradication of the feminine homoerotic position to desire is precisely what
many romantic comedies aim to stage. [End Page 257]

Such texts suggest that what is at issue in feminine homoeroticism is less eroticism or even
gender per se than the upholding of marital alliance, with social and biological reproduction at
its core. The chaste friend's desire is ultimately untenable not because it is viewed, as is the
tribade's, as imitative of masculine prerogatives and hence monstrous, but because it fails to
contribute to the reproduction of patriarchal authority. Through their narrative trajectories these
plays suggest that female-female desire becomes an issue--becomes significant--only when
the time comes for the patriarchal imperative of marital alliance, and with it the transmission of
property and the production of children, to be enforced. Only when women's erotic relations
with one another threaten to become exclusive and thus endanger the fulfillment of their marital
and reproductive duties, or when they symbolically usurp male sexual prerogatives, are cultural
injunctions levied against them. It is precisely the cultural anxiety that women will fail to comply
with their socially mandated role to become wives and mothers that these dramatic texts
obsessively articulate and assuage. It is hardly incidental that female homoerotic liaisons are
dramatized only within the context of heteroerotic courtship plots (rather than, for instance, the
genres of the history play or tragedy), for one purpose of comedy is to naturalize the expulsion
of undesirable social relationships in order to resecure the dominant social order. Nonetheless,
Renaissance stage plays imply that if same-gender erotic practices could exist coterminously
with the marriage contract and husbandly authority, there would be little cause for alarm. Thus
although tribades, with their enlarged clitorises (or dildos), necessarily performed a certain
amount of "gender trouble," fem-fem couples seem to have posed very little gender trouble at
all. Within the terms of social orthodoxy, this absence of trouble marks out their social function:
able to simultaneously elicit and elude erotic meanings, fems embody the fantasy of women
who love women to minimal social effect.

Except, that is, when such women, whether writing or being written about within the tradition of
idealized friendship, move beyond appropriating the language of marriage to claim for their
unions the social function of marriage. As the plights of Ovid's Iphis and Ianthe and Lyly's
Gallathea and Phyllida make clear, marriage between women was imagined to be possible in
the literary tradition only within the terms of a sex transformation. For the marriage to be
performed and consummated, one of the female lovers must become a man. This edict
typically is underwritten by a concept of the unnatural. As Iphis says in Golding's translation of
Ovid, [End Page 258]

A cow is never fond

Uppon a Cow, nor Mare on Mare. The Ram delyghts the Eawe,
10

The Stag the Hynde, the Cocke the Hen.

In the 1632 translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by George Sandys, Iphis continues:

No watch restraines
Our deare imbrace, nor husbands jealousies,
Nor rigorous Sires; nor she her selfe denies:
Yet not to be injoy'd. Nor canst thou bee
Happy in her; though men and Gods agree!
Now also all to my desires accord:
What they can give, the easie Gods afford;
What me, my father, hers, her selfe, would please,
Displeaseth Nature; stronger then all these.
Shee, shee forbids. 12

Even within the tradition of lament, however, cracks in the ideology of marital alliance occur. A
powerful instance of an attempt to appropriate marriage on behalf of female intimacy occurs in
an anonymous Middle Scots poem known only as Poem XLIX in The Maitland Quarto
Manuscript (1586). In this lyric a female speaker contemplates the perfection of her female
beloved and proclaims herself to have been ravished by their affection for each other. The
speaker then compares the quality of their love to that of a series of famous male pairs--
Perithous and Theseus, Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan--arguing that women love
with more constancy than do men. Appropriating the classical discourse of idealized male
amicitia, Poem XLIX renegotiates the possible terms of female-female amity by invoking a
historical precedent for such liaisons--Ruth and Naomi--and implicitly envisioning a world in
which women can marry. Recognizing that such a world does not yet exist, the speaker
envisions the next best thing: an Ovidian metamorphosis. Asking God to transform her into a
man, the speaker confidently asserts,

No brutus then sould caus ws [us] smart

as we doe now vnhappie wemen
Then sould we bayth [both] with Ioyful hairt
honour and bliss 3e [the] band of hymen. [End Page 259]

Such divine intervention would create heaven on earth:

Then our more perfect amity

more worthy recompense should merit
In heaven eternal deity
among the gods to inherit. . . .
friendship and amity so sure
with so great fervency and force
So constantly which shall endure
That not both death shall us divorce. . . .
no trouble / torment / grief / or sorrow
nor earthly thing shall us dissever
Such constancy shall we maintain
In perfect amity forever. 13

Even as it appropriates the magical conclusion of Ovidian prose and verse narrative, Poem
XLIX refuses to accede to the unnaturalness of its amor, refuses to mourn its own impossibility.
This break from the Ovidian tradition is enabled partially through a change in form: as lyric
utterance, the temporality of this poem stays with, and in the experience of, desire. Regardless
of the fact that it cannot inhabit that future now, it elaborates the utopian aspirations of the
11

poetic persona who, despite her willingness to be metamorphosed into a man, remains
gendered female. Her female voicings stay in the present moment of desire, even as she
proleptically articulates a vision of human love existing outside human time. The poem's
temporal grasp is expansive, balancing the voice of present longing ("as we do now unhappy
women"), the construction of an authorizing past (the biblical Ruth and Naomi), and the
anticipation of a radically different future ("perfect amity forever"). In its incorporation of a past
and present desire into an eternal present, Poem XLIX comes very close to imagining that
future into being.

By exploring the terms of female homoeroticism as figured in expressions of adolescent

longing, in tropes of erotic similitude, in pastoral and mythological conventions, and in traditions
of loving lament, I illuminate such instances of (in)significance and place them in relationship to
moments when female bodies and bonds attain special, even excessive signifying power. My
point, however, is not merely to demonstrate the existence of such discourses but to chart
changes that occurred in the representation of female bodies and bonds over the course of the
seventeenth century. I argue that the intertextual circulation of anatomy books, midwiferies,
travel narratives, obscenity, and other imaginative literature leads to increasing suspicion about
those forms of female intimacy previously considered [End Page 260] chaste: the sharing of
beds, kissing and caressing, and exclusive friendships. These behaviors, represented as
unexceptional until the mid-seventeenth century, begin to be construed as immoral, irrational, a
threat to other women. In historical terms I chart how a discursive regime of impossibility is
gradually displaced by a governing logic of suspicion and possibility. By the end of the century
the chaste adolescent fem who expresses desire and love for her friend is implicated in the
same nexus of transgression that formerly was attributed solely to her monstrous counterpart,
the tribade. It is this "contamination" of the fem by the phobias surrounding the tribade that, I
argue, provides the condition of possibility for a modern erotic identity, and specifically for the
range of female social "types" whose desires eventually were sutured to identity: masculine
females, macroclitorides, female husbands, tommies, sapphists, inverts, and lesbians.

One implication of this historical argument--all too schematically summarized here--is that
representations of female homoeroticism do not provide clear antecedents or stable historical
ground for contemporary lesbian identities. Renaissance London is a far cry from San
Francisco's Noe Valley, and however much we might see drag as a constitutive feature of both
theaters, Shakespeare's Globe is not New York's WOW Café. In traveling back in time to
ancient rhetorics and describing their reconfiguration in the early modern period, I do not push
the birth of the lesbian back in time but, rather, pluralize the notion of origins, multiply sites of
emergence, and trace various strands of influence. One result of this strategy is that instead of
treating lesbian existence as the epiphany or "denouement of every argument," I resist the
temptation to make historical inquiry culminate in a politics of identity. 14 This is not to suggest
that identity politics have no place in contemporary gay and lesbian activism. As long as the
lives of lesbians and gay men are constricted and destroyed by silences, misinformation, and
hatred, the articulated self-presence and political agitation under the banner of identity will
remain a crucial political strategy. Nonetheless, the politics of identity can operate as a
stranglehold, limiting the questions one asks and thus the answers one finds. When identity
politics are treated as the sine qua non of lesbian scholarship, when the modern category of
"the subject"--whether conceived as a lesbianauthor, a lesbiancharacter, or a lesbianpoetic
persona--governs the critical recognition of homoeroticism, often the claims one can make are
reduced to the critical equivalent of "Look there! Look, there's another one!" I agree with Jeffrey
Masten that "identifying Renaissance figures as gay--'outing' them--seems the mildest of
possible claims one might make," 15 for such identifications effectively quarantine individuals
from complex and interdependent systems of erotic affect and practice--not the least of which
is heterosexuality--as well as isolate erotic [End Page 261] systems from other social
formations, such as race. One of the consolations I offer to those looking for historical
affirmations of gay identity is this: although we will not find contemporary lesbiansin early
12

modern England, neither will we find contemporary heterosexuals.

By recovering and reclaiming a renaissance of lesbianism, I hope to show that analysis of

female homoeroticism worthy of the complexity of the past obliges us to balance the supports
of identity and the pleasures of identification with a recognition of the instability of these
supports and the problematic nature of these pleasures. I thus pursue the implications of the
radical incommensurability among erotic desires, practices, and identities, less in some
abstract allegiance to queer theory than in the interest of lesbian specificity. Balancing the
claims of continuity and alterity within a historically specific study, I have tried to keep open the
question of the relationship of present identities to past cultural formations--assuming neither
that we will find in the past a mirror image of ourselves nor that the past is so utterly alien that
we will find nothing usable in its fragmentary traces. Such an approach, I believe, puts us in a
position to appreciate the alterity of past understandings of bodies and desire, as well as the
diversity and historical specificity of our own expressions and experiences of erotic desires,
practices, and modes of affiliation.

Valerie Traub is an associate professor of English and women's studies at the University of
Michigan. She is the author of Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean
Drama (1992) and editor, with M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan, of Feminist
Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (1996). Her book The Renaissance of
Lesbianism in Early Modern England is forthcoming.

Notes
The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is forthcoming from Cambridge
University Press; this essay presents a précis of its argument.

1. These entries were written, respectively, by Louis Crompton, David Lorenzo Boyd, and
Claude Summers, in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, ed. Claude Summers (New York:
Henry Holt, 1995), 598, 220, 224; emphases mine. George Rousseau makes no references to
lesbianism in his entry, "English Literature: Restoration and Eighteenth Century," 228-35.

2. Rudolf Dekker and Lotte Van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern
Europe (New York: St. Martin's, 1989), 57.

3. For a discussion of Gower's tale, see Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval
Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 213-16, and Carolyn
Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999), 10-11.

4. Joan Kelly, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" rpt. in Women, History, and Theory: The
Essays of Joan Kelly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 19-50.

5. The. XV. Bookes of P. Ovidius Naso, entytuled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding
(London, 1567), in Shakespeare's Ovid, Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the
Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London: Centaur, 1961), ll. 853-63.

6. Gallathea and Midas, ed. Anne Begor Lancashire (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
13

1969), 2.2.6-9.

7. David M. Halperin, "Homosexuality," in the Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3d ed., ed. Simon
Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 720-23; citation pp.
722-23.

8. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia; or, A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615),
238.

9. Thomas Bartholin, The Anatomical History of Thomas Bartholin (London, 1653), 76.

10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random
House, 1976), 43.

11. All quotations of Shakespeare's works are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 4th
ed., ed. David Bevington (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

12. George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in

Figures (1632), ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1970).

13. Jane Farnsworth, "Voicing Female Desire in 'Poem XLIX,'" SEL: Studies in English
Literature 36 (1996): 57-72.

14. The phrase is Julie Abraham's in "A Case of Mistaken Identity?" her review of Terry
Castle's The Apparitional Lesbian, in The Women's Review of Books 11 (1994): 36-37.

15. Jeffrey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in

Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7.