"Premodern Sexualities" offers rigorous new approaches to current problems in the historiography of sexuality. From queer readings of early modern medical texts to transcribing and interrogating pre-modern documents of sexual transgression, the contributors bring together current theoretical discourses on sexuality while emphasizing problems in historicist interpretation of early textualizations of sexuality. "Premodern Sexualities" clarifies the contributions literary studies can make--through its emphasis on reading strategies--to the historiogrphy of sexuality.
Editors Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero construct a genealogy for the history of sexuality, sexual practices and sexual identities, by expanding the recent abundance of work in the history of sexuality, most notably popularized by John Boswell's "Same-Sex Unions in Pre-modern Europe." Expanding on a special issue of the GLQ which explored the role of pleasure in the construction of narratives about "premodernity" and "modernity," Fradenburg and Freccero call for a rethinking of the categories of history and sexuality in ways that mutually transform each other in the much needed encounter between historicism and queer theory.
"Premodern Sexualities" is organized into sections that address some of the most significant concerns in sexuality studies today, with essays by scholars from a wide range of literay and historical disciplines. Jonathan Goldberg, Ruth Karras, Bruce Holsinger and many others contribute essays in "The Erotics of Conquest," "Medicine and the Law," and "Sexuality and Sanctity."
Contributors include: David Boyd, Maria Carrion, Richard Corum, Lorraine Daston, Simon Gaunt, JonathanGoldberg, Bruce Holsinger, Ruth Karras, Kathryn Lavezzo, Karma Lochrie, Katherine Park, Patricia Parker, Jose Piedra, and Elizabeth Pittenger

Premodern Sexualities offers rigourous new approaches to current problems in the historiography of sexuality. From queer readings of early modern medical texts to transcribing and interrogating pre-modern documents of sexual transgression, the contributors bring together current theoretical discourses on sexuality while emphasizing problems in historicist interpretation of early textulaiztions of sexualtity. Premodern Sexualities clarifies the contributions literary studies can make - thorugh its emphasis on reading strategies - to the historiography of sexuality.
Editors Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero construct a genealogy for the history of sexuality, sexual practices and sexual identities. By expanding the recent abundance of work in the history of sexuality, Fradenburh and Freccero call for a rethinking of the categories of history and sexuality in ways that mutually transform each other in the much- needed encounter between historicism and queer theory.

Women and Power at the French Court, 1483-1563 explores the ways in which a range of women " as consorts, regents, mistresses, factional power players, attendants at court, or as objects of courtly patronage " wielded power in order to advance individual, familial, and factional agendas at the early sixteenth-century French court. Spring-boarding from the burgeoning scholarship of gender, the political, and power in early modern Europe, the collection provides a perspective from the French court, from the reigns of Charles VIII to Henri II, a time when the French court was a renowned center of culture and at which women played important roles. Crossdisciplinary in its perspectives, these essays by historians, art and literary scholars investigate the dynamic operations of gendered power in political acts, recognized status as queens and regents, ritualized behaviors such as gift-giving, educational coteries, and through social networking, literary and artistic patronage, female authorship, and epistolary strategies.

In "Queer/Early/Modern," Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term "queer," in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of "fantasmatic historiography" that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labe, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin's take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius's "The Golden Ass" and Boccaccio's "Decameron"; and France's domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre's "Heptameron." Turning to French cleric Jean de Lery's account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida's concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.

In "Queer/Early/Modern," Carla Freccero, a leading scholar of early modern European studies, argues for a reading practice that accounts for the queerness of temporality, for the way past, present, and future time appear out of sequence and in dialogue in our thinking about history and texts. Freccero takes issue with New Historicist accounts of sexual identity that claim to respect historical proprieties and to derive identity categories from the past. She urges us to see how the indeterminacies of subjectivity found in literary texts challenge identitarian constructions and she encourages us to read differently the relation between history and literature. Contending that the term "queer," in its indeterminacy, points the way toward alternative ethical reading practices that do justice to the aftereffects of the past as they live on in the present, Freccero proposes a model of "fantasmatic historiography" that brings together history and fantasy, past and present, event and affect.

Combining feminist theory, queer theory, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and literary criticism, Freccero takes up a series of theoretical and historical issues related to debates in queer theory, feminist theory, the history of sexuality, and early modern studies. She juxtaposes readings of early and late modern texts, discussing the lyric poetry of Petrarch, Louise Labe, and Melissa Ethridge; David Halperin's take on Michel Foucault via Apuleius's "The Golden Ass" and Boccaccio's "Decameron"; and France's domestic partner legislation in connection with Marguerite de Navarre's "Heptameron." Turning to French cleric Jean de Lery's account, published in 1578, of having witnessed cannibalism and religious rituals in Brazil some twenty years earlier and to the twentieth-century Brandon Teena case, Freccero draws on Jacques Derrida's concept of spectrality to propose both an ethics and a mode of interpretation that acknowledges and is inspired by the haunting of the present by the past.