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court case

 

This tag identifies court records of legal cases involving either the suspicion or reality of lesbian sex.

For a full list of LHMP misc tags click here.

LHMP entry

LHMP #148 Velasco 2000 The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso

Preface

This book looks at how Catalina de Erauso’s story has been “constructed, interpreted, marketed and consumed” in the 17-20th centuries. Velasco identifies Catalina as a “transgenderist” (that is, someone who engages in transgender performance without necessarily having transgender identity) and uses she/her pronouns as the book is examining how Catalina’s image was used (the image of a woman performing masculinity) rather than interpreting what Catalina’s own understanding might have been.

LHMP #131 Monter 1985 “Sodomy and Heresy in Early Modern Switzerland”

The majority of this article concerns accusations of sodomy between men, and looks at the numeric distribution of evidence with regard to the date, location, nature of the charge, and demographic information about the accused. The analysis is particularly interesting with regard to the interplay of religious and sexual concerns. There is a single reference to an incident involving women.

LHMP #130 Eriksson 1985 “A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records”

This is a translation of an 1891 publication of the summary of German trial records from1721. The 1891 publication is by Dr. F. C. Müller, a sexologist who added his own commentary from the point of view of sexual psychopathology. Eriksson’s translation omits this commentary and includes only the original trial summary. The summary was put together after the conclusion of the trial when the sentence was being sent to a higher authority for review.

LHMP #129 Crompton 1985 “The Myth of Lesbian Impunity: Capital Laws from 1270 to 1791”

Crompton provides an in-depth study of European and American laws addressing homosexual acts between women, from 1270 on. Prior to this study, the general historical understanding was that lesbians were ignored by the law, based mostly on an unwarranted generalization from English law. In fact, lesbian acts were criminalized in legal systems in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland, and were considered equivalent to male sodomy.

LHMP #126 Friedli 1987 “Passing Women: A Study of Gender Boundaries in the Eighteenth Century”

Friedli provides an extensive examination of “passing women” -- defined as women (using current terminology, it might be better to say “persons assigned female at birth”, but Friedli uses “women” and I will follow that here) who live, work, and/or marry as men for some period during their lives. This is specifically distinguished from theatrical cross-dressing or overt cross-dressing as a sexual signal. While the phenomenon is far from confined to the 18th century, there seems to have been a fascination with it in England, beginning in the late 17th century.

LHMP #112a Castle 2003 The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall Part 1: 16th Century

Unsurprisingly, the material here is (with one possible exception?) filtered through male authors. We have literary tales of same-sex desire under the cover of gender disguise. There are medicalized case studies that--to a modern reader--sound more like intersex and transgender individuals, but those concepts were inextricably tangled with understandings of lesbianism at that time. And we have two poems, placed in the voice of a female narrator who is trying to come to terms with desiring another woman (though one is known to have been written by a man).

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #102i Habib 2009 "From “Kanz Al-Umal” by Al-Mutqee Al-Hindi (ca. 1597)"

References to legal prohibitions on both female and male homosexuality.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #110f Borris 2004 - Same-Sex Desire in the English Renaissance (Chapter 7)

A specialized version of the encyclopedia was the catalog of unnatural or monstrous individuals, encompassing deformities, birth defects, and a great many mythical beings. Of particular relevance to sexuality was the fascination for hermaphrodites. Visual representations often portrayed a bilateral dimorphism, with the right half of the individual portrayed as one sex and the left half as the other.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: 111b Walen 2005 - Constructions of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Drama (Chapter 1)

Images of women-loving-women were established enough in 16th century England to appear as a character type that was not so much defined as simply assumed, and therefore was available for reference both explicitly and obliquely. Within this general type, there were clear distinctions made between the motifs of desire between women and sexual acts between women. This chapter explores evidence for this character type in non-dramatic sources that were available to early modern English playwrights and their audiences.

Lesbian Historic Motif Project: #69b Traub 2002 - The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Chapter 1)

Renaissance drama provides a case study in how lesbian themes and female homoerotic potential can be hidden in plain sight simply by the denial of their possibility. Traub notes that even today one can find vehement denials of homoerotic content in such overtly suggestive works as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. And less overt content may only emerge into view through an awareness of the era’s understanding and encoding of female desire and forms of female intimacy.

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