Gender, Rhetoric, and Print Culture in French Renaissance Writing

However incongruous the association between homosexuality and pornography may seem, the manner in which both are perceived and represented in early modern French texts affords a common discursive denominator. Not surprisingly, there are no first-person accounts of deviant sexual preferences or practices. When the subject arises, it is related by others, primarily in ecclesiastical, legal, or scientific texts, where it is treated as an example of the kind of anomaly which nature occasionally produces. Whereas the Renaissance gives gradual rise to the voice of women, it fails to provide homosexuals of either gender with an equivalent means of self-expression, consigning them consequently to the margins of medical treatises, courtly gossip, or private journals. Further, while there is evidence of increased curiosity about homosexuals, whatever printed records exist on the subject are dictated from without, with little or no input from those most directly involved, and we come to see and know them almost exclusively through the eyes of indiscreet or detached observers.

The appearance in print of the sexual other will be viewed first in the context of contemporary cultural and civil expectations. For example, Brantôme and Montaigne demonstrate curiosity about all kinds of irregular erotic behavior, including lesbianism, cross-dressing, homosexual marriages and practices. Their writings on the subject are dissimilar in intent and scope, however.