Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England

Visiting memory and erotics in the early modern period, this volume brings together two vibrant areas of Renaissance studies: the study of memory and the study of sexuality. Essays explore how memory re-shapes the concerns of queer studies, including the unhistorical, the experience of desire, and the limits of the body, and how the erotic revises the dominant trends of memory studies, from the rhetoric of the medieval memory arts to the formation of collective pasts. Showing that Shakespeare and contemporaries were deeply interested in the interoperability of memory and sexuality, the volume suggests that both undergird the fraught constructions of social identity in early modern England.