Book Review: Countless Blessings: A History of Childbirth and Reproduction in the Sahel by Barbara MacGowan Cooper

argues, enact a “queer historiography.” Bale’s historiography is queer in the sense that his promotion of a chaste, theologically reformed England becomes implicated in his condemnation of clerical chastity as a kind of sodomy. “Sodomitical traces” of a demonized Catholic past thus haunt Bale’s redeemed English present (125). One way that Bale associates the Catholic Church with sodomy is through the character Sodomismus in Thre Lawes of Nature, Moses, and Christ, who boasts of the pederastic tastes of even the Pope. As we saw in the earlier chapter about male friendship, however, sodomy was a broadly defined sin that signified the general debauchery of human will. For Bale, then, sodomy could encompass not only pederasty but also adultery, promiscuity, masturbation, bestiality, and idolatry. Yet because Bale’s interludes, like many of the dramatic texts in Pugh’s study, feature few female characters, sodomy comes to seem particularly descriptive of transgressive male same-sex relations. With the wonderfully paradoxical phrase “sodomitical chastity,” Bale excoriates the sexual hypocrisy of lecherous if unmarried Catholic prelates (and nuns) even as he thereby undercuts the purity of Englande, a chaste widow and mother, in King Johan. King Johan’s chaste asexuality similarly falls under the shadow of “sodomitical chastity.” As always, Pugh is alert to the ways in which performance might add a queer(er) dimension to the text; here, he observes the delicious irony that the performer who played Englande also doubles in the part of lecherous Clergye. In his final chapter (preceding a brief conclusion that situates Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi within the “queer legacy” of early English drama), Pugh turns from the English Reformation to the Scottish Reformation as presented through David Lyndsay’s Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis. Pugh identifies this carnivalesque text as proto-camp for its foregrounding of the dissonance between the male bodies of actors and the exuberant female bodies they perform, a dynamic that fosters in audiences a “hermaphroditic gaze” in which male and female gender distinctions refuse to congeal (146). Like Bale, Lyndsay attributes sexual incontinence to the Catholic Church; unlike Bale, he fills his play with “an extraordinarily large number of female characters,” some of whom “straddle the borders between masculine and feminine” (157). I appreciated Pugh’s use of contemporary theories of camp to explain how Lyndsay seems to search for an innovative dramatic form with which to explore sexual vices and inversions of traditional gender roles. Camp provides an apt vocabulary for describing not just the dramatic style of Lyndsay’s Satyre but also its production of “epistemological crises” for spectators who might not be able to apprehend the allegory of social reform beneath the performance’s sexually raucous surface. That tension between the orthodox ideological message and the unruly performative energies of early English drama drives Pugh’s interpretations throughout this excellent study and serves as a powerful motive and model for future work.