Queering the Seventeenth Century: Historicism, Queer Theory, and Early Modern Literature

This article explores the continuing prevalence of historicism and queer theory in seventeenth‐century literature. While some scholars have announced the demise of new historicism and queer theory and others have challenged these critical perspectives’ methodologies and assumptions, scholarship on the history of sexuality published within the past ten years demonstrates the continuing importance of historicist and queer theories on seventeenth‐century literary criticism. Queer historicists, also called alteritists, constructivists, or differentialists, argue that the seventeenth century's constructions of same‐sex sexual practices, desires, and emotions are fundamentally different from those of the present day. Challenges to this position maintain that early modern representations of same‐sex eroticism share some continuity with those of today. Through an examination of scholarship on female same‐sex erotics, passionate male friendship, constructions of ‘sodomy’ as a legal and social category, the exiling of homoeroticism from the center of government to the margins of society, and depictions of same‐sex desire in the theater during the seventeenth century, this piece concludes that queer historicism remains a dominant voice in early modern studies.