This response (and re-response) to Judith Brown’s Immodest Acts is one of those features of academic discourse in which one scholar takes a public podium to critique the scholarship and conclusions of a colleague. As usual, it includes a rebuttal by the original author.
17th c
LHMP entry
This biographical article isn’t directly relevant to lesbianism, but provides an example of a woman who broke gender norms and was celebrated for it. I’ve added her to my list of fascinating 17th century women.
As this publication isn’t directly concerned with same-sex relations, I’ll only be summarizing and quoting a few pertinent details. In general, the work is a hit piece on Christina, alleging all manner of immoral and criminal behavior, with as great a salacious spin as possible. While Christina was capable of autocratic and violent behavior, I’d hesitate to put credence in any specific detail given here without corroboration. Nevertheless, it speaks to the types of opinions floating around. The claim in the subtitle that it is “rendered into English from the French original” is fiction.
This article examines the language of affection and romance used in letters from Mary Stuart (Queen Mary II) to a close friend, confidante, and courtier Frances Apsley, placing the language within several contexts relevant to understanding it. (Mary’s sister Anne—Queen Anne I—had similar correspondence with Frances Apsley, but this article focuses on Mary.)
This article examines themes of female romantic friendship and its limitations in the Restoration-era play Queen Catherine by Mary Pix. The play is a historical tragedy, centered around female characters, involving Catherine (widow of King Henry V) and her waiting woman Isabella, both of whom have heterosexual romances that drive the tragedy.
This article is one of those that eventually went into Traub’s The Renaissance of Lesbianism (chapter 6), but since I did a higher level overview when I covered that book, it’s worth examining more closely.
The typical focus on researching female same-sex desire in the early modern period centers around medical and legal records, the motif of physiological anomaly (the enlarged clitoris myth), and attempts to identify covert homoerotic themes in women’s writing. In contrast, pornography and popular culture (ballads and pamphlets) present a different view, even though they can rarely be interpreted as self-reporting of the women involved.
The author notes a lack of attention paid to mid-17th century literary pornography, a telling absence in considerations of gender-related shifts in this era, while also noting that feminist analysis of pornography focuses mostly on contemporary issues and treats the genre as monolithic and inherently misogynistic.
This article examines the 17th century pornographic text L’Escole des filles (School for girls) not only as a sexual dialogue but as a satire (or at least reflection) of the fashion for pedagogical texts aimed at women and girls. This is illustrated (literally) by the frontispiece image in the 1668 edition, which depicts figures representing the two women in the dialogue studying a copy of the book itself in an academic setting.
This article concerns one of a number of female sodomy trials in the Low Countries in the 17th century, a time and place where there was an unusual level of concern for the topic. This interest can be connected to the increasing preoccupation with the role of the clitoris in sex and beliefs about its role in gender identity and same-sex activity. However the detailed testimony in the trial is also interesting for suggesting an unexpected self-consciousness by the defendants about their own same-sex desires—a topic for which evidence is difficult to find.
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