Blog
Friday, February 14, 2025 - 08:00
I don't usually get quite so political in my blog titles, but the rage has to spill out somewhere.
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Burshatin, Israel. 1999. “Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
Burshatin - Written on the Body
Because of the ways that I define the scope of the Project, I end up including a lot of transmasculine content. I often say that there is no lesbian history without transmasculine history, regardless of how the historic individuals understood their own identities, because of they ways that society assigned masculinity to the desire for women or to any sort of transgressive behavior by women. But there are some individuals who--while shedding fascinating light on issues relevant to lesbian history--very clearly understood themselves to be men and demanded that society treat them as such. Eleno de Céspedes is one of those people and regardless of the language that I and other researchers sometimes use in trying to communicate the facts of his life, I want to recognize that.
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As might be expected given the author and subject, this article covers much the same ground as Burshatin 1996. The current article focuses on Céspedes’ position as a challenge to various sovcio-political doundaries: gendr, race, national, and sexual.
The official structures that documented and prosecuted Céspedes’ case both framed the narrative in specific ways and documented the subject’s own framing and identity claims that constructed a very different story.
Born female to an enslaved Black mother, Céspedes achieved freedom, became male, served in the army, and trained as a surgeon. After marrying a woman, Céspedes was recognized by a former army comrade who knew of the gender crossing, and was then charged with sodomy—specifically, engaging in penetrative sex using an instrument. In contrast to that secular offense, church authorities were concerned with the act of marriage. This latter became the focus of the trial. In the end, the conviction was for bigamy, because Céspedes could not offer proof that the husband they had married (prior to gender-crossing) had died before their subsequent marriage to a woman.
[Note: This is reminiscent of a similar instance in England, where the conviction for bigamy can be interpreted at some level as recognition of the “validity” of marriage between two assigned-female people.]
There were a number of complicating factors. Céspedes offered a defense of being a “hermaphrodite” who had undergone a physiological sex change. But medical examination contradicted this claim. There were side charges that the appearance of masculinity was due to magic. Céspedes’ sentence was harsh in absolute terms (two sessions of public whipping, a public confession, then public service as a surgeon), but this was aligned with typical punishments for bigamy at the time (and to some extent, more lenient than usual).
The article traces several parallel processes of “self-fashioning,” not only of gender but of occupation and economic status. Racial self-fashioning was beyond Céspedes’ ability, but they moved across a permeable racial boundary by manipulating other aspects of identity.
The article goes into much more detail regarding the racial/religious politics of 16th century Spain and how Céspedes maneuvered through them.
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Wednesday, February 12, 2025 - 21:00
Next to last article from this collection and then we move on to Early Modern France.
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Perry, Mary Elizabeth. 1999. “From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
Perry - From Convent to Battlefield
The two articles that deal most solidly with Project-related topics are both about trans-masculine individuals. Both are solidly within the fuzzy scope of the Project, but it does continue to point up how absent certain content is from this collection.
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(For other publications on this topic that have been reviewed in more detail, see this tag.)
This article reviews the rather unusual experience of Catalina de Erauso, whose gender-crossing received far more acceptance than usual. The author considers the interpretation of Erauso as a trans man. The discussion covers both Erauso’s biography and the fictional versions of their life and discusses the process of “becoming male.”
Both types of sources include women being romantically/sexually attracted to Erauso, but Erauso avoided such entanglements, evincing some degree of erotic interest in women but never carrying through to a sexual relationship.
Fictional accounts tend to dodge the question of Erauso as a colonial warrior, focusing instead on Erauso’s confession of identity and the receipt of official approval and license to continue presenting as male. Erauso’s past life as a nun may have helped mitigate moral concerns regarding the gender-crossing. Despite having lived a rather contentious and violent life as a soldier, Erauso could be depicted as “pure and virginal.”
Erauso became something of a folk hero due to this open category-crossing, but this was enabled by official approval and there being no aggravating sexual factors.
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Tuesday, February 11, 2025 - 18:00
Yeah, this time I got nothing.
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Gerli, E. Michael. 1999. “Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in Celestina” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
Gerli- Dismembering the Body Politic
OK, I guess I’m spite-reviewing this. Despite there being a female homoerotic encounter in a key scene in Celestina, Gerli’s article fails to take any notice of it at all. (Other articles in the collection do make reference to it.) See this tag for background.
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Monday, February 10, 2025 - 12:41
The contracts have been sent out and returned, so it’s time to announce the 2025 Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast fiction line-up! Thank you to everyone who submitted.
When I had my choices narrowed down to the top six, I realized that I could take them all. Two stories were short enough that, when combined, they still met the 5000 word limit of my budget. And when I checked the calendar, I realized that I also needed a story for January 2026 (a 3-shows month).
So here is the line-up, in alphabetical order by title. (Release schedule has yet to be determined.)
- “A Falling Star and a Flying Bird” by Rhiannon Grant
- “An Encounter with a Lady” by Catherine Lundoff
- “Down by the Tumbling Stream” by EC Hallewell
- “Ma’am, This is a Fruit Stand” by Maya Dworsky-Rocha
- “The House of the Women” by Jeannelle M. Ferreira
- “Where You Go” by Jennifer Nestojko
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LHMPSunday, February 9, 2025 - 14:00
I'd meant to roll out the articles in this collection a bit more regularly, but -- having written them all up -- I keep forgetting to post them! Here you go.
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Blackmore, Josiah. 1999. “The Poets of Sodom” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
Blackmore - The Poets of Sodom
This article discusses genres of poetry that reference homosexuality, especially “songs of scorn and malediction,” though these are sometimes more teasing in tone than slanderous. The article discusses 36 poems, of which 3 make brief passing references to the potential female same-sex encounters of prostitutes in military camps.
A soldadeira (camp prostitute) has an older female companion “a que quer ben, e ela lhi quer mal (whom she loves but who doesn’t love her)”. Dona Ourana (a prostitute) is warned off of sex with women (not quoted). Maria Leve (another prostitute), it is suggested, prefers living among young women.
A fourth poem has a more extensive reference in which the poetic speaker addresses a woman named Mari’ Mateu, comparing their shared desire for cunts in a teasing and relatively neutral way that is unambiguously sexual.
E foi Deus já de conos avondar aqui outros, que o non an mester,
E ar feze-os muito desejar a min e ti, pero que ch’ és molher.
Mari’ Mateu, Mari’ Mateu, tan desojosa ch és de cono com’ eu!
(And it was God who made cunts in abundance here, for there is no lack, and Who also made both ou and I want them even though you’re a woman. Mary Matthew, Mary Matthew, as desirous of cunt as I!)
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Sunday, February 2, 2025 - 10:00
Because I don't have enough distractions at the moment, I'm working on a couple of retrospective tasks related to the Project. One is an editorial review of all previous publication blogs to make sure that my commentary that is directly related to the publication is located in a field that will always be viewable in conjunction with the publication. When designing the back end of the Project, we...um...sort of overcomplicated things. (Something for which my web consultants may not have forgiven me yet.) The thing is, when migrating the original publications over from LiveJournal, I noticed that there were often three types of content in a Project post: the summary of the publication itself, my meta-commentary about the publication, and unrelated information that I just happened to post on the same day. I wanted to keep that structure, to some extent, so when we created the data structure for this website, there's the main publication summary, and introduction field intended to be my meta-commentary, and then each Project post has an "envelope" that's the actual blog post, which should contain any non-Project information--that is, any information that isn't relevant to understanding the Project post.
Well, I haven't always been consistent in sorting out the data that way. In part, this is because I don't always have any "unrelated" information to post, but I abhor a blank blog text (even though it never actually displays as blank -- the blog always "contains" the LHMP content). In part, my meta-commentary tends to have a very fuzzy relationship to the Project content and there isn't always a clear answer to "which field should this go in."
So, knowing that I've had meta-commentary that ended up in the blog field (and therefore doesn't display if you're reading a publication post from the LHMP search functions), I decided to go through it all and pull out any Project-related commentary and copy it over into the "introduction" field associated withe the publication entry. (The fact that this ends up duplicating some content between the blog "envelope" and the publication post doesn't matter, because I doubt anyone is going to be reading old blog posts as blog posts.)
The other task is less of a housekeeping project. I've long had notes towards a glossary of vocabulary and terminology from primary sources that related to sexuality and same-sex topics, but I haven't been collecting it systematically from the publications I've blogged. Since this will be important for the sourcebook, I'm now going back and pulling material from publications I've already read. The idea is to provide a sense of how women in history would have described or expressed same-sex desire and erotics, or how those around them might talk about it. Due to the nature of the sources, very little of this will be candid "own voices" data from women who desired women, but it will be the closest approximation I can manage. So as part of my workflow for new publication posts, I'm including pulling this sort of data. And I'll start going through the 400+ previous publications to pull from them as well. This isn't as daunting as it might seem because many books and articles don't include quotations from primary sources, and I'm restricting the scope narrowly.
Just a few things I figured I could add to my non-existent spare time, rather than waiting the 87 remaining days until retirement.
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LHMPFull citation:
Blackmore, Josiah and Gregory S. Hutcheson. 1999. “Introduction” in Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance ed. Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Duke University Press, Durham. ISBN 9780822323495
Introduction
The introduction reviews the background and thematic connections of the papers in this volume. The focus is overwhelmingly on masculinity and sodomy, although several articles in the section “The Body and the State” focus on women (or female-coded figures). There are a total of 15 articles of which four have at least marginal relevance to the Project. However the two that have the strongest focus on female-coded individuals both concern transmasculinity.
This collection evolved out of a set of thematic sessions at the International Medieval Congress (Kalamazoo) and the contents point to the hazards of how scholarly networks silently constrain the scope of interest for such projects. If particular areas of interest are not included within a scholarly network, it becomes difficult to solicit work on those areas—or even to notice that they are not covered.
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Saturday, February 1, 2025 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 306 - On the Shelf for February 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/02/01 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for February 2025.
One of my holiday projects was to start the massive reorganization of my personal library, which means that the books on queer history are now comfortably spread out into two bookcases, rather than being crammed double-stacked into one. I’ve also moved them to the bookcase directly in front of the library door, since they’re the volumes I access most frequently. What this means is that I’m now free to buy more books! Though, as it happens, I haven’t done so this month.
Since it’s February, that means that submissions are closed for this year’s fiction series. But since it’s February 1st, that means I haven’t read them yet and made my selections. So watch the blog or my social media for the announcement of this year’s line-up. Submissions were very sparse for the first half of the month and I confess I was freaking out just a little bit, but they picked up later and we ended up with about our usual number. My usual practice is not to read any of the submissions until they’re all in, to avoid the possibility of bias based on receipt date. But from the log-in process I can tell that we once again have a very diverse set of submissions, both in terms of settings and authors. And, as always, I’m proud that the authors have entrusted me with their work, whether it ends up on the podcast or not.
Publications on the Blog
I’ve kept my New Year’s Resolution to try to keep up a more regular blogging schedule for reviewing and summarizing publications. At the time of recording, I’ve blogged five new items. I followed up last month’s review of Stephen Turton’s study of queer vocabulary in English dictionaries with a related article by him “The Lexicographical Lesbian: Remaking the Body in Anne Lister’s Erotic Glossary.” Working my way through articles I have uploaded in my iPad, I followed it with Theresa Braunschneider’s “The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman: Configuring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse,” which looks at the context of this anatomical myth in 18th century medical writing. I finally blogged two collections of poetry that I’ve been mining for my poetry podcasts: The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present edited by Domna C. Stanton and Poems Between Women: Four centuries of love, romantic friendship, and desire, edited by Emma Donoghue. Finally, I expressed my disappointment with the article collection Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, which managed to avoid including anything on female homoeroticism at all.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
The new fiction, however, will never disappoint. There’s a belated January book that I hadn’t realized was historical: Distant Thunder by Peggy J. Herring from Bella Books.
Leo yearns to be free—to ride the vast empty spaces of the open West and escape the endless drudgery of running a farm. It’s a hard life, and every night she tumbles into bed exhausted to dream of freedom.
When free-spirited Cordy rides into her life, Leo both resents and envies Cordy’s freedom. Not to mention the strange feelings that Cordy seems to have awakened in her—feelings she can’t explain or comprehend.
Soon Cordy leaves to join Leo’s father as a train robbing outlaw. But the memory of the kiss they share sends Leo on a journey to find the other woman—and her own self-discovery.
I’m holding off on one of the February books because it doesn’t seem to have a live buy link yet, so I’ll catch up on that one next month. That leaves five more new releases—an unusually low number, especially since February is often a popular month for romance releases. But maybe they’ll show up in my searches next month.
Minas (Dying Gods #4) by Elisha Kemp is a spin-off from a series set in ancient Greece, focusing on two minor characters from that series. The author notes that it can be read by itself but does include spoilers for the main series. The cover copy is exceedingly brief, so let’s see if I can make this dramatic.
Britomartis: I have always been the perfect second-sister: dedicating my life to my people, to my goddess, and to my mother, the Minas of Thera. Now, I’ve betrayed a goddess, commandeered a stolen fleet, and am taking my people into battle against my mother’s orders. For Sira.
Sira: Some women are born to rule. Others carve out their thrones from the bones of their sisters, their mothers, their friends. I was never destined for such a throne. I was never meant to be Minas.
Benefactor to the Baroness by Melissa Kendall from Dragonblade Publishing looks like it has a Victorian setting. The wordiness of the cover copy makes up for the previous title. This book is third in a series, but they appear to be unconnected, with independent characters, and this is the only sapphic entry.
In a world of rules, surrendering to love is the only rebellion that matters.
Plagued by survivors’ guilt after escaping her impoverished childhood selling matchsticks, Fontaine Shepherd, the Dowager Lady Kerry, uses her position on the board of a charitable foundation to relocate starving orphans to the new world—until contact with the new office is abruptly lost. Fearing the foundation will discover she’s been clandestinely using funds to bribe workhouse owners to release children, she decides to travel across the ocean and re-establish communication herself.
Except the only captain who can transport her in time insists that she not travel alone.
Facing a lonely life after marrying off her nieces, Rosemary Summersby reluctantly agrees to attend a ladies’ charity group. There, she meets the vivacious Lady Kerry, who challenges her long-held beliefs of how a lady should look and act. Compelled by a desire to experience the excitement of which her niece often speaks, Rosemary accompanies the dowager baroness to a workhouse and witnesses the cruelty of poverty firsthand.
Then Lady Kerry stumbles into Rosemary’s cottage one night with an outrageous request: to travel across the ocean as her companion and help her uncover the mystery behind the missing orphans.
Unable to convince the dowager baroness of the dangers of her plan and remembering the sense of responsibility that drove her to accept three orphans into her life fifteen years prior, Rosemary decides to join Lady Kerry on her trip. But as the vast ocean and a noble mission stretches before them, a shared purpose and a single bunk ignite an unexpected passion that makes both women question what they truly want for themselves.
This next book has a sapphic protagonist, but it isn’t clear that she has a central romance within the story. There is a secondary gay male couple who are also central to the action. The book is Mutual Interest by Olivia Wolfgang-Smith from Bloomsbury USA.
At the turn of the 20th century, Vivian Lesperance is determined to flee her origins in Utica, New York, and avoid repeating her parents' dull, limited life. When she meets Oscar Schmidt, a middle manager at a soap company, Vivian finds a partner she can guide to build the life she wants-not least because, more interested in men himself, Oscar will leave Vivian to tend to her own romances with women.
But Vivian's plans require capital, so the two pair up with Squire Clancey, scion of an old American fortune. Together they found Clancey & Schmidt, a preeminent manufacturer of soap, perfume, and candles. When Oscar and Squire fall in love, the trio form a new kind of partnership.
Vivian reaches the pinnacle of her power building Clancey & Schmidt into an empire of personal care products while operating behind the image of both men. But exposure threatens, and all three partners are made aware of how much they have to lose.
Penny Mickelbury’s books are always worth snapping up. Her current release is Payback, from Bywater Books
World War II ended less than 10 years ago, and the Korean War less than one. But no one has recovered from wartime privations, especially the Colored soldiers who fought a ruthless enemy on foreign lands, expecting to return home with all the rights and privileges of American citizenship.
But those rights and privileges remain few and far between, and Mickelbury’s cast of characters find themselves reflecting on the Harlem they call home: they are educated and unschooled; wealthy and desperately poor; committed to improving circumstances for Negroes and abjectly hopeless. They create a family of and for themselves—women, men, children, gays, and the proudly self-named. They commit themselves to helping create a world to benefit their people based on hard work, artistic expression, and faith in their community.
They have learned to live in the larger world by two guiding principles: Each One Teaches One, and Harm to One is Harm to All—because in this neighborhood, payback will always be swift and painful.
Sheridan LeFanu’s sapphic vampire story Carmilla has inspired a lot of variations from modern writers. The latest in this tradition is Hungerstone by Kat Dunn from Zando.
Lenore is the wife of steel magnate Henry, but ten years into their marriage, the relationship has soured and no child has arrived to fill the distance growing between them. Henry's ambitions take them out of London and to the imposing Nethershaw manor in the countryside, where Henry aims to host a hunt with society’s finest. Lenore keeps a terrible secret from the last time her husband hunted, and though they never speak of it, it haunts their marriage to this day.
The preparations for the event take a turn when a carriage accident near their remote home brings the mysterious Carmilla into Lenore's life. Carmilla who is weak and pale during the day but vibrant at night; Carmilla who stirs up a hunger deep within Lenore. Soon girls from local villages begin to fall sick before being consumed by a bloody hunger.
Torn between regaining her husband's affection and Carmilla's ever-growing presence, Lenore begins to unravel her past and in doing so, uncovers a darkness in her household that will place her at terrible risk . . .
What Am I Reading?
I’ve only read three books this month—all audiobooks, as usual. I was exploring some sale books to see if I could find any interesting historic mysteries and thought that Murder in an English Village by Jessica Ellicott looked interesting. It’s set between the World Wars and involves two old school chums—one an English spinster and one an American adventuress—who stumble into several mysteries. It’s a pleasant enough mystery, though I was unwarrantedly hoping for a touch more sapphic subtext, along the lines of Miss Buncle’s Book.
That same audiobook sale led me to pick up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own about the difficulties of being a woman writer. Pair this classic with Joanna Russ’s How To Suppress Women’s Writing and then sink into a deep depression about how little has changed since those books were written.
I finished up the month with Emma Denny’s sapphic medieval romance All the Painted Stars. This book is a follow-on from her previous one which focused on a gay male couple. The two stories are connected by family ties. I found it to be a nice, well-written romance, but I had to suppress my historian’s reflexes a bit too often for comfort. It wasn’t a matter of large inaccuracies, but of a constant flow of small details that kept distracting me from the endearing main characters.
And that concludes the show for this month. I have a couple feelers out for upcoming interviews, but didn’t manage to fit one into my schedule this time. If you’re an author with a book coming out that fits into this podcast (and if I haven’t already interviewed you on the show), I’d love for you to reach out and ask.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Submissions for the 2025 fiction series are closed and results will be announced shortly
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- Turton, Stephen. 2022. “The Lexicographical Lesbian: Remaking the Body in Anne Lister’s Erotic Glossary” in The Review of English Studies, vol. 73, no. 310: 537-551.
- Braunschneider, Theresa. 1999. “The Macroclitoride, the Tribade, and the Woman: Configuring Gender and Sexuality in English Anatomical Discourse” in Textual Practice 13, no. 3: 509-32.
- Stanton, Domna C. 1986. The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present. The Feminist Press ISBN 0-935312-52-8
- Donoghue, Emma. 1997. Poems Between Women: Four centuries of love, romantic friendship, and desire. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-231-10925-3
- Burger, Glenn & Steven F. Kruger eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-81669-3404-1
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- What I’ve been consuming
- Murder in an English Village by Jessica Ellicott
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- All the Painted Stars by Emma Denny
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Mastodon: @heatherrosejones@Wandering.Shop
- Bluesky: @heatherrosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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LHMPSunday, January 26, 2025 - 15:00
So...um...I almost forgot I had this all written up but hadn't posted it yet. Then I was drawing up the script for the February "On the Shelf" podcast and when I came to discuss the publications on the blog, I panicked, thinking that I'd managed to delete my notes on the book. No, the blog was already written, but just waiting in queue. Whew. So here it is (slightly out of numerical order).
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LHMPFull citation:
Donoghue, Emma. 1997. Poems Between Women: Four centuries of love, romantic friendship, and desire. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-231-10925-3
I’ve mined this book for several of the poetry episodes on the podcast, but hadn’t gotten around to blogging it on its own. I’m closing that gap now.
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The title of this anthology is a call-back to Donoghue’s non-fiction work Passions Between Women. In contrast to the previous blog on The Defiant Muse, pretty much the entire contents of this collection are relevant in some degree to the Project. So I won’t be citing specific poems. (Several have been included in various of the poetry podcast episodes.) This book makes a nice compare-and-contrast to The Defiant Muse. It is entirely Anglophone authors and specifically focused on poems about relationships between women—erotic, romantic, and platonic.
Of the approximately 100 authors and 150 poems, perhaps two-thirds fall within the pre-1900 scope of the Project. (This is very approximate, as I didn’t track down the specific publication dates.) Although the poems all focus on love of some type between women, the poets do not all fall within even the most generous definition of sapphic, demonstrating how normalized and ordinary expressions of f/f love have been across the centuries.
The collection specifically excludes poems where the relationship is between close family members. Other omissions are very long poems (mostly all from the 17-18th century), simple praise poems, and some works and authors who are already very familiar to the audience.
The organization is chronological, showing the development and change of poetic themes and fashions. These include the motif of unselfconscious romantic friendship from the 17th through 19th centuries, the establishment of poetic circles who used classical nicknames (17th century), the pleasures and pains of trying to maintain a female partnership in the face of a society that tolerated but did not actively support such an ambition (18-19th century), celebration of the extremes of sensibility (19th century), the entanglement of f/f love with feminist solidarity (later 19th century), death or absense of the beloved (universal, but especially increasing in the 19th century), and the waxing and waning of erotic language in varous degrees of explicitness. And then, beginning in the later 19th century, an increasing self-consciousness that the extremes of f/f love must be kept secret or disguised, until they begin to emerge more explicitly, first among sapphic salons and literary circles of the early 20th century then after a hiatus, openly with the Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s.
Sunday, January 26, 2025 - 10:24
When I review a thematic collection of academic papers, there are several possible outcomes. The entire collection is relevant and I blog each one in turn. A few papers aren’t relevant, but I blog the entire collection for completeness’ sake. Only a few papers are relevant and I only blog those. Or it turns out that none of the papers are relevant and I move on without blogging. Well, it turns out there’s a fifth option: none of the papers are relevant and I want to blog about that to let people know not to bother.
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LHMPFull citation:
Burger, Glenn & Steven F. Kruger eds. 2001. Queering the Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-81669-3404-1
In a collection with 10 articles and 3 respondant discussions, despite refular references in the introduction to “gay and lesbian history,” there are zero articles that touch on female same-sex relations, and only one that centers women at all. (The latter examines women in romantic/sexual relationships with monsters in medieval versions of Ovid.)
One of the respondant discussions notes a “noticeable lack in medievalist queer studies…of same-sex/queer potential among women.” But then goes on the discuss how, in the articles in this collection, women are invariably framed as a “hetero-normalizing force.” Alas, that this respondant does not then go on to remedy this peculiar absence.
This situation is, unfortunately, not at all uncommon in the field of queer history studies. It’s only disappointing. A collection like this one is why I regularly make comments about how my default expectation is that a history book or article collection that uses the words “queer” or “homosexual” in its title but has only male-presenting authors or editors has a very slim chance of being of interest to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project.
It’s the same sort of silent erasure or bias that drove the creation of “women’s history” as a field. If the existing structures don’t even notice that they’re excluding topics from their scope, the people studying those topics have little recourse but to create a new field focused specifically on those topics. Which then gets accused of identity politics or of further marginalizing their subject by removing it from the mainstream discussion.
In the field of lesbian history, the backlash to setting up “lesbian history” as a topic of study also takes the form of challenging the very existence of the concept. The complicated discussions around using anachronistic labels for historical subjects lead, all too often, to simply erasing the existence of those historical subjects by concluding that the study of them is inherently invalid.
(Karma Lochrie’s introduction to the collection The Lesbian Premodern tackles this trap head-on. Lochrie also sets out a lament that I’ve recently been trying to track down. “[I]n historical examinations, when women are categorized as lesbians it is often because they exclude men from their sexual self, whereas men are labeled ‘homosexual,’ or at least discussed in terms of homosexuality, when they include other men. … Why is it that we feel exclusivity is a necessary component of premodern lesbianism, but not of male homosexuality?”)
So, all in all, while one might think that a substantial collection of articles titled Queering the Middle Ages ought, by rights, to include at least one article talking about women loving women, one would be disappointed in this case.
Monday, January 20, 2025 - 11:32
I love doing the podcast poetry episodes, but I need to catch up on blogging the sources I used!
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LHMPFull citation:
Stanton, Domna C. 1986. The Defiant Muse: French Feminist Poems from the Middle Ages to the Present. The Feminist Press ISBN 0-935312-52-8
I’ve mined this book for several of the poetry episodes on the podcast, but hadn’t gotten around to blogging it on its own. I’m closing that gap now.
The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction. While the collection doesn’t have a specific interest in homoerotic poetry, in exploring the pressures of marriage and the constrictions of heterosexual romance, room for love between women emerges. And that is what my summary will be focusing on.
The introduction also includes a survey of French literary history and genres, highlighting the forces that made particular eras richer in poetry than others. The collection includes 57 poems, both in the original and in English translation. Perhaps three-quarters of them fall in the pre-1900 period that is within the scope of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project. I’ll provide brief notes on the twelve poems in that scope that speak to romance or eroticism between women, although only a few could be considered homoerotic in a strict sense.
Marie de Romieu 16th century “Brief Discourse: The Woman’s Excellence Surpasses Man’s” – An extended poem in praise of excellent women, arguing that women are better than men. Not homoerotic but a woman admiring women.
Catherine des Roches 16th century “Agnodicia, or Ignorance Banished from the Presence of Women” – A story set in ancient times about a king who forbade education to women, and how women’s health suffered, as they were too modest to frequent a male doctor. Then a woman cross-dressed to study medicine and secretly disclosed her sex to the women so they would trust her. There is a somewhat non-erotic passage where the women admire her beauty and kissed her in gratitude. Their husbands, fooled by the disguise, accused the healer of compromising the women’s virtue. So she was forced to disclose her sex, and as able to convince them to allow women to be educated again.
Anne de Rohan 16th century “On a Lady Named Beloved” – This is one of them poems I’ve included in a podcast episode. It’s a love poem from one woman to another. Some of the phrases are allusive of Sappho’s “He seems as a god to me,” although it isn’t a direct translation of the poem. During Rohan’s lifetime Sappho’s poetry was being republished in the original Greek or in Latin translation, and Sappho’s reputation as a lover of women was firmly established.
Mademoiselle Certain (undated) “To the Queen of Sweden on her Contempt for Women’s Minds” – Why am I including a poem that snarkily comments on another woman’s misogyny? Because it seems highly likely that the “Queen of Sweden” referenced in it is Christina, who had romantic (and probably sexual) relationships with women. The poem comes from a collection published in 1665. Christina abdicated her throne in 1654 and lived in France from 1656-8 where she caused quite a stir with her gauche behavior.
Anne de la Vigne 17th century “The Ladies to Mademoiselle de Scudéry” – Scudéry was a salonnière and poet who sometimes used the pen name “Sapho.” This poem praises her under that name, saying that her work excels over that of men. Scudéry had “romantic friendships” with women, though I don’t believe there is any evidence for erotic relationships. This poem is imbued with themes of sisterhood and praise of women.
The next three poems show the social connections between female poets, in how they are cross-dedicated: Sainctonge to C***, C*** to Simiane, Simane to an unknown dedicatee. All through show varying flavors of affection and desire.
Louise-Geneviève de Sainctonge 17th c “Letter to Madame la Marquise de C***” – A poetic thank you note for a gift. The author asserts that men are unworthy of the giver’s attentions and urges her (as a widow) to disdain re-marriage. It closes saying that the lady has complete power over the writer’s soul.
Madame de C*** (undated) “Letter to Madame la Marquise de S[iminae], on Sending Her Tobacco” – The letter describes the sensual delights of the gift of tobacco and says that as repayment all she asks is that she be told of the recipient’s pleasures and amusements.
Pauline de Simiane 17th c “Madrigal” – I’ve used this poem in the podcast. It is a short lament that the dedicatee “kisses me like a sister” when she’s rather be kissed like a lover (using the mythic figures of Diane and Endymion to create this message).
The last several poems I’ll mention come from right around the turn of the 20th century, but as the authors were definitely active in the late 19th, I’m not going to quibble over specific publication dates. Given the era they were written in, these are much more overt in their homoeroticism.
Renée Vivien late 19th-early 20th c multiple poems – A sensual poem to her female lover. A poem of sisterhood and violent rejection of men. A poem about Sappho.
Natalie Clifford Barney late 19th-20th c multiple poems – A poem celebrating a lover’s body. A poem about making love as poetry.
Lucie Delarue-Mardrus late 19th-20th c “If You Come” – A poem about greeting and making love to a female lover.
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