Reading for Queerness in Seventeenth-Century Sources: Talk and Workshop How do we interpret the language that Renaissance people used to describe queerness, when their terms for sexual preferences or acts are highly ambiguous and do not match modern identity categories?

Historians James Hobbes and Scarlett Stevens (University of York) will share their thoughts - including why focusing on high-status men, like Netflix faves James VI/I and George Villiers, can be limiting - and lead a workshop on developing your ‘queer eye’ for history. Using the concept of ‘queer potentiality’, we’ll explore meaningful ways to engage with seventeenth-century individuals and queerness beyond labels, and discover queer angles to historical sources that we might never have spotted before.

Scarlett Stevens and James Hobbes are PhD students at the University of York. James is interested in the seventeenth-century political imagination; his thesis focuses on the role of poison, witchcraft, and sexual scandal in depictions of seventeenth-century court favourites. Scarlett is interested in queer, gender and reading histories; her thesis considers the erotic and pleasure-inducing potential of reading in the 17th century.