The only scholarly monograph to focus on Ovid's 'Iphis and Ianthe'.

Trans Historical explores the plurality of gender experiences that flourished before the modern era, from Late Antiquity to the eighteenth century, across a broad geographic range, from Spain to Poland and Byzantium to Boston. Refuting arguments that transgender people, experiences, and identities were non-existent or even impossible prior to the twentieth century, this volume focuses on archives—literary texts, trial transcripts, documents, and artifacts—that denaturalize gender as a category. The volume historicizes the many different social lives of sexual differentiation, exploring what gender might have been before modern medicine, the anatomical sciences, and the sedimentation of gender difference into its putatively binary form. The volume's multidisciplinary group of contributors consider how individuals, communities, and states understood and enacted gender as a social experience distinct from the assignment of sex at birth. Alongside historical questions about the meaning of sexual differentiation, Trans Historical also offers a series of diverse meditations on how scholars of the medieval and early modern periods might approach gender nonconformity before the nineteenth-century emergence of the norm and the normal. Contributors: Abdulhamit Arvas, University of Pennsylvania; Roland Betancourt, University of California, Irvine; M. W. Bychowski, Case Western Reserve University; Emma Campbell, Warwick University; Igor H. de Souza, Yale University; Leah DeVun, Rutgers University; Micah James Goodrich, University of Connecticut; Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University; Anna Kłosowska; Greta LaFleur; Scott Larson, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Kathleen Perry Long, Cornell University; Robert Mills, University College London; Masha Raskolnikov; Zrinka Stahuljak, UCLA.

This collection of essays examines the ways Ovid's diverse oeuvre has been translated, rewritten, adapted, and responded to by a range of French and Francophone women from the Renaissance to the present. It aims to reveal lesser-known voices in Ovidian reception studies, and to offer a wider historical perspective on the complex question of Ovid and gender. Ranging from Renaissance poetry to contemporary creative-criticism, it charts an understudied strand of reception studies, emphasizing how a longer view allows us to explore and challenge the notion of a female tradition of Ovidian reception. The range of genres analysed here--poetry, verse and prose translation, theatre, epistolary fiction, autofiction, autobiography, film, creative critique, and novels--also reflect the diversity of the Ovidian texts in reception from the Heroides to the Metamorphoses, from the Amores to the Ars Amatoria, from the Tristia to the Fasti. The study brings an array of critical approaches to bear on well-known authors such as George Sand, Julia Kristeva, and Marguerite Yourcenar, as well as less-known figures, from contemporary writer Linda Lê to the early modern Catherine and Madeline Des Roches, exploring exile, identity, queerness, displacement, voice, expectations of modesty, the poetics of translation, and the problems posed by Ovid's erotized violence, to name just some of the volume's rich themes. The epilogue by translator and novelist Marie Cosnay points towards new eco-critical and creative directions in Ovidian scholarship and reception. Students and scholars of French Studies, Classics, Comparative Literature and Translation Studies will find much to interest them in this diverse collection of essays.

Uses adaptation and appropriation studies to explore early modern textual and theatrical metamorphoses of OvidApplies contemporary theoretical approaches, such as gender/queer/trans studies, feminist ecostudies, hauntology, rhizomatic adaptation, transmedialityUses adaptation studies in analyzing early modern transformations of OvidFocuses on the appropriations of "e;Ovid"e; (as an umbrella term for "e;all things Ovidian"e;) on the early modern English stageIncludes chapters on Shakespeare and Marlowe as well as other early modern dramatistsDid you know that Ovid was a multifaceted icon of lovesickness, endless change, libertinism, emotional torment and violence in early modern England? This is the first collection to use adaptation studies in connection with other contemporary theoretical approaches in analysing early modern transformations of Ovid. It provides innovative perspectives on the 'Ovids' that haunted the early modern stage, while exploring intersections between adaptation theory and gender/queer/trans studies, ecofeminism, hauntology, transmediality, rhizomatics and more. This book examines the multidimensional, ubiquitous role that Ovid and Ovidian adaptations played in English Renaissance drama and theatrical performance.

Ovid transformed English Renaissance literary ideas about love, erotic desire, embodiment, and gender more than any other classical poet. Ovidian concepts of femininity have been well served by modern criticism, but Ovid's impact on masculinity in Renaissance literature remains underexamined. This volume explores how English Renaissance writers shifted away from Virgilian heroic figures to embrace romantic ideals of courtship, civility, and friendship. Ovid's writing about masculinity, love, and desire shaped discourses of masculinity across a wide range of literary texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including poetry, prose fiction, and drama. The book covers all major works by Ovid, in addition to Italian humanists Angelo Poliziano and Natale Conti, canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and John Milton, and lesser-known writers such as Wynkyn de Worde, Michael Drayton, Thomas Lodge, Richard Johnson, Robert Greene, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, and Francis Beaumont. Individual essays examine emasculation, abjection, pacifism, female masculinity, boys' masculinity, parody, hospitality, and protean Jewish masculinity. Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature demonstrates how Ovid's poetry gave vigour and vitality to male voices in English literature - how his works inspired English writers to reimagine the male authorial voice, the male body, desire, and love in fresh terms.

The "rogue," a term that described criminals, prostitutes, vagrants, beggars, and the unemployed, dominated the pages of early modern popular crime literature. Rogue Sexuality resituates the rogue by focusing on how their menace—and their seductive appeal—emerged not only from their social marginality, but also from their supposedly excessive sexuality and prodigious sexual reproduction. Through discussions of both familiar and little-studied early modern works by William Shakespeare, John Milton, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Robert Greene, Thomas Harman, and the inventor of modern demography John Graunt, this volume posits the sexualized rogue as the avatar of a new category of "socio-sexual identity" and traces a surprising social transposition, in which socio-political elites are portrayed as appropriating the rogue's sexual vitality and performative charisma to navigate moments of crisis. By tracking the movement of rogue sexuality from a criminal to a normative discursive register, this book challenges the distinctions that literary critics and historians tend to draw between orderly and disorderly sexuality. With its focus on reproduction, rogue sexuality also provides a new framework for what Michel Foucault called "biopolitics," the state's focus on exercising power over life. In legal, administrative, and scientific documents, this book shows that early modern writers grappled with popular pamphlets' rendering of the alleged threat of rogue reproduction. Rogue Sexuality thus offers a new approach to the political history of early modern England as a population—as a people whose aggregate sexual life and reproduction were a key part of its political imagination.

A prehistory of transness that recovers early modern theological resources for trans lifeworlds. In this striking contribution to trans history, Colby Gordon challenges the prevailing assumption that trans life is a byproduct of recent medical innovation by locating a cultural imaginary of transition in the religious writing of the English Renaissance. Marking a major intervention in early modern gender studies, Glorious Bodies insists that transition happened, both socially and surgically, hundreds of years before the nineteenth-century advent of sexology. Pairing literary texts by Shakespeare, Webster, Donne, and Milton with a broad range of primary sources, Gordon examines the religious tropes available to early modern subjects for imagining how gender could change. From George Herbert’s invaginated Jesus and Milton’s gestational Adam to the ungendered “glorious body” of the resurrection, early modern theology offers a rich conceptual reservoir of trans imagery. In uncovering early modern trans theology, Glorious Bodies mounts a critique of the broad consensus that secularism is a necessary precondition for trans life, while also combating contemporary transphobia and the right-wing Christian culture war seeking to criminalize transition. Developing a rehabilitative account of theology’s value for positing trans lifeworlds, this book leverages premodern religion to imagine a postsecular transness in the present.

In the 1800s, urban development efforts modernized Paris and encouraged the creation of brothels, boulevards, cafés, dancehalls, and even public urinals. However, complaints also arose regarding an apparent increase in public sexual activity, and the appearance of “individuals of both sexes with depraved morals” in these spaces. Andrew Israel Ross’s illuminating study, Public City/Public Sex, chronicles the tension between the embourgeoisement and democratization of urban culture in nineteenth-century Paris and the commercialization and commodification of a public sexual culture, the emergence of new sex districts, as well as the development of gay and lesbian subcultures. Public City/Public Sex examines how the notion that male sexual desire required suitable outlets shaped urban policing and development. Ross traces the struggle to control sex in public and argues that it was the very effort to police the city that created new opportunities for women who sold sex and men who sought sex with other men. Placing public sex at the center of urban history, Ross shows how those who used public spaces played a central role in defining the way the city was understood.

By encompassing the hagiographies of the first centuries, the most famous case of Joan of Arc, numerous chivalrous novels, and the overlooked accounts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, this is the first study to consider cross-dressing for the entire medieval age. Cross-dressing is a thought-provoking practice in a world that, in theory, adheres to neat distinctions of the functions and attires of males and females in society; this volume demonstrates that only a long-term analysis can fully account for the phenomenon in its various facets. If dress is a gender marker, the argument that it also marks many other conditions beyond the man–woman binary cannot be ignored. There is a dress for the cleric and one for the layman; there is the dress of the rich and that of the poor. In some cases, these other binary distinctions are intertwined with that of sex and gender, and this intersectional perspective is developed through a wide range of sources read with philological rigour. The narrative style makes this book accessible to both students and general readers interested in the history of sexuality, gender history, and medieval studies.