Since I'm beginning a series of publications relating to classical Rome, it only makes sense to begin with a book that reviews the vocabulary of sex in Latin. It isn't a work that is of particularly direct use for the topic of love or sex between women, as the author gives away his attitude toward the topic with words like "abnormal." But especially given how difficult it is to extract reliable information about female homoeroticism from the surviving Latin texts, the need to understand Roman attitudes toward sex in general is unavoidable.
LHMP
Blog entry
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 74 (previously 27a) - On the Shelf for October 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2018.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 76 (previously 27c) - Sappho: The Translations (reprised) - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/20 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 75 (previously 27b) - Sappho of Lesbos: The Woman and the Legend (reprised) - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/10/13 - listen here)
(Transcript posted 2018/09/26)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 10 - Sappho of Lesbos: The Woman and the Legend - transcript
(Originally aired 2017/06/03 - listen here)
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 73 (previously 26e) - Peaceweaver by Jennifer Nestojko - transcript
(Originally aired 2018/09/29 - listen here)
Welcome to the third story in the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast original fiction series!
Complicated historic stories tend to send me either to drawing up genealogies or timelines. When I finished doing my LHMP summary of Bennett's book on Mary Diana Dods, I needed to sort it all out in my head by coming up with a chronology of her identities and movements. One startling aspect is how short the time was between the first inklings of creating Walter Sholto Douglas as a husband for Isabella Robinson, and Douglas's probably fatal end in a French debtor's prison.
You ever imagine one of those so-crazy-no-editor-would-ever-buy-it romance plots? F/f regency romance with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a significant supporting character. Bastard daughter of a Scottish earl. Beautiful socialite whose baby-daddy fled to America. Marriage of convenience. Secret baby. Gender disguise. Beauty and the beast. Making a living by publishing under multiple pen names. Foreign travel. Brittle witty people engaging in flirtation and back-biting gossip in Parisian salons. Over-the-top Gothic poetry about dead loves. Mysterious chronic illness.
This article makes a nice palate-clenser to last week's piece by Ungerer. It primarily focuses on the dramatic character of Moll Cutpurse within The Roaring Girl, but also notes how Mary Frith (by way of her post-show performance) acted to underming the play's attempt to rehabilitate her character, and to re-claim her identity as a disruption to existing gender identities.
Sometimes this blog is a dispassionate and intellectual summary of academic research. Sometimes it's a total squee-fest about a great source or a fascinating piece of historical evidence. And sometimes it's the equivalent of rage-tweeting. This one has turned into the last. Ungerer's article is a valuable single source for most of the documentary evidence of Mary Frith's life.
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