Since Michel Foucault's intervention, historians of sexuality have spent a fair amount of time in imitation of Diogenes with his lantern, searching out texts to reveal the remains of the sexual past. While this task is by no means done, Ian Frederick Moulton and Susanne Scholz indicate that searching has given some ground to interpretation and analysis. Despite different methodologies and foci, the authors contextualize the body and analyze the often thorny problems of sexual discourse and representation in early modern England. With their attention to the complicated negotiations fostered by conceptions of masculinity as at once powerful and besieged, together they should convince those who believe “heterosexuality” was stable and uncomplicated before it took on its modern shape as an identity category to rethink their position.

For Scholz, poetic and prose texts primarily by Edmund Spenser, Walter Raleigh, and Philip Sidney reveal changing gender deployments that shape notions of the nation and subjectivity. In part 1, Scholz focuses on efforts to produce the (docile) subject, drawing on Norbert Elias and Stephen Greenblatt to describe the process of subject formation as a matter of bodily discipline and self-fashioning. Scholz reads The Faerie Queen (1590, 1596) as a manual of gentlemanly comportment in which Spenser offers a model of perfection defined in terms of temperance and sexual continence. Scholz brings out how Spenser frames perfection as imperiled by threats of bodily excess and fragility through analysis of such key episodes as the destruction of the Bower of Bliss and images like Duessa's monstrous figure (pp. 36, 70). While Scholz pays much attention to the familiar dynamic of denigrating the feminine to secure masculine identity, more intriguing is the persistence of insecurity.

Since the locus of this study is the Elizabethan court, the central figure causing insecurity is Queen Elizabeth. Not the first to see Elizabeth's uncomfortable fit in a sexual economy that regarded powerful women as dangerous to male subjectivity, Scholz is more original in explicating how the oscillations around Elizabeth as simultaneously an integrating figure and an object of critique shaped the formation of English masculinity. With the queen looming over a patronage system configured around Petrarchan expressions of idealized courtship, textual producers at court negotiated between effeminacy (as dependent men) and agency (usually as authors). The courtier could shake off his dependent status by staking a claim to agency through authorship—of texts or of the self. Spenser's images of emasculation and damage to the contained male body by female figures suggest much masculine anxiety about authorship and subjectivity. On the way to linking the anxiety to ideas about the nation, Scholz seems to skip a step, which Moulton actually supplies: he explicates how the anxiety about authorship as a species of effeminacy kept the tension over textual production especially acute (pp. 82–91). The act of excluding the feminine is crucial to the formation of the national narrative. Through active and recurrent reiteration of the value of masculine self-creation, the specter of effeminacy could be warded off. If Scholz is not entirely clear on the centrality of process to this dynamic, she does suggest how much cultural work had to be done to keep the anxieties and resultant exclusions viable.

Other links between the discourses about gendered bodies and narratives of the nation are explored in part 2. Elizabeth functioned metonymically for the nation through the medieval concept of the king's two bodies, with her mortal body vulnerable to various threats, especially from the Catholic enemies of England. Court texts like Raleigh's attempt to explain away his disgrace in 1592 and John Lyly's Endimion (1586) expressed anxiety about the danger to subjectivity through the body of the queen by depicting Elizabeth as Cynthia, goddess of the moon. Changeable and subordinate to the sun, Cynthia was also transcendently noncorporeal. The strategy for claiming space for male agency was thus to render Elizabeth-England as both vulnerable and fundamentally inferior. Scholz does not address the duel meanings of the word “subject” in the context of the court, but she makes it clear that male subjects could frame their ambitions as protective of the nation.

Anxiety about female rule and ambivalence about Elizabeth then allowed for national imagery organized around the exclusion of gendered, effeminized “others.” Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596), Scholz argues, constructs male subjects by rendering them as crucial for the containment of the degenerate and “humoral” (read: effeminate) Irish. Describing the Spanish as intemperate and tyrannical and the “Indians” as incapable of protecting their women enabled Raleigh's Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (1596) to differentiate the English from both the Spanish and indigenous populations. English men cast as temperate and self-contained can protect vulnerable femininity in the form of virgin land, virgin queen, or simply threatened nation. These postcolonial readings are not terribly complicated. The more interesting but unexplored aspect of the analysis is how the corporeal metaphor of the nation as figured through Elizabeth's body could do all this cultural work beyond the confines of courtly literature.

In situating his analysis in the broader context of public discourse and debate around the circulation of erotic texts, Moulton makes a compelling case for the powerful contours of masculine anxiety. Moulton must do this because he has entered the perilous territory of discussing the erotic and the pornographic. He is well aware of the highly charged modern debates around his subject and opens with an assessment of recent positions on pornography. He sidesteps actually defining pornography insofar as he contends, quite rightly, that the term needs to be historicized rather than deployed polemically. He sees pornography as having a number of characteristics, but ultimately decides that pornography is largely a result of modern technologies of visual reproduction, with the nineteenth century as the true beginning of pornography (p. 15). “Before” then, he argues, there was a great deal of erotic writing, but it was not really pornography. This seems quite a neat way around the problem of modern feminist quarrels about the parameters of the erotic and the pornographic. Less compelling is Moulton's suggestion at several points that pornography is characterized primarily by misogyny and the absence of anything other than sex in its representations (pp. 15, 121, 152). It is less compelling because pornography by its nature engages in a sexual politics—it is subversive in its obsessive focus on the sexual in a culture organized in part around the repression of the sexual. In short, I remain somewhat skeptical that there is a so easily determined “before pornography” period. I say this in the vein of wishing, as Moulton himself does in his conclusion, to open up discussion of representation, both erotic and pornographic.

This caveat aside, I found Moulton's analysis of erotic culture insightful and creative. Part 1 provides an overview of erotic writing practices and their relation to the formation of English national identity through a fascinating combination of material history and interpretive work about early modern manuscript culture. With most erotic writing circulating in manuscript, Moulton argues, the practice of placing erotic material amid an array of other sorts of materials (political works, religious tracts, and even recipes) indicates the integration of erotic writing in everyday life. The contrast with the modern tendency to separate and quarantine the sexual is striking.

As it is for Scholz, sexual anxiety, associated in Moulton's analysis with erotic writing, is central to notions of national identity. Erotic writing, Moulton emphasizes, comes in all genres, and the range of sexual activities valorized, satirized, derided, and celebrated is wider than one might expect. Moulton here contributes to the findings of historians of sexuality who have questioned the Foucauldian conception that saw sexual acts and identities in discreet terms.Footnote 1 Because gendered expressions of sexuality were perceived to be on a spectrum (rather than in binary categories), male privilege was insecure at best (p. 49). The lack of sexual fixity was largely expressed in erotic writing as male anxiety, with female sexual desire also a matter of much concern. Moreover, erotic writing was routinely attacked as effeminizing under a gender scheme that defined masculinity by activity and martial prowess and femininity as “enervated, sensuous, passive” (p. 70). Erotic weakness was seen as a matter of national concern, particularly by critics who worried that moral corruption would debilitate the male body. Critics of the theater such as Philip Stubbes (The Anatomy of Abuses [1583]) believed that seeing moral corruption would cause spectators to engage in promiscuous sex, waste their seed, and as a result, weaken their constitutions. When critics complained particularly about poets being unable to defend the realm because of their effeminate weakness, respondents like Philip Sidney (Astrophil and Stella [ca. 1582] and Defense of Poesy [1579–80]) defended erotic poetry as encouraging increased martial qualities and male virtue. The Faerie Queen, Moulton argues, positively links eroticism to the national project (pp. 94–102).

Erotic writing figured prominently in debates over the impact of foreign “decadence” on English identity once more situated against the “other.” Part 2 considers the figure of Pietro Aretino, notorious in his day as a polemicist and erotic writer, in the English imagination. Among Aretino's detractors, Roger Ascham, in The Scholemaster (1570), complained mightily about the threat to England from Italian erotic corruption figured as sexual and sodomitical. Moulton carefully delineates the differences between sodomy and effeminacy while pointing out the deliberate slippages that early modern critics utilized to condemn erotic writing. Aretino, the low-born foreign writer with dubious morals, became a convenient figure against which to set English probity and sexual self-control.

Moulton makes a strong case for Aretino being seen by his contemporaries as dangerous as much for his career as for the content of his writing. Aretino's spectacular success convinced critics that erotic writing was associated with disorderly social mobility. When the “English Aretine,” Thomas Nashe, embraced Aretino's authorial model, Cambridge professor Gabriel Harvey responded by depicting Italian eroticism as corrupting and enfeebling. Nashe ended up reinforcing these associations with his poem, “Choice of Valentines” (also called “Nashe His Dildo”). Featuring male sexual dysfunction and exhaustion, along with female sexual and financial independence, the poem linked the erotic with (foreign) disorder. Again, Moulton's attention to the manuscript tradition is especially noteworthy. In its complicated manuscript life, various versions of Nashe's text omitted plot elements so as sometimes to dampen, but more often to heighten, the anxieties about eroticism, impotence, and independent female sexuality (pp. 187–93).

Despite the condemnation of erotic writing by associating it with foreign sexual corruption, the “Italianate” erotic was actually built into English writing in many ways by Ben Jonson. Although Jonson set himself emphatically against effeminacy in writing and denigrated both female and foreign alike as incapable of inhabiting masculine modes of authorship, Moulton points out how much Jonson appropriated from Aretino. Plot elements and characters in Volpone (1605), Every Man Out (1599–1600), and Epicoene (1609–10) were reworked from Aretine models. Moralistically attacking the social disorders that he saw embedded in Italian sexual politics, Jonson ended up deepening the sense that effeminacy and eroticism went hand in hand. Jonson's celebrations of aristocratic homosociality did little to suggest functional or happy heterosexuality. As Moulton describes him, Jonson seems rather like modern critics of pornography who obsessively visit and revisit the object they ostensibly hate in their efforts to occupy the moral high ground.

As Scholz and Moulton depict it, early modern England was shot through with sexual anxiety. Despite the emphasis at Elizabeth's court on a Petrarchan heterosexual love model, male subjectivity was organized around a series of unstable claims about masculine superiority. Controversies around erotic writing and its sublimation into “respectable” forms were marked by persistent fears that the erotic was perilous for soul, body, and nation. The elaborate discursive productions to protect mighty masculinity from frail femininity suggest that one of the great sources of power within the heterosexual paradigm has long been the fear that the paradigm will not hold.