Loveable Philologies: Texts, Bodies and Early Modern Queer Desire

Abstract

Two publications might serve as bookends to the period under consideration in Jeffrey Masten’s richly engrossing Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Affect in Shakespeare’s Time. The first is Champ Fleury – ‘the Art and Science of the Due and True Proportion of Classical Letters’ – by the French printer and humanist Geofroy Tory. Published in 1529, Tory’s treatise set out to regularize the design of Roman majuscule letters according to a standard ten-by-ten grid and in harmony with the human body and face. His ‘O’ is consequently depicted encircling a nude Vitruvian man, whose stretched-out hands and feet land gracefully at the two, four, eight and ten o’clock positions on the face of the letter. More pertinent for Masten is Tory’s deviant ‘Q’, the only capital letter to venture below the line whose tail queerly reaches out to embrace his ‘companion and good brother’ ‘V’ (U) ‘from below’. When, in a plate entitled ‘L’Homme Lettre’, Tory depicts the twenty-three letters of the Roman alphabet in relation to the parts of the body, Q is inevitably aligned with the cul (arse).