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Sex and the Archives: Current Work on Subordinate Identities and Early Modern Cultural Formation

The four works under review here appear as two vital debates are converging about how we study subaltern identities during the medieval and early modern periods. The first of these conversations, undertaken primarily by historians of sexuality, is aimed at rethinking the possibilities of sexually subordinate subjects beyond the Foucaultian paradigm. Ruth Mazo Karras and others have argued that the act/ identity model unravels in the face of politically, socially, and sexually subordinate people that even by Foucault’s own measure must be understood to have had identities. Indeed, the multifaceted recognition that both medieval and early modern cultures were capable of producing sexually subordinate identities has added further questions to those being asked already by political historians like Tim Harris about what it might mean to do “history from below” when most evidence of subordination comes from institutions and individuals with power. Remarkably, scholars of various beliefs and methodologies (cultural materialists, Marxists, political historians, feminists, and historians of sexuality, to name a few), who often can agree on little else, agree that a historiography focused merely on rounding up early modern dissident “suspects” risks becoming a tautological and fetishized search for reflections of the modern in the premodern that may also lure us into a new kind of essentialism. All too often the belief that a search for dissident subjects can be definitively undertaken is accompanied by the belief that the ar-