Pre-Modern Lesbian History

Andreadis, Harriette

Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714, University of Chicago Press, June 2001

Ballaster, Ros

"`The Vices of Old Rome Revived': Representations of Female Same-Sex Desire in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England", in Suzanne Raitt (ed.), Volcanoes and Pearl-Divers: Lesbian Feminist Studies. Onlywomen, 1993.

Bennett, Judith M.

"'Lesbian-like' and the social history of lesbianisms", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 9 (2000): 1-24.

Brooten, Bernadette J.

Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Brooten, Bernadette J.

"[Saint] Paul's views on the nature of women and female homoeroticism", in C. W. Atkinson, C. H. Buchanan and M. R. Miles (eds), Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, Boston: Beacon Press, 1985, pp. 61-87.

Brown, Judith C.

Immodest Acts: the Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Brown, Judith C.

"Lesbian sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe", in Duberman et al., Hidden from History (1989), pp. 67-75.

Castle, Terry,

"Matters not fit to be mentioned: Fielding's The Female Husband, ELH, 49 (1982): 602-22.

Castle, Terry

"Sister-Sister: Jane Austen's Letters", London Review of Books, 3 August 1995; report by Barry Hugill, "Sex and sexuality: The new key to readings of `gay' Jane Austen", Observer, 6 August 1995; Letters, London Review of Books, 24 August 1995.

Cheek, Pamela

"The 'Mémoires secrets' and the Actress: Tribadism, Performance, and Property", in Jeremy D. Popkin and Bernadette Fort (eds), The "Mémoires secrets" and the Culture of Publicity in Eighteenth-Century France, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1998.

Chesser, Lucy

"A woman who married three wives", Journal of Women's History, 9(4) (Winter 1998).

Clark, Anna

"Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 7(1) (1996), pp. 23-50.

Crompton, Louis

"The myth of lesbian impunity: Capital laws from 1270 to 1791", in Licata and Petersen, The Gay Past (1985), 11-25 (orig. pub. 1980).

Davis, Madeline and Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky

"Oral history and the study of sexuality in the lesbian community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960", orig. pub. in Feminist Studies, 12(1) (Spring 1986), pp. 7-26. Repritned in Duberman et al., Hidden from History, 1989, pp. 426-40.

DeJean, Joan

Fictions of Sappho, 1546-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Dekker, Rudolf M. and van de Pol, Lotte C.

The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe. London: Macmillan, 1989.

Donoghue, Emma

"Imagined more than women: Lesbians as hermaphrodites, 1671-1766", Women's History Review, 2 (1993): 199-216.

Donoghue, Emma

Passions Between Women: British lesbian culture 1668-1801. London: Scarlet Press, 1993.

Eriksson, Brigitte

"A lesbian execution in Germany, 1721: The trial records", in Licata and Petersen, The Gay Past (1985), 27-40 (orig. pub. 1980).

Faderman, Lillian

Scotch Verdict: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods v. Dame Cumming Gordon. London: Quartet Books, 1985 (orig. pub. 1983).

Faderman, Lillian

"The morbidification of love between women by nineteenth-century sexologists", Journal of Homosexuality 4 (1978), pp. 73-90.

Fielding, Henry

The Female Husband and Other Writings, ed. C. E. Jones. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1960.

Hamer, Emily

Britannia's Glory: History of Twentieth-century Lesbians. London: Cassell, 1995.

Hunt, Margaret

"The Sapphic Strain: English Lesbians in the Long Eighteenth Century", in Judith M. Bennett (ed.), Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Katz, Jonathan

Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie against Dame Helen Cumming Gordon. New York: Arno Press, 1975. Contains a 20-page compendium of "Authorities with Regard to the Practice of Tribadism" compiled in 1811 for the famous Scottish libel case.

Mueller, Janel

"Troping Utopia: Donne's brief for lesbianism", in J. G. Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 182-207.

Murray, Jacqueline

"Twice marginal and twice invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages" [incl. two translations of medieval lesbian-relevant texts], in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Garland Publishing, 1996), pp. 191-222.

Rupp, Leila J.

"'Imagine my surprise': women's relationships in mid-twentieth century America", orig. pub. 1980. Reprinted in Duberman et al., Hidden from History, 1989, pp. 395-410.

Sautman, Francesca Canade and Sheingorn, Pamela (eds)

Same Sex Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages. Palgrave, 2001

Simons, Patricia

"Lesbian (in)visibility in Italian Renaissance culture: Diana and other cases of 'donna con donna'", Journal of Homosexuality, 27, 1/2 (1994): 81-122. (Also published Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History, ed. Whitney Davis, Haworth Press, 1994, pp. 81-122.

Stiebel, Arlene

"Subversive sexuality: Masking the erotic in the poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn", in C. Summers and T.-L. Pebwroth (eds), Renaissance Discourses of Desire. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993, pp. 223-6.

Traub, Valerie

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Trumbach, Randolph

"London's Sapphists: from three sexes to four genders in the making of modern culture", in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (eds), Body Guards: the Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Routledge, 1991, pp. 112-41. Also reprinted in Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Third Sex, Third Gender, New York: Zone Books, 1994, pp. 111-36.

Velasco, Sherry

The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire and Catalina de Erauso. University of Texas Press, due December 2000.

Vicinus, Martha

Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (University of Chicago Press, 2004). Review

Vicinus, Martha

"`They wonder to which sex I belong': The historical roots of the modern lesbian identity", Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, Fall 1992, pp. 467-97 (a revision of her paper first published in Denis Altman et al., Homosexuality, Which Homosexuality?). Reprinted in Abelove et al., The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993), 432-52.

Watt, Diane

"Behaving like a man? Incest, Lesbian desire, and gender play in 'Yde et Olive' and its adaptations", Comparative Literature, 50, 4 (Fall 1998): 265-85.