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16th c

LHMP entry

The introduction reviews the history of feminist literary criticism and notes that it has tended to focus on prose. Multiple filters and gatekeeping mechanisms stand in the way of presenting non-Anglophone feminist poetry to a larger audience. Feminine stereotypes have pressured women poets into restrictive genres: domesticity, romance, religion, etc. This collection seeks out pets and poems that operate against this restriction.

This chapter compares the dearth of entries for f/f sexuality in general dictionaries in the 1750-1850 period with the wealth of discussion on those topics in medical dictionaries. The appearance of medical dictionaries as a genre aligned with an explosion of vernacular publishing in the health field in the 16-17th centuries. These were aimed not only at non-specialists, but at health workers outside the academic elite—people who didn’t have access to Latin literature. The publishing establishment operated as gatekeepers in terms of what material got published and how it was presented.

This chapter opens discussing how dictionaries explicitly presented themselves as censoring inappropriate language when aimed at an audience that included women. This sort of comment shows up as early as the later 18th century. Even the nature of what was being censored is censored, with explanations that it is aimed at “inelegant” words, rather than objectionable or obscene ones.

This chapter looks at how words are defined and cited, and the semantic frameworks they’re associated with, using “sodomy” and “buggery” as the working examples. [Note: my summary is going to give undue attention to discussions relevant to women.]

The book begins with an anecdote about the OED updating its entry for “marriage” when the (British) marriage equality act was passed, and how this was framed in the press as participating in a “change of definition”. This is followed by an anecdote from a slander case in 1942, which argued that “lesbian” could not be slanderous, as it was (incorrectly) asserted that the word didn’t exist in English when the relevant law was passed--an argument based on citations in the OED entry for “lesbian”, which was not included in the first edition published in 1908.

It is generally agreed on by historians that evidence for prosecutions of women for “sodomy” (however defined) are both rare (in absolute terms and compared to those for men) and often more lightly punished. Roelens explores a context that runs counter to this pattern: the Southern Netherlands in the 15th and early 16th century.

As a supplement to the discussion of records of women cross-dressing, the book has an appendix with quotations from the court records. It notes that these are not an exhaustive record—indeed the number of records is relatively small. It’s likely that the attention given to cross-dressing as an offence varied depending on what other concerns might draw attention, for example a rise in the concern over vagrancy in the 1590s.

In contrast with the backstories of cross-dressing women in Shakespearean drama, legal records of women wearing male clothing (either individual garments or complete outfits) were viewed harshly by civic authorities. The chapter opens with an exception: the case of Arabella Stuart cross-dressing to try to evade confinement and escape to the continent in 1611.

The afterword sums up the conclusion of the collection that the “all male stage” is a myth and an aberration, being true only of certain specific times, contexts, and locations. Women are absent from the stage only when “the stage” is very narrowly and carefully defined. The concept holds true in England only for a narrow range of time between the rise of private professional companies (displacing the earlier tradition of guild-sponsored plays) and the entrance of women into those companies at the Restoration.

This article discusses the gendered aspects of ballad performance, both in terms of who is singing, and in terms of the gender of the “persona” of the song. The “female impersonation” of the article’s title refers to male performance of songs representing a female “voice.” This is connected very tangentially to the practice of male actors performing female parts on stage. Like the previous two articles, I did not consider it very relevant to my interests.

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