Course Description

This course will introduce students to the historical study of gender as it was understood and represented in pre-1800 poetry and drama. Too often, heteronormative sexual practices and ideas are taken to be an invention of modernity (or post-modernity), but the full range of sexual practices, gender identities, and cultural norms—from homosexual desire, to trans identity, to feminism—have clear antecedents in the pre-modern period. The real historical figure, Mary Frith, for example, after whom Moll Cutpurse in Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl is modeled, really dressed as a man and lived their life as a man in late sixteenth-century London. Philip Sidney’s prose romance, The Arcadia, shifts names and pronouns when a character initially introduced as a man transforms into a woman. As the narrator explains, “thus did Pyrocles become Cleophila—which name for a time hereafter I will use, for I myself fell such compassion of his passion that I find even part of his fear lest his name should be uttered before fit time were for it.” After which, the narrator refers to Cleophila throughout as “she.” The misogynist, homophobic, and anti-trans rhetorics of our own historical moment also have antecedents in the early modern period. Gender norms were violently enforced by legal, religious, and cultural institutions, as demonstrated in the anonymous essays Haec Vir and Hic Mulier, which debate gender bending practices in behavior and dress. 

Our reading and discussion of premodern constructions of gender will be informed by contemporary theory and criticism, focusing in particular on Judith Butler’s foundational concept of gendered performativity. Butler, together, with a selection of essays by scholars like Colby Gordon, Marjorie Rubright, Simone Chess, and Amia Srinivasan, students will come away with a robust set of interpretive tools to grapple with sex and gender—concepts whose deep histories continue to shape our experience of our world and ourselves to this day.

Resources