In the introductory matter for this book, Bray states: “I have...restricted the scope of the book to questions of male homosexuality. Female homosexuality was rarely linked in popular thought with male homosexuality, if indeed it was recognised at all. Its history is, I believe, best to be understood as part of the developing recognition of a specifically female sexuality.”
17th c
LHMP entry
This article takes a deep dive into French medical literature of the late 16th and early 17th century discussing the clitoris and developing mythology about it that would linger for centuries. One key element of this discourse was a reliance on textual material, despite many of the authors being surgeons.
This article examines the interactions of class and sapphic desire in the “long 18th century,” arguing for a complex interaction between the two. That is, that class could insulate women from scrutiny of their intimate friendships with women, but that suspicion concerning women’s intimate friendships could degrade their class standing.
This is a collection of excerpts from historic sources related to homosexuality in America. As with other publications of this sort, I’m mostly going to be cataloging the items of interest. Although it’s a very thick little paperback, the lesbian content is sparse. In fact, Katz notes, “In the present volume, Lesbian-related material is dispersed unequally within the parts, and not always readily identifiable by title—thus difficult to locate at a glance.
This is a high-level overview of the English Bluestocking movement(?), as part of a special volume of Huntington Library Quarterly on “Reconsidering the Bluestockings.” As such, it doesn’t touch much on specifically sapphic topics, but provides a useful context for various individual Bluestockings.
As with several other articles I’ve blogged in this run of American-themed publications, this one covers material that I’ve already discussed in more detail in a previous entry. (Godbeer, Richard. 1995. “"The Cry of Sodom": Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England” in <em>The William and Mary Quarterly</em>, Vol. 52, No. 2: 259-286)
I’m inadvertently continuing my theme of publications where I’ve already covered a more extensive version of the same material, though in this case by a different author. (Brown, Kathleen. 1995. “’Changed...into the Fashion of a Man’: The Politics of Sexual Difference in a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Settlement” in Journal of the History of Sexuality 6:2 pp.171-193.)
While this article is (necessarily) focused primarily on m/m history, it does have useful details of the early legal history of female same-sex relations in America. I’ll be focusing on those details and so this summary won’t cover the article as a whole. The general approach is to compare the “official” (church and state) position on same-sex erotics with the evidence for how specific individuals were viewed within their communities, including some startlingly lax responses to men notorious for their sexual interest in other men.
Introduction
Although the title of the book features the sensational phrase “lesbian nun,” the book works up to that revelation slowly, building a far more complex picture of Benedetta’s life and experiences that that single phrase implies. The introduction explains how Brown came across the records that lay document the subject, and provides a broad understanding of the historic context of f/f sex in the European middle ages and Renaissance.
Chapter 1: The Family
Introduction
The author points out that this is an inescapably political book and should be read in that context. He points out that the question of “who is queer” is not at all straight-forward [pun intentional] in a historic context, and that queer figures have been silently and invisibly embedded in US history far deeper than most people are aware.
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