I like the book by Alan Bray (Is it "Homosexuality in the Renaissance"
or something like that?) and the ones by Bruce R. Smith and by
Bredbeck. I seem to remember that one of them discusses the
university world as a place where homosexual activities were common
and even acceptable -- I think either Smith or Bredbeck said that.
Sorry I don't have the books right here but they should be easy to find.
Quoting William Oram <[log in to unmask]>:
> I don't know the answer but I think that the question is important. A
> book I like a lot is Stephen Guy-Brey, Homoerotic Space (2002), which
> doesn't answer the question either but helps in thinking about it.
>
> In the SC my take on E.K.'s harrumphing about "disorderly love" in the
> gloss to "January" is that it's a send-up of an identifiable kind of
> pedantic uneasiness and fascination with the whole subject--possibly a
> send-up of a particular person whom both Spenser and Harvey knew. But
> I've got no evidence except the sense that there's a comic undergraduate
> air about the passage. Bill Oram
>
>
>>>> David Wilson-Okamura <[log in to unmask]> 10/31/2006 11:47 AM >>>
> I am rewriting (again) the section of my Virgil in the Renaissance book
>
> that deals with homosexuality* in The Shepheardes Calender. Don't need
>
> to rehearse all of the evidence for this crowd. Have been wondering,
> though: was there a homosexual* subculture at English universities in
> the 1570s? If so, has anyone written about it?
>
> Gary M. Bouchard, Colin's Campus: Cambridge Life and the English
> Eclogue
> (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2000) argues that much of
> The Shepheardes Calender can be understood in reference to student life
>
> at Cambridge, but doesn't comment on this aspect.
>
> * Many scholars, I know, deprecate the use of "homosexual" for this
> period. But the period terms -- bugger, sodomite, tribade -- are
> equally
> misleading; or so I have been convinced by reading Claude J. Summers,
>
> "Homosexuality and Renaissance Literature, or the Anxieties of
> Anachronism," South Central Review 9 (1992): 2-23.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Dr. David Wilson-Okamura http://virgil.org [log in to unmask]
>
> English Department Virgil reception, discussion, documents,
> &c
> East Carolina University Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude
> Fauchet
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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