3 Approaching the marginalized in early modern England – low frequency data Yet the corpus is invaluable as it allows us to study English of the Early Modern period on a scale that smaller, though admittedly better structured, corpora such as the Helsinki Corpus, While that is understandable, it also leads, as this paper will show, to strong skews in the data at times towards religious interpretations of the world and religious allegory. Also, because of the nature of publishing at the time, EEBO is very heavily populated with religious writings. Any findings related, for example, to genre must be made on the basis of the skills of the analyst and close reading. As it stands, it is an unstructured collection of texts. The corpus itself is composed of a wide variety of genres, including religious tracts, proceedings of meetings, plays and reportage. EEBO v3 was compiled at Lancaster University using 44,422 texts amounting to 1,202,214,511 words. The great bulk of the texts are in English, though the corpus also contains some texts in other languages including French, Latin and Welsh. The TCP has been releasing tranches of keyed in texts from libraries worldwide for the period 1475–1715. The corpus used in this study, the Early English Books Online Corpus version 3 (EEBO v3), is constructed from texts keyed in by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP). In this paper we take a neutral stance to the essentialist/social constructionist debate by adopting Bray’s solution of using the phrase homosexual only when referring to physical acts. A similar note of caution is raised by Bray ( 1982: 10, 17).
Foucault argued that, prior to this time, ‘sodomy was a category of forbidden acts their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them.’ This approach was highly influenced by the work of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault, who claimed that the homosexual, as a personage, was only conceived of in the nineteenth century.
For instance, they might argue that men who engaged in sexual relations with adolescent boys in Ancient Greece were acting in accordance with the cultural norms of their society and were not conceived of as being homosexual. Its adherents believe that sexual behaviour is conditioned by cultural factors and that participation in same-sex activity holds differing significance depending on the participant’s society. Social constructionism arose in the 1980s and continues to be influential. Essentialists perceive homosexuality as being biologically determined and historically constant. Scholars researching sexuality are sometimes divided into essentialist and social constructionist camps. in this paper we feel that the body of work on the study of homosexuality is substantial enough for us to use that as a point of reference. While we could approach this question through the lens of conceptual history, We wish to explore how such men were written about in public discourse during a time when male same-sex intercourse was a capital offense. This paper focuses upon the public representation of men who engaged in sexual relations with other males in the seventeenth century.
Through such analyses, this paper sheds light on the typically negative meanings associated with this group in early modern England, and provides both challenge and refinement to existing lexicography, both modern and early modern, relating to the group in this period.
In addition, we show that, even where frequency does not seem to be an issue, close reading, guided by corpus analysis, is vital in allowing the analyst to move past a superficial analysis of the data towards an understanding of the conventions attached to the use of words which appear to reference men who have sex with men in this period. We consider the historical context which brings this about, the impact of such data on our study and the importance of close reading in understanding words in discourse. Our exploration leads us to consider a number of methodological issues, notably low frequency data and the classical framing of some words. To do this we use a large corpus of seventeenth century texts, the Early English Books Online corpus. In this article we explore public discourse around one marginalized group in early-modern English society, men who engaged in sexual relations with other males.