Friday, December 12, 2025 - 09:00
If you wanted a great, compact one-stop overview of lesbian-relevant history in Early Modern Europe, I don’t know that I could improve on this article. In an odd way, that makes it very hard to summarize because it is, itself, a summary. There’s no content in this article that I haven’t already blogged in the context of more focused articles, so I won’t even try. But I wanted to give it a shout-out as doing an excellent job of what it set out to do.
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[LHMP #532 Gowing 2006 Lesbians and Their Like in Early Modern Europe ](https://alpennia.com/lhmp/lhmp-532-g…
Friday, December 12, 2025 - 09:00
If you wanted a great, compact one-stop overview of lesbian-relevant history in Early Modern Europe, I don’t know that I could improve on this article. In an odd way, that makes it very hard to summarize because it is, itself, a summary. There’s no content in this article that I haven’t already blogged in the context of more focused articles, so I won’t even try. But I wanted to give it a shout-out as doing an excellent job of what it set out to do.
Major category:
Tags:
LHMP #532 Gowing 2006 Lesbians and Their Like in Early Modern Europe
Full citation:
Gowing, Laura. 2006. ”Lesbians and Their Like in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800” in Gay Life and Culture: A World History ed. Robert Aldrich. London: Thames and Hudson. 125-43
move to blog - I’m blogging two articles from this survey collection. (The rest of the contents weren’t relevant to the Project.) Hence the intrusion of an Early Modern Europe article into what’s meant to be an Asia cluster.
This is a startlingly (I might say unexpectedly) excellent and comprehensive survey of lesbian-relevant history in Early Modern Europe. That actually makes it difficult to summarize (as well as difficult to tag, though I’ll give it my best shot). I think I’ll approach it by noting themes and topics, without necessarily trying to compose complete sentences.
The article starts with some of the theoretical difficulties with defining lesbian history, noting discussions by Judith Bennett et al. Classical motifs (e.g., Diana and Callisto). Early examples of terminology for lesbians. Sex between women in Early Modern pornography. The “rediscovery of the clitoris” and phallocentric ideas about f/f sex. Displacement of f/f relations onto foreign cultures. Defining gender in the context of gender-crossing and intersex theory. Criminal cases involving sex between women, primarily focusing on gender transgression and penetrative sex. Popular literature about gender-crossing along with biographical examples. Joint memorials. Marriage records for female couples. Romantic friendship and its discontents. Popular access to ideas and images of same-sex activity. The prevalence of single-women, female co-habitation, and what they say about lesbian possibilities. Socio-economic forces that discouraged “lesbian community.” Lack of self-reporting of women’s same-sex experiences and understandings. The problem of defining “what is sex?”
I realize this is very unsatisfying from the point of view of informative details. Let’s just say the article would be a great introduction to the topic.
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