The topic of this article involves the reputation that the town of Brentford had as a place of adulterous assignation for residents of London, and how the sexual sheanigans of a group of men in the early 17th c play “Westward Ho” were subverted by the women who were the target of their desire via a femal alliance to keep the upper hand. I just barely skimmed this, as it doesn’t have any identifiable relevance to the Project. Included only for completness’ sake.
England
Covering topics relating specifically to England or generally to the region equivalent to the modern United Kingdom. Sometimes lazily and inaccurately used generally for the British Isles, especially when articles don’t specifically identify the nationality of authors.
LHMP entry
Mikalachki’s introduction to this article focuses on the difficulty of the topic: inter-personal alliances among female vagrants in the early 17th century.
This article looks at depictions of women and work in two scenes of the medieval Chester Mystery Play cycle. The plays were revised over their lifespan and these scenes were added fairly late—possibly the latter part of the 16th centuy--drawing on medieval legend rather than Biblical sources. The first of the scenes occurs in the Noah play and focuses on Noah’s wife, often played as a comic character as she first refuses to enter the Ark and then wants to divorce Noah to stay with her friends who are singing a drinking song as the waters rise.
While other papers in this volume look at relations between upper class waiting women and their aristocratic mistresses (whether in life or fiction), this study concerns itself with in-group relations among ordinary housemaids and women in service. One common life path for young women from rural households (whether of the gentry or lower) was to be placed in service with a large urban household with the expectation that this would not only provide income in the immediate future but would lead to wider opportunities for marriage.
The importance of relations (of all types) between women to society and to women’s lives has tended to be overlooked in favor of the more visible relations between men or between women and men. Due to the nature of society, men could assume that their relationships were stable and long-lasting, but women’s relationships could easily be disrupted by the lesser control women had over their own lives. Or women’s relationships might be temporary alliances across social barriers, established for a specific purpose.
I’m including this summary really just for the sake of completeness and because a colleague happened to be reading the book and was willing to scan me the brief relevant section. The book as a whole (as might be determined from the title) looks at the ways that marriage relationships are represented and symbolized in medieval tomb sculpture. In the chapter on “The Double Tomb” there is a section entitled “Queer Tombs” that specifically looks at commemorations of same-sex pairs.
Most of the articles on burial monuments commemorating same-sex pairs reference this article, so I had high hopes that it might include further leads and details. Alas, not so, at least with respect to women’s memorials. The article focuses primarily on the symbolism of structural and artistic details of a couple of major monuments commemorating pairs of men. (This focus is not entirely surprising given that the article appears in a journal about English church monuments.)
Frangos looks at representations of female same-sex desire in Delarivier Manley’s “New Cabal” in the satire The New Atalantis, specifically focusing on female masculinity (to use Halberstam’s terminology). [Note: I’m afraid this article got off on the wrong foot for me because it stakes a claim that desire for “the representation of men in women” is the primary form that desire takes in this depiction, but leans heavily on one passage that I believe Frangos has drastically misinterpreted.]
Ballaster uses the lens of Delarivier Manley’s The New Atalantis, and especially its “New Cabal” as a lens for exploring knowledge of, and attitudes toward, female same-sex eroticism in 17th and 18th century England. (Manley’s book was published in 1709 and so speaks to both centuries.)
Fisher examines the social and erotic context of the gesture-group known as “chin-chucking”, which is loosely defined as “reaching for, touching, fingering, pinching, caressing, cupping, or clasping of the cheek or chin.” The central version of the gesture involves one person holding the chin of the other person with the fingers of one hand. [Note: although Fisher considers this topic specifically within the context of 17th century England, there is a much wider context involved. See my commentary for further consideration.]
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