The very informative essay by Will Fisher that opens this collection, “A Hundred Years of Queering the Renaissance,” explores the simultaneous genesis of the historiographical concept of “the Renaissance” and of “homosexual” identity—and so the cultural production of a “queer” Renaissance in the late nineteenth century—through a demonstration of the ways in which John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, and Havelock Ellis were “engaged in contesting the degenerationist theories of inversion that were popular at the time” (38). Yet it is Goran Stanivuković, in “Beyond Sodomy: What Is Still Queer about Early Modern Queer Studies?” who establishes a framework for the collection by defining the parameters of its thought, or rather by establishing the flexibility of those parameters: “identifying queerness as a flexible category that positions these emotions [i.e., ‘non-somatic affect and affiliation’] in the centre rather than on the margin of literature, and as a category that imagines ‘sex’ in multiple ways” (46). Following this perspective, the collective contribution of the essays is to look at the ways in which early modern texts explore the fluidity of sexuality, that is, what “counts” as sex and how individuals experience, think about, and represent sexuality and the erotic. Many of the essays thus make significant contributions to our understanding of Renaissance erotics and sexualities by calling our attention either to new materials or to new ways of thinking about already much examined texts. They provide a window into the early modern structure of sexual relations and thinking about sexuality/eroticism that, until fairly recently, scholars, critics, and historians have read as being as clearly delimited as modern sexual identities.

So, for example, in an essay on Marlowe's Hero and Leander, James M. Bromley distinguishes between histories of sexual identity and histories of sexual acts in order to underline the erotic significance of nonpenetrative and nonprocreative sexual activities. He draws our attention to the ways in which a sexual teleology of penetration and ejaculation has marginalized other types of sexual practice and reads Hero and Leander as offering “a poetics of non-consummation that places non-penetrative sexual acts and non-ejaculatory pleasures, especially same-sex ones, at the center of the poem's sexual economy” (76). Julie Crawford's “Women's Secretaries” is a nuanced, judicious analysis of how female homoerotic relations in the period were brokered by power. She looks closely at literary representations of early modern women's secretarial practices to demonstrate how, via bed sharing and the trope of “bosom counsel” in such works as The Countess of Montgomery's Urania and Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and several comedies, the transactions of women's intimacies illustrate “the extent to which female homoeroticism was an integral and deeply significant part of early modern social, cultural, and political life” (131). In “The Touch of Office: Supernumerary Economies and the Tudor Public Figure,” Laurie Shannon develops a theory of public personage incorporating Kantorowicz's principle of “the king's two bodies”—the corporeal and the corporate—in light of the system of erotic consumption represented in George Cavendish's The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey (1556–57), in which “we see a society of disposable bodies; a rough game of musical chairs in which the persons—in a way, even more than the goods—are fungible with countless available substitutes” (146). And in a fine essay titled “Sexuality and Society in the Poetry of Katherine Philips,” Graham Hammill also takes up the conjunction of erotics and politics, making the case for Philips's importance in the history of sexuality as well as in homoerotic literary history because, by intervening in the debate about the political, social, and philosophical underpinnings of friendship, she “explores the contours of the passionate and embodied subject in ways that deepen and revise the terms and logics of mid-seventeenth century political thought” (202).

Vin Nardizzi's welcome exploration of the rhetoric of plant grafting and the nearly ubiquitous metaphors of gardens, gardening, and horticulture generally in Shakespeare's history plays illuminates the problematic relations of Hal with Falstaff and Catherine in the second tetralogy. Although at times seeming to overread the texts and neglecting to include the many contemporary treatises on friendship in his discussion of idealized male friendship, Nardizzi astutely cautions that we must not “misrecognize this investment [i.e., ‘the marriage of female stock and male scion’ in Henry V] in dynamic succession and reproduction as modern heterosexuality” (167). Putting further pressure on the distinctions between hetero- and homosexuality, Stephen Guy-Bray looks at Andrew Marvell's “The Definition of Love” and “Ametas and Thestylis Making Hay-Ropes” to deconstruct notions of sameness and difference, while Will Stockton focuses on Milton's Paradise Lost to demonstrate “the failure of heterosexuality,” “as desire seeks after relations unconstrained by gender” (224). Jennifer Drouin's “Diana's Band: Safe Spaces, Publics, and Early Modern Lesbianism,” however, turns away from these understandings of sexual fluidity in an attempt to establish a finally untenable speculative connection, grounded in unwarranted assumptions, between a Renaissance “public” and the “Making Publics” (MaPs) project at McGill University. As anachronistic is her attribution of a “lesbian” identity to the complexities of early modern representations of female same-sex erotics; that said, Drouin offers some useful insights into the erotics of The Winter's Tale, Measure for Measure, and The Convent of Pleasure.

Insofar as these essays continue the project of helping us to read early modern texts through the recognition that ideas, experiences, and representations of what constitutes sexuality were fluid, and not circumscribed as they have been throughout modernity, they mark an important advance in our understanding. Particularly notable as a corollary, at least for me, is the recognition put into play here of the ways in which the notions of “heterosexuality” and “homosexuality”—both early modern anachronisms— evolved in tandem to shape modern paradigms of sexuality. One can hope that these recent paradigms might eventually devolve into a more enlightened cultural system in which ideas of sexual fluidity and an embrace of the erotic are active components.