Synopses & Reviews
In the most comprehensive study yet of homosexuality in the English Renaissance, Bruce R. Smith examines and rejects the assessments of homosexual acts in moral philosophy, laws, and medical books in favor of a poetics of homosexual desire. Smith isolates six different "myths" from classical literature and discusses each in relation to a particular Renaissance literary genre and to a particular part of the social structure of early modern England. Smith's new Preface places his work in the context of the continuing controversies in gay, lesbian, and bisexual studies.
"The best single analysis of the homoerotic element in Renaissance English literature."and#8212;Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books
"Smith's lucid and subtle book offer[s] a poetics of homosexual desire. . . . Its scholarship, impressively broad and deftly deployed, aims to further a serious social purpose: the redemptive location of homosexual desire in history and the recuperation for our own time, through an understanding of its discursive embodiments, of that desire's changing imperatives and parameters."and#8212;Terence Hawkes, Times Literary Supplement
"The great strength of Bruce Smith's book is that it does not sidestep the complex challenge of engaging in the sexual politics of the present while attending to the resistant discourses and practices of Renaissance England. Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England demonstrates how a commitment to the present opens up our understanding of the past."and#8212;Peter Stallybrass, Shakespeare Quarterly
"A major contribution to the understanding of homosexuality in Renaissance England and by far the best and most comprehensive account yet offered of the homoeroticism that suffuses Renaissance literature."and#8212;Claude J. Summers, Journal of Homosexuality
Review
andldquo;The implications of Setting Plato Straight are substantial. Reeser takes the developments of sexuality studies, queer theory, and translation studies into account to offer a substantially new and deeply sophisticated understanding of how problematic classical texts and ideas were transmitted and adapted in the Renaissance. While a number of scholars have considered homoerotics and same-sex sexuality in the Renaissance, none have engaged with Plato so systematically. Reeser demonstrates that Plato is crucial for understanding the production of cultural logic around sexuality. Although the ongoing politics of sexuality figure heavily in public culture, this book is not simply timely, but profoundly important.andrdquo;
Synopsis
When we talk of platonic love or relationships today, we mean something very different from what Plato meant. For this, we have fifteenth and sixteenth-century European humanists to thank. As these scholarsandmdash;most of them Catholicandmdash;read, digested, and translated Plato, they found themselves faced with a fundamental problem: how to be faithful to the text yet not propagate pederasty or homosexuality.
In Setting Plato Straight, Todd W. Reeser undertakes the first sustained and comprehensive study of Renaissance textual responses to Platonic same-sex sexuality. Reeser mines an expansive collection of translations, commentaries, and literary sources to study how Renaissance translators transformed ancient eros into non-erotic, non-homosexual relations. He analyzes the interpretive lenses translators employed and the ways in which they read and reread Platoandrsquo;s texts. In spite of this cleansing, Reeser finds surviving traces of Platonic same-sex sexuality that imply a complicated, recurring process of course-correctionandmdash;of setting Plato straight.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. [270]-315) and index.
About the Author
Todd W. Reeser is professor of French and director of the gender, sexuality, and womenandrsquo;s studies program at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture and Masculinities in Theory.
Table of Contents
Preface: Strictly Platonic
Note on Translations Used
Introduction
1: Solving the Problem with Plato
2: The Antitheses of Same-Sex Sexuality in Bruni
3: Ficino and the Theory of Purging Same-Sex Sexuality
4: Ficino and the Practice of Purging Same-Sex Sexuality
5: Importing Ficino: Gender Balance in Champier
6: Seducing Socrates: The Silenus in Erasmus and Rabelais
7: The Gates of Germania: Space, Place, and Sexuality in Cornarius
8: Fractured Men: Feminism and Neoplatonism in Mid-Sixteenth-Century France
9: Orientations: Female-Female and Male-Male Eros in Dialogue
10: Reading Sexuality Skeptically in Montaigne
Conclusion: Bending Plato
Appendix: Major Translations of Platoandrsquo;s Erotic Dialogues
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index