Before Modernity: Gender, Sexuality, and the Renaissance

This course turns to Renaissance literature to explore how earlier periods understood gender and desire in ways that unsettle modern assumptions. Reading across genres including proto-novels, drama, and poetry, we will consider works such as The Faerie Queene, The Roaring Girl, Shakespeare’s sonnets and Twelfth Night, alongside medical, legal, and theological texts that both shaped and reflected premodern ideas about gender and sexuality. We will investigate topics such as the “transvestite theater” of the Elizabethan stage, shifting models and “types” of same-sex desire, marriage and celibacy, and female authority,, situating these texts within frameworks drawn from queer theory and Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. By foregrounding the strangeness and complexity of premodern categories, the course challenges linear narratives of “progress” and invites students to reconsider how the past can destabilize our understanding of gender and sexuality in the present.