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25 of My Favorite Books from the LHMP Blog (So Far)

Saturday, January 23, 2021 - 14:54

(Lightly adapted from the original twitter thread. My first draft included more detailed descriptions of the books, but I edited ruthlessly to make (most of) them fit into individual tweets.)

25 recommended texts from the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog. This is in response to a twitter request for suggested reading on pre-20th century queer history. My specific specialty is on sapphic/lesbian history, though some of these works are broader in coverage.

The list is limited in that it draws from texts I’ve blogged. Not a “best of all time” just “my favorites of the 320 publications I’ve read in the last 6 years.” The blog is rather Anglo- and Euro-centric. I’ve focused on books rather than individual journal articles.

There are 6 groups: texts that inspired me, medieval and pre-modern, specific eras in British history, primary source material (primarily British), books focusing outside of Britain/France, and studies of specific topics. Links are to my blog entries.

My Inspirations. These are the three publications that convinced me that studying the history of female same-sex love was possible and exciting. I encountered each of them pretty soon after they were published, so that’s 40 years of being a lesbian history fan-girl.

#1 Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4564]

The relationship between female same-sex desire and “romantic friendship” in the 18-20th centuries in England and the USA.

#2 Donoghue, Emma. 1995. Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 1668-1801. Harper Perennial, New York. ISBN 0-06-017261-4 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4359]

A ground-breaking work. Donoghue exploded some of the myths about “lesbians are a modern invention.”

#3 Bennett, Judith M. 2000. "’Lesbian-Like' and the Social History of Lesbianism" in Journal of the History of Sexuality: 9:1-24. [https://usc.academia.edu/JudithBennett]

Bennett’s paper was mind-blowing for me in how to think about studying lesbians in history. (Link is to download.)

Medieval and Pre-modern Topics: The farther back you go in time, the more you need to re-think exactly what “same-sex desire” means, and how to study it. These books draw together themes and motifs that don’t neatly map to our modern concepts of homosexuality.

#4 Sautman, Francesca Canadé & Pamela Sheingorn (eds). 2001. Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. Palgrave, New York. [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4370]

An excellent collection of topics. The book might have been designed just for me!

#5 Bullough, Vern L. & James A. Brundage. 1996. Handbook of Medieval Sexuality. Garland Publishing, New York. ISBN 0-8153-3662-4 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/3922]

Little lesbian content, but includes Murray’s “Twice marginal and twice invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages.”

#6 Mills, Robert. 2015. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-16912-5 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4795]

Primarily male topics, but includes an excellent consideration of the intersection of same-sex and transgender motifs.

#7 Giffney, Noreen, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt (eds). 2011. The Lesbian Premodern. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5065]

A very dense and theory-heavy collection but some of the papers made me think a lot of interesting thoughts.

Era-specific books with primarily British content: The Anglo-centric nature of the publications I blog comes from several sources – my own interests, the way books come to my attention, and perhaps even a greater interest in queer history among historians studying Britain.

#8 Jennings, Rebecca. 2007. A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500. Greenwood World Publishing, Oxford. ISBN 978-1-84645-007-5 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4513]

A truly excellent popular-oriented history of women’s same-sex relations in Britain.

#9 Lanser, Susan S. 2014. The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-18773-0 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4366]

How the motif of lesbianism reflects and shapes social concerns. Dense but readable.

#10 Traub, Valerie. 2002. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-44885-9 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4372]

Similar coverage as Lanser. Also dense and maybe slightly less readable for the non-academic.

#11 Wahl, Elizabeth Susan. 1999. Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment. Stanford University Press, Stanford. ISBN 0-8047-3650-2 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5868]

An enjoyable read on f/f eroticism in 17-18th c England and France.

#12 Beynon, John C. & Caroline Gonda eds. 2010. Lesbian Dames: Sapphism in the Long Eighteenth Century. Ashgate, Farnham. ISBN 978-0-7546-7335-4 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/3896]

A collection that leans strongly to literary analysis. Not as accessible to the non-specialist.

Primary sources with mostly British content: Sometimes looking at primary source material can feel dreary & depressing, since it so often involves persecution and hostility. But leavening that are personal letters, love poems, passionate philosophical arguments.

#13 Borris, Kenneth (ed). 2004. Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance: A Sourcebook of Texts, 1470-1650. Routledge, New York. ISBN 978-1-138-87953-9 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4356]

Not necessarily texts of 16th century England, but texts available to people then.

#14 Loughlin, Marie H. 2014. Same-Sex Desire in Early Modern England, 1550-1735: An Anthology of Literary Texts and Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. ISBN 978-0-7190-8208-5 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5500]

Highly recommended. Just read it.

#15 Merrick, Jeffrey & Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. 2001. Homosexuality in Early Modern France: A Documentary Collection. Oxford University Press, New York. ISBN 0-19-510257-6 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/3995]

Skewed to male topics, but provides a counterpoint to the British sources.

#16 Norton, Rictor (ed.), Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook. Updated 7 September 2014 http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/. [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4002]

Very convenient in being available on the web.

Breaking Outside the England/France Zone: Several of these books could as easily have gone into other categories, but I wanted to highlight some of the better works I’ve found that *don’t* focus on north-western Europe.

#17 Habib, Samar. 2007. Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations. Routledge, New York. ISBN 78-0-415-80603-9 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4363]

#18 Habib, Samar. 2009. Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality: 850-1780 A.D. Teneo Press, Youngstown. ISBN 978-1-934844-11-3 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4364]

Combine narrative history with extensive source texts (in translation). The sources cover a broad swath of the Islamicate world in the pre-modern era. Habib also includes a biting analysis of the problems of bringing Western attitudes to the study of Islamic cultures.

#19 Thadani, Giti. 1996. Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India. Cassell, London. ISBN 0-304-33452-9 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5399]

A political analysis as much as a historic and literary one, tracing the “invisibility” of lesbianism in modern India.

#20 Velasco, Sherry. 2011. Lesbians in Early Modern Spain. Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville. ISBN 978-0-8265-1750-0 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4949]

Includes some material from colonial Spanish America. Makes a nice change from “all England/France all the time.”

#21 Williams, Craig A. 2010. Roman Homosexuality. Oxford University Press, Oxford. ISBN 978-0-19-538874-9 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5357]

The book that helped me finally grasp classical Roman attitudes toward homosexuality.

Special Topics: This group contains books that focus on some fairly narrow and specialized subject, but that do it in a fascinating way.

#22 History Project, The. 1998. Improper Bostonians. Beacon Press, Boston. ISBN 0-8070-7948-0 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4979]

A companion volume to a museum exhibition on the queer history of Boston Mass. Lots of pictures of artifacts.

#23 Bennett, Betty T. 1991. Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. ISBN 0-8018-4984-5 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/5343]

If you would enjoy a really twisty and convoluted academic mystery, this is a lovely and engrossing read.

#24 Walen, Denise A. 2005. Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave MacMillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6875-3 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4373]

The English stage worked out philosophies and anxieties about gender and sexuality as public culture.

#25 Donoghue, Emma. 2010. Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. ISBN 978-0-307-27094-8 [https://alpennia.com/lhmp/publication/4360]

A history of female same-sex desire in (English-language) literature organized around six “plot types.”

So that’s it: my personal suggested reading list. Check out the links to my blog for more detailed opinions and summaries of the books. And tell your friends about the Lesbian Historic Motif Project!

Major category: 
historical