In the preceding chapters, I have insisted that many more intimate possibilities, especially those detached from an interiorized sense of embodiment, were imagined throughout Renaissance texts than appeared to be authorized at their moments of closure. Insofar as these texts circulate, readers who follow the cues that separate textual endorsement from narrative closure can recover their value and make use of them. Along the way, I have tried to emphasize the defamiliarizing aspects of Renaissance texts and show how these aspects are forms of protest to a cultural shift in the definition of intimacy. In my last chapter, I discussed how Lady Mary Wroth emphasized interiority and privacy in affection, and how her narrative's trajectory in part established these two aspects of affection as the basis for distinguishing privileged heteroerotic bonds from subordinated homoerotic ones. These distinctions are part of a terrain that is, arguably, familiar to the modern reader, but the boundary in Wroth's work is inchoate and permeable, making it possible to read her texts against the grain of their own narrative tendencies to delimit the intimate sphere. Thus, though my discussion of Renaissance texts concludes with a resemblance to modernity in which the intimate is remarkably homogeneous and centralized around abiding coupledom, I have tried to argue throughout that this historical trajectory was not inevitable. Instead, the contraction of the intimate sphere around coupling was hotly contested through these texts’ representations of alternative possibilities for affective relations. Even in Wroth's narratives, other voices disturb the texts’ ostensible orientation toward a narrower understanding of intimacy. In the context of the arguments of the earlier chapters of this book, this orientation seems more like a departure from polyvocality than a progression because I did not start with modernity as a given. More generally, then, when these representations circulate among readers and audiences in print, in manuscript, and in performance, the possible alternative lives that authors imagine for their characters circulate as persistent reminders, not of a world to which we can or should return, but of the avenues of resistance to dominant ideologies that the circulation of texts opens up.