ABSTRACT
This essay began as a talk at a conference titled “Historicizing Sex.” When the conference talks were gathered into a volume for publication, however, the book title became “Rethinking Feminism.” This is a metamorphosis that would have impressed Ovid himself. Among the accomplishments of feminist scholarship—on the early modern period and more generally—is certainly a much-needed historicizing of sex. But feminism’s brief went well beyond this one narrow if important task. A t the same time, feminism’s commitment to historicism has always been somewhat equivocal, not least because of theoretical influences that do not always point in a historical direction. In the field of early modern literature alone, critics such as Janet Adelman, Lynn Enterline, and Elizabeth J. Bellamy, for instance, have done important nonhistorical work that is at once feminist and psychoanalytic in orientation. 1
