Bredbeck 1991

Bredbeck 1991|Bredbeck, Gregory. Sodomy and Interpretaion: Marlowe to Milton. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991.

"Renaissance configurations of homoeroticism are uniquely able to expose the historical and social rifts typically concealed in higher discourses, for the language of sodomy throughout the entire Renaissance was a dynamic and fluid field that specifically took as its task defining the unacceptable hence, the language of sodomy functions both as a demarcation between high and low and as a specification of a point where low transgresses high." (10)

"The point here is not that sodomy during the early Renaissance was asexual but rather that its lack of sexual specificity allowed the term to be used in unspecified ways, ways that signify broad fields of sexual aberration all additionally stigmatized by the prurience of male-male attraction." (11)

"The thesis of this study is that much literature of the Renaissance -- much more, at least, than has been recognized -- exploits the conflations of high/low and decorum/transgression present in Renaissance homoeroticism and that an examination of the rhetorical interplay of synechdoche and negatio that characterizes the language of sodomy in a number of discursive arenas of the Renaissance can begin to suggest a perspectivef rom which modern critical practice can more fully discover the dynamics influencing the evolution of gender meaning in early modern England." (21)