The Sexual Politics of Victorian Historiographical Writing about the "Renaissance"

W. Fisher

The "Renaissance" and the "homosexual" are both nineteenth-century inventions. The historiographical concept of the Renaissance?with its overtones of cultural rebirth and the rise of the individual?was first introduced in the second half of the nineteenth century by such Continental writers as Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt and the English writers John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds. The term homosexual was first used in 1892, and, as Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and others have argued, it was during this period that the term came to be understood as a "personage" or "species" in which "nothing that was part of his being was unaffected by his sexuality." Although these two roughly concurrent developments might appear to be unrelated, I want to explore some of the ways in which they overlapped. In what follows, I focus primarily on Victorian historiographical writing about the Renaissance and argue that when this concept was introduced in England, the period was imagined as queer terrain. In Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), Alan Bray points out that the Renaissance is often...