SOURCE: “Bradford's ‘Ancient Members’ and ‘A Case of Buggery … Amongst Them,’” in Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Stanford University Press, 1992, pp. 223-246.

In this excerpt, Goldberg examines Bradford's treatment of sexuality, gender, and race in the process of “inclusion and exclusion” by which he defined the community depicted in Of Plymouth Plantation.

I move from Landa now to William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation to pursue further these paths of negation and their relation to representations of sodomy. From many perspectives Bradford's text could seem out of place in this discussion, and indeed the introduction of an Anglo-American text in the context of Spanish-American texts poses great problems, and not merely those of national, chronological, and geographical difference. Such issues could be explored, but to do so might deflect the focus of this inquiry too far afield; it might also serve the purposes of the enforcement of disciplinary and...