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The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 18501930, by Yvonne Ivory; pp. ix +

240. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 45.00, $85.00.

Victorianists working across a broad range of disciplinary boundaries have explored

the subject of same-sex desire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from a
variety of instructive perspectives. Ranging from studies that dissect the urban land-
scapes populated by same-sex desiring men in fin-de-sicle London to examinations of
the culture of female love in the Victorian era, such work reminds us that nineteenth-
century historical subjects inhabited a highly variegated sexual landscape. Concerns
with self-fashioning and the construction of individual sexual subjectivities also punc-
tuate a number of important scholarly interventions in the rapidly developing field of
LGBT history. The creation of sexual identity in this period, for most, involved at least
some engagement with the frequently pathologizing and criminalizing representations

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of the homosexual that permeated medical, scientific, and legal texts. These negative
conceptions were occasionally countered by alternative discourses that drewas Linda
Dowling, in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994), and others have
notedon ancient traditions of same-sex desire and love. In The Homosexual Revival of
Renaissance Style, 18501930, Yvonne Ivory introduces readers to another component of
the history of sexual subjectivities by illustrating how some same-sex desiring men and
women in both Germany and England deployed Renaissance tropes in the service of
queer self-fashioning (138).
Ivory tackles a number of important issues in her discourse-based study,
aiming to uncover the origins of a persistent cultural connection between queer sexual
identities and style. The contemporaneous emergence of the notion of the homosexual
and the late-nineteenth-century preoccupation with Renaissance art and design
contributed, in Ivorys estimation, to an enduring association of (particularly male)
homosexuality with finely honed aesthetic sensibilities. More significant is Ivorys
discussion of how some writers used a variety of Renaissance themes to create positive
depictions of same-sex love and desire in multiple published and unpublished works.
These themes or topoias Ivory refers to themoriginated in several genres
of nineteenth-century writing (most notably in the history and art criticism of Jacob
Burckhardt, Walter Pater, and John Addington Symonds) and helped foster an ethos of
creative, and occasionally defiant, individualism. Each of these authors focused, to
varying degrees, on five themes in explaining why the Renaissance was a momentous
historical epoch: the intense aestheticization of culture, the focus on reproducing and
celebrating the beautiful body, the understanding that criminality was frequently a part
of everyday life, the relative toleration of divergent sexual practices, and the rising impor-
tance of the individual. By referencing Burckhardts and Symondss assertion that the
creative capacities of Renaissance artists and patrons often led to more experimentation
in matters of sexuality, Ivorys queer Victorian and Edwardian subjects embraced this
vision of the past in fashioning their own sexual and aesthetic subjectivities.
The individualist Renaissance tendency toward self-fashioning provided a
model of behavior for same-sex desiring people that countered negative stereotypes
emanating from the medical and legal establishment. As Ivory notes in her second chapter,
the German sex reformer Adolf Brand encouraged personal expression in the first explic-
itly homosexual periodical, Der Eigene, as a mechanism for combating despotic laws that
prohibited sex between men. Similarly, Edward Carpenter challenged traditional morals
and British legal institutions by arguing, in an 1887 essay, that morality was highly subjec-
tive. Admirers of the Renaissance also found models for resisting the sexological catego-
ries that were coming into vogue after the 1870s. Writers like Symonds, Ivory asserts, drew
on Renaissance ideas of masculinist individualism in asserting the maleness of same-sex
love and rejecting the ideas of sexual scientists like Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who hypoth-
esized that inverts possessed erotic desires that were contrary to their biological sex.
The ideals of the Renaissance and the emphasis on the cultivation of the self
in that period were particularly evident, as Ivory demonstrates in the final three chap-
ters of her study, in the work of Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, and Vita Sackville-West.
Each of these literary figures incorporated into their public writings and private lives
some of the Renaissance traits discussed by nineteenth-century historians and art
critics. By the 1880s and 1890s, Wilde was engaging with the splendor and artistic

victorian studies / Volume 53, no. 3

 595

output of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and constructing an explicit defense of
the perceived moral and sexual excesses of the period. For Ivory, Wildes works are
replete with references to Renaissance themes drawn from Paters Studies in the History
of the Renaissance (1873) and Symondss Renaissance in Italy (187586). Like the other
authors examined in Ivorys study, Wilde developed a theory of self-culture that relied
on Renaissance precedents and privileged individual development, experimentation,
and a rejection of traditional moral standards.
In her chapters on Mann and Sackville-West, Ivory turns more toward the
biographical in her efforts to show how the revival of Renaissance ideals and styles could
justify same-sex love and desire. Mann looked to the sexual experimentation of the
Renaissance (expressed most explicitly in his short story Gladius Dei [1902]) to explain
his romantic relationship with Paul Ehrenberg, which lasted from 1899 until Manns 1904
marriage to Katja Pringsheim. While this fascination with the Renaissance would end
with his marriage and the quest for bourgeois respectability that accompanied it, this
brief period of romantic and erotic subversiveness illustrates how ideas from the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries continued to hold sway in the twentieth.
Sackville-West also wrote extensively on the Renaissance in a number of
underexamined texts produced between 1910 and 1917. Her fascination with the period
was rooted, in part, in the history of the Sackville family seat at Knole, a west Kent estate
acquired during the reign of Elizabeth I. Sackville-West also found in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, however, a cast of creative geniuses, ruthlessly individualist aristo-
crats, unconventional women, and sexual dissidents (142); past precedents that
assisted her in creating complex gender and sexual subjectivities. Her identification
with strong masculine individualists from Renaissance Italy such as Giuliano de Medici
and Michelangelo was especially important as she made sense of her love for other
women and her own unorthodox gender identity. By referencing the uninhibited
masculinity of the period (and the access to women and property that went along with
it), Sackville-West engaged in a fantasy of authority and power that helped her nego-
tiate the limitations of femininity in the early twentieth century.
Ivorys intervention provides a number of important insights into one of the
cultural forces that conditioned same-sex desires and identities for elite men and women
in the years between 1850 and 1930. Her book is particularly effective in reminding readers
that modern conceptions of the Renaissance originated in the works of Victorian histo-
rians and that these ideas informed the sexual and aesthetic subjectivities of queer men
and women. This is not a work, however, that is able to escape criticism entirely. Certainly,
many will be left wondering just how wide-reaching this Renaissance revival was for the
ordinary men and women who may have possessed same-sex desires but not the educa-
tional background or economic means to access Italian culture from the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. While Ivory hints at the general popularization of some Renaissance
themes by referencing Baedeker guides, hers is not a narrative that pays great attention to
the wider currency of these ideas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Still,
this informative and engaging piece of scholarship shows us how Victorians utilized past
precedents to understand the present, combat marginalizing discourses, and, ultimately,
create more positive depictions of the same-sex desiring individual.
Paul R. Deslandes
University of Vermont

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Ian Burney (ian.burney@manchester.ac.uk) is Senior Lecturer at the University of

Manchesters Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. His most
recent book, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination (2006), is published by
Manchester University Press.

Janis McLarren Caldwell (jcaldwell@english.ucsb.edu) is a former physician, now

Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
She is the author of Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley
to George Eliot (2004) and is now working on a project examining scientific and literary
representations of the face in the Victorian period.

Claire Connolly (connolly@cardiff.ac.uk) is Professor of English at Cardiff Univer-

sity and the author of A Cultural History of the Irish Novel, 17901829, which will be
published by Cambridge University Press in 2012. She is the editor of Theorising Ireland
(2003) and, with Joe Cleary, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Irish Culture (2005).

Paul R. Deslandes (paul.deslandes@uvm.edu) is Associate Professor of History at the

University of Vermont. He is the author of Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the
Undergraduate Experience, 18501920 (2005) and a number of essays and reviews on the
history of British education, gender, and sexuality. He is currently writing a new book
on the cultural history of male beauty in modern Britain.

Jim Endersby (j.j.endersby@sussex.ac.uk) is Senior Lecturer at the University of

Sussex and a 2010 to 2011 Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the
author of Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (2008) and
editor of the Cambridge University Presss edition of Darwins Origin of Species (2009).

Tanya Evans (tanya.evans@mq.edu.au) is Research Fellow at Macquarie University.

Her publications include: Unfortunate Objects: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London
(2005). She has two forthcoming books on the history of motherhood with Oxford
University Press and is co-editing a special issue of Australian Historical Studies on biog-
raphy and life-writing.

Frances Ferguson (ff1@jhu.edu) is Mary Elizabeth Garrett Professor in Arts and

Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and author of Pornography, the Theory: What Utili-
tarianism Did To Action (2004). She is currently working on concurrent projects on
Enlightenment education and on reading and practical criticism.

David Finkelstein (dfinkelstein@qmu.ac.uk) is Research Professor of Media and

Print Culture at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. His publications include The
House of Blackwood: Author-Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era (2002), the co-authored
An Introduction to Book History (2005), and the edited Print Culture and the Blackwood
Tradition, 18051930 (2006).

J. Jeffrey Franklin (jeff.franklin@ucdenver.edu) is Professor of English at the

University of Colorado Denver. His books are Serious Play: The Cultural Form of the

spring 2011
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