Blog
Thursday, January 11, 2018 - 07:00
One of the themes that I find really valuable in this collection of essays is poking at the question of whether and why it is important to find connections between historic modes of sexuality and the modes familiar to modern producers and consumers of historic research and theory. Given how prominent and foundational Lillian Faderman has been in the field of lesbian history, I always feel a bit guilty when I describe my winces at certain of her approaches, though in this essay I think she addresses the underlying premises of those winces fairly directly. One that is stated outright in this article is "can there be lesbian identity in the absence of sexual activity?" Faderman seems to argue for a negative answer both explicitly in this article and implicitly in much of the discussion in Surpassing the Love of Men, and the obvious reason that this position makes me wince is that it erases the concept of asexual lesbians. If one erases them in the historic record, the obvious implication is to erase them in the modern experience as well. I can understand the position that the complex prototypical model for lesbian identity includes erotic desires and activity between women, but any position that requires it as a necessary defining characteristic is a position that erases my own existence.
A second point the Faderman makes in this essay--one that I'm far more on board with--is that it's important not to get too fixated on lesbian identity as publicly transgressive of social norms. To allow for women who are outwardly conforming (or at least not outwardly non-conforming) but whose lives embody emotional and erotic experiences that can only be seen as lesbian. One of themes promoted in the modern lesbian community is that the state of being a woman who loves women is inherently and existentially transgressive, no matter how it is outwardly expressed. When applying this principle to women in history, we shouldn't overlook or dismiss lesbian lives simply because they were not engaged in a public confrontation with heterosexual expectations. This is a theme that has significant effects on lesbian historical fiction. Modern readers are deeply attached to characters who are outwardly transgressive: passing women, outlaws, women in male-coded professions. Our fiction should have room for stories about the more subtle rebellions of simply existence as well.
Major category:
LHMP View comments (2)
Full citation:
Faderman, Lillian. 2011. “A Useable Past?” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9
Publication summary:
A collection of papers addressing the question of what the place of premodern historical studies have in relation to the creation and critique of historical theories, and especially to the field of queer studies.
Faderman, Lillian. 2011. “A Useable Past?”
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
One of the themes that I find really valuable in this collection of essays is poking at the question of whether and why it is important to find connections between historic modes of sexuality and the modes familiar to modern producers and consumers of historic research and theory. Given how prominent and foundational Lillian Faderman has been in the field of lesbian history, I always feel a bit guilty when I describe my winces at certain of her approaches, though in this essay I think she addresses the underlying premises of those winces fairly directly. One that is stated outright in this article is "can there be lesbian identity in the absence of sexual activity?" Faderman seems to argue for a negative answer both explicitly in this article and implicitly in much of the discussion in Surpassing the Love of Men, and the obvious reason that this position makes me wince is that it erases the concept of asexual lesbians. If one erases them in the historic record, the obvious implication is to erase them in the modern experience as well. I can understand the position that the complex prototypical model for lesbian identity includes erotic desires and activity between women, but any position that requires it as a necessary defining characteristic is a position that erases my own existence.
A second point the Faderman makes in this essay--one that I'm far more on board with--is that it's important not to get too fixated on lesbian identity as publicly transgressive of social norms. To allow for women who are outwardly conforming (or at least not outwardly non-conforming) but whose lives embody emotional and erotic experiences that can only be seen as lesbian. One of themes promoted in the modern lesbian community is that the state of being a woman who loves women is inherently and existentially transgressive, no matter how it is outwardly expressed. When applying this principle to women in history, we shouldn't overlook or dismiss lesbian lives simply because they were not engaged in a public confrontation with heterosexual expectations. This is a theme that has significant effects on lesbian historical fiction. Modern readers are deeply attached to characters who are outwardly transgressive: passing women, outlaws, women in male-coded professions. Our fiction should have room for stories about the more subtle rebellions of simply existence as well.
# # #
Faderman builds on Bauer’s discussion of how conventional historic approaches erase lesbian history, but adds that an abandonment of the concept of history as “what really happened” is a surrender to that erasure. She notes her own pursuit of lesbian history as an “unabashedly political project”--a pursuit of a “useable past” that offered the modern audience connection with history. Faderman has some possibly snide things to say about how the scarcity of premodern evidence for lesbians drives post-modern scholars to “all sorts of imaginative--and sometimes rather labored--devices.” On the other side, she notes how the longing for a “useable past” leads to ahistoricity (perhaps what is elsewhere called “search and rescue” missions). She asserts how the framework of Romantic Friendship allowed her to discuss intense loving relationships between women in the 18-19th centuries without anachronistically labeling them “lesbian”. This raises the question, if “lesbian” is an unstable concept, how is it possible to discuss lesbianism in history at all?
Faderman spends a while discussing how the strict scrutiny on the precise definition of “lesbian”--both within and outside the field of lesbian history--inevitably leads to erasing the realities of women who had primary emotional bonds with other women. But conversely, she probes at the question of whether “lesbian” has lost its most crucial meaning if it doesn’t refer to sexual relations. [Note: This is the theme that regularly bothers me in Faderman’s writing, that sex is the sine qua non of the word “lesbian”.] But she also notes that looking for “lesbian-like” data only in the context of social non-conformity excludes women whose lives were superficially conventional, despite strong evidence for female same-sex emotional or erotic relationships. “If our definition of ‘lesbian-like’ is limited to women who were openly outlaws, we’re in danger of losing much that is juicy and wonderful.” She notes the class divisions in responses to lesbian-like behavior and the promising evidence that knowledge and acceptance of female same-sex love was more widespread in premodern times than we often think.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018 - 07:00
I always mean to do these book intake posts more regularly. (Maybe I have and I failed to tag them properly?) But the point when I say, "I need to get these in the spreadsheet so I can shelve them" is at least a reasonable trigger. And it's well past time that I cataloged books I picked up on my travels in Europe last year! So, in some vaguely thematic groupings:
Books bought at Worldcon in Helsinki
Sinisalo, Johanna & Toni Jerrman eds. 2017. Giants at the End of the World: A Showcase of Finish Weird. - A small book published specially for the convention. 12 stories that look like they should be very quick reads.
Barbini, Francesca T. (ed). 2017. Gender Identity and Sexuality in Current Fantasy and Science Fiction. Luna Press. ISBN 978-1-911143-24-6 - A collection of academic essays on gender and sexuality issues both in literature and in the social context of writing and publishing SFF. I read this on the plane flying back after my travels and it was perfect distracting me without requiring intense concentration. I know that sounds like a weak endorsement, but it's not!
Books bought while traveling
Groeneveld, Karen. (I think -- it doesn't really have an author credit.) 2017. In de Pan van de Middeleeuwen. Woord & Co., Lochem. ISBN 978-90-823475-5-5 -- I'm a bit of a sucker for popular-oriented historic cook books. I picked this up in Deventer in the city historic museum gift shop. It's a souvenier-type cookbook of late medieval cuisine. The recipes are all modernized and there's nothing in the way of easily-traceable sources, so it's useless for actual research in historic cuisine. But I love examples of how popular history is pitched at the general public. (It's entirely in Dutch, so my chances of treating it as anything but a souvenier and curiosity are small.)
Williams, Gareth. 2014. The Viking Ship. The British Museum, London. ISBN 978-0-7141-2340-0 -- One of my back-burner projects is a historic novel set in the 10th century involving Welsh, Icelandic, and Viking Dublin settings. I took the opportunity while at the National Museum of Ireland gift shop to pick up several useful research books. This is a brief technical guide to the structure and purposes of Viking-era ships, based on both archaeology and iconography. It will help me figure out just what sort of ship my Icelandic girl is captaining.
Griffiths, David. 2010. Vikings of the Irish Sea. The History Press, Stroud, Gloucestershire. ISBN 978-0-7524-3646-3 -- A scholarly but accessible survey of the political, cultural, and material context of Norse presence in the Irish Sea area in the 8-11th centuries, very nicely centering around exactly where and when my novel is set.
Wallace, Patrick F. 2016. Viking Dublin: The Wood Quay Excavations. Irish Academic Press, Sallins. ISBN 978-07165-3314-6 -- This would have been an extravagent purchase if it weren't so essential to the setting of some of the main action of the story. This is the definitive and copiously illustrated report of the intensive rescue excavations of Wood Quay in Dublin in the '70s and '80s, primarily providing evidence on the 10th and 11th century settlement. I can't even begin to say how useful this will be in visualizing the physical environment of my Dublin action in the story.
Schwarz, Christopher. 2015. Workbenches: from Design and Theory to Construction and Use. Popular Woodworking Books, Ohio. ISBN 978-1-4403-4312-4 -- OK, let's be clear: I have no illusions that I will ever design and build the perfect workbench in my garage and thereby enable me to create all sorts of projects easily and efficiently. I'll probably continue cobbling together work-arounds when I want to haul out the power tools. But I fell in love with this book when I saw a copy Joel Uckelman had, so I popped online and had my local bookstore in Oakland order me a copy to pick up when I got back home. (The bookstore owner said she was hard pressed to allow me to take it away with me because she hadn't finished drooling over it yet.) This is, for woodworking, like those glossy kitchen-porn magazines you pore over when you dream about remodeling your home. It's just esthetically pleasing and needn't be anything else.
Recent purchases for the Lesbian Historic Motif Project
Lesbian History Group. 1989. Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in HIstory 1840-1985. The Women's Press, Ltd., London. ISBN 0-7043-4175-1 -- A collection of biographical articles on specific persons or contexts. This is one of those early "search and rescue mission" books whose main goal was to lay claim to specific persons for the lesbian team. But a couple of the articles are in my list of publications to cover, so it seemed worth picking up a secondhand copy of my own.
Bray, Alan. 2003. The Friend. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. ISBN 978-0-226-07181-7 -- Although Bray protests (perhaps a bit too much) against the reading of same-sex passionate friendships in history as being homosexual, the groundwork of evidence for how those friendships were performed and received is rigorous and extensive. His primary focus is on male friendships from the 16-19th centuries, primarily of the English-speaking world. He does cover women to some extent. (I decided to get the book after several references to it in the context of same-sex funeral monuments for women.)
Merrill, Lisa. 2000. When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor. ISBN 978-0-472-08749-5 -- Sometimes a long trail of breadcrumbs leads you to conclude that there's a bakery worth visiting in the neighborhood. I'd been noting references to actress Charlotte Cushman in various contexts in LHMP publications, but when I read about several other women in her social circle (including several of her lovers) in Improper Bostonians, I decided I needed to do a podcast essay on her circle and began hunting down some books specifically to prepare for it. The blog and podcast are coming to an interesting stage where it sometimes makes sense (or at least is amusing) to plan ahead enough to coordinate a month's worth of publications leading up to the monthly podcast essay. I need to strategize when to schedule this set. I'm reading this book for the blog currently and finding it fascinating and quite a refreshing counter to claims that 19th century Romantic Friendships were definitely not erotic, no definitely not, nice women didn't do those things or even think about them, and they were blissfully ignorant of how their lives and relationships might look to a more prurient age.
Leach, Joseph. 1970. Bright Particular Star: The Life and Times of Charlotte Cushman. Yale University Press, New Haven. (no ISBN) -- An in-depth biography of Cushman. Given the date (and the male author) it will be interesting to see how much it touches on her sexuality and that of her social circle. Cushman gathered around her a group of talented, brilliant, and often homosexually-inclined women, both in her home base of Boston and at her second home in Rome. Their lives, loves, and interpersonal dramas would make excellent fodder for a historic soap opera (or inspiration for some great historical fiction!).
Miscellaneous Non-Fiction
Mercier, Jacques. 1979. Ethiopian Magic Scrolls. George Brazillier, New York. ISBN 0-8076-0897-1 -- If I'd spotted this book (and others on its topic) back when I was doing deep background research for the sort of mystical traditions Serafina Talarico might have known or heard about from her parents, I might have worked bits of the topic into the story of Mother of Souls. This book explores (with copious illustrations) a genre of talismanic magical scrolls that are part of Ethiopian Christian tradition, with examples in the book dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries. Although Serafina wasn't taught the mystical traditions of her own heritage, it's possible that she may find reason to learn more about this sort of thing in the future.
Schlabow, Karl. 1976. Textilfunde der Eisenzeit in Norddeutschland. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster. ISBN 3-529-01515-6 (print on demand photocopy of the original text) -- I have an ethical principle that if I encounter a book that I once considered valuable enough to throw onto a photocopy machine in its entirety (we're talking out of print books here, since the labor and photocopy fees aren't really worth it for anything in print), I would buy it to expiate my sins against copyright. I could wish that this were acutally in print, since many of the photos of the textiles are less than useful in their third-hand state. This is pretty much THE definitive book on archaeological textiles in northern Europe from the Iron Age. I was using it recently as an example of the sort of book I would apply the aforementioned ethical principle to, and on a whim did a search and discovered that it had been made available in POD.
Homberger, Eric. 2016. The Historical Atlas of New York City. (3rd edition) St. Martin's Press, New York. ISBN 978-1-250-09806-1 -- I picked this up at the Museum of the City of New York back at Thanksgiving. I'm thinking it will be useful in sorting out various refernces in Abiel LaForge's diaries, especially after the war is over and he moves to NYC.
Misc. Fiction
I never seem to include ebooks when I do these intake posts, largely because I don't have a good systemtic way of tracking what I've bought since the last roundup. At least physical books sit there in a stack waiting to be entered. I do try to add ebooks to my catalog, but it's trickier.
Hambly, Barbara. 2017. Murder in July. (Benjamin January #15) -- Despite knowing that I have a hard time reading physical books these days, it's hard to let go of buying the hard copies for a series that I began collecting that way. I'm about six books behind in reading this excellent series.
Steffen, David. ed. 2017. The Long List Anthology: Volume 3. -- One outcome of the Hugo Award ballot slating mess several years ago was this project to anthologize the "long list" of nominated short works in order to honor those stories that got bumped off the ballot by the slates. Even as the power of the slates has been tempered by community reaction, the idea of the Long List Anthology has had enough appeal to succeed with this third Kickstarter-driven collection. I very much doubt I'll manage to read any of the works that I haven't already read (in preparation for the voting), but it's a project I don't mind supporting as a subscriber, and that nets me a copy.
Green Sacchi (ed). 2017. Witches, Princesses, and Women at Arms: Erotic Lesbian Fairy Tales. Cleis Press. -- Ok, so erotica isn't really my thing. I admit that. But lesbian fantasy is. And a couple authors I like are in this volume. So what the heck.
Parisien, Dominik & Navah Wolfe (eds). 2016. The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales. Saga Press. -- More fairy tales...a theme? This collection was much talked about (and contents much nominated) last year. But as usual, if I read it, it will be in e-book. So why did I buy a hard copy? Because it's just a physically gorgeous object.
Major category:
ReviewsTuesday, January 9, 2018 - 08:31
Lesfic author Jae has set up a fun reading challenge game for 2018: Lesbian Book Bingo. It's your basic genre/trope-based bingo card to encourage people to read a variety of books in 2018 and win a chance for prizes. I was invited to participate by donating some prizes and having one of my books listed in the Suggested Reading Lists. Here's the topic card for those who might want to participate, but follow the link to Jae's site to register and to participate in the topic-specific blogs (more chances at prizes!) and discussions.
Now, I don't know how many books I'll be reading that fit the bingo squares -- I barely read two dozen novels in a year as it is, and not all of them have lesbian characters. But just because I'm an overachiever and love a writing challenge, I'll be playing along by writing a short bit of fiction for each of the themes. And just to make it even more challenging, they'll all be part of a very loosely connected overall story, which of course will have a historic setting. I'll do my best not to go too far down the research rabbit holes because I do have other things I should be writing! But here's my first installment, for the "Women in Uniform" theme.
Follow the Drum (Lesbian Book Bingo: Women in Uniform)
Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat. The rattle of drums had been the sound of my daydreams since I was a girl, walking to the marketplace with my mother beside the market wagon. From where we sold cabbages and onions at the edge of the cobbled square, I could just see down Heerenstraat to where the soldiers drilled in formation in the yard before the barracks. The bright flash of their coats, blue, green, and red, caught the eye and the sharp staccato of the snares called a promise of adventure waiting just a few steps out of reach.
If it had only been the local regiment marching and training, it wouldn't have stirred my blood, but the chance of where Zendoorn stood among the roads and between the great lords meant there were always troops coming and going. They settled into the barracks for a week or two, made a great show of their colors, drank their fill in the taverns, and then one morning the drums would call them away. I remember seeing one company, with the drummer boys out front beating the march, and the banners flying, and the men in their bright coats stepping in time as one as they set out on the road toward Antwerp and maybe even farther on to France. In that moment, my heart grew wings and beat in my breast to follow.
Mother boxed my ears and said, “Don’t you go mooning after soldiers like your cousin Greta!” Greta got nothing from her soldier love but a swelling belly and a lifetime of following the drum, washing and cooking for the soldiers. It wasn’t the soldiers themselves I yearned for but that promise the drums gave of somewhere to go, something to do, someone to be. Rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat.
When it was time for me to go out into service and save up some money for a dowry, or maybe to set myself up in trade, I got my fill of soldiers carrying beer for Mevrouw Trijn at De Leeuw. Oh, not my “fill” the same way Greta did! But the shine on the tinsel tarnished a bit seeing them up close, day after day, drinking and gambling their wages away, or spending their last coin on a night with one of the other girls who wasn’t as nice about it as I was. Trijn didn’t mind if the girls made a bit extra that way, but she didn’t require it either. The soldiers were men like any others. They marched in to town and soon they’d march out again. Most of them weren’t going anywhere but a foreign battlefield and weren’t going to be anyone but the farmer’s sons and runaway prentices they’d started as. But at least they’d have their chance, which was more than I’d have.
You got to know them, even as short a time as they were in town. Old Joost reminded me of my uncle with his tales and funny stories. Boastful Corneelijs talked big about what a hero he’d been in battle, but always had a word of encouragement for the new boys frightened at the thought of facing the guns. And then there was Martijn. I liked Martijn as soon as I brought the drinks around because he was quiet, and stopped his friends from trying to get a feel beneath my skirts, and when the others were telling rude jokes to try to get me to blush he only looked sideways at me with a crooked smile as if to say, “Never mind them, they’re just little boys.” Which was funny because he was shorter and scrawnier than the rest of them, without even a bit of hair on his lip yet. He was dark, like maybe his grandfather had been a Moor, and he had the most beautiful eyes. I liked him right off, but it felt sisterly, not like how the other girls talked about their sweethearts.
Martijn and his friends were there late into the evening, but he didn’t join in when they brought out the dice and cards. “Careful with my money,” he said, and I could understand that, though the other soldiers ragged on him horribly about it. Most soldiers spent as if they didn’t have a tomorrow. Well, and lots of them didn’t, so maybe I shouldn’t blame them. But it meant Martijn ended up sitting by himself and in a quiet moment I sat beside him and asked where he was from and who his people were. He didn’t really answer, but we talked about places he’d seen. He’d been as far away as Cologne, and once had even crossed the channel to England. He thought maybe he’d go for a sailor and see the Indies when the fighting was over. Maybe I was foolish, but I told him about how the drums made me feel, and how I’d always envied the soldiers marching away to see the world. He didn’t tease me for it, not even a bit. “But that’s for men,” I said with a sigh. “Not for the likes of me.”
It was a mistake to get friendly because the next day the word went round that Martijn’s company would be marching out on the morrow. No use in liking someone when you’ll never see them again. Martijn and his friends came back to De Leeuw that night. Most of them wanted what soldiers usually want before they leave: to get drunk and spend some time with a woman. I didn’t care for that sort of sport so I kept myself mostly in the kitchen, but as some of the girls slipped off to the upstairs rooms there was nothing for it but to carry the tankards around.
One of Martijn’s friends called out, “Hey boy! There’s your sweetheart!” and pushed him toward me so I barely kept from spilling beer over the both of us.
“Sorry,” he muttered and his face flushed even darker than before.
“Hey Martijn! We took up a collection to see you taken care of!” The man slapped a small handful of coins on the table as I set the tankards down. “You’ll see our friend treated right, won’t you Lena?”
I was used to turning matters aside with a few joking words, but it was Martijn they kept after. That wasn’t right. A man’s a man even if he doesn’t fall in bed with every woman he sees. Martijn took me aside and stared at the floor like he was ashamed while he asked quietly, “If you were to…well, you wouldn’t have to do anything? Just let them think we…”
I thought about my reputation, which wasn’t so big a thing as it might be. And I thought about the small pile of coins sitting on the table. But mostly I thought about Martijn and how he’d be marching away in the morning and wishing I could do that too. And I took him by the hand and scooped up the coins in my fist and pasted on a grin for his companions as I pulled him off toward the stairs.
When I’d closed and barred the door we both stood there feeling silly. There wasn’t anywhere to sit but on the bed and I didn’t want to do that in case he got the wrong idea.
“I’m sorry,” Martijn said. “They don’t really mean anything by it. It’s only that I have something of a reputation.”
“For being polite to women?” I said sharply. And then because it wasn’t his fault, I asked, “Have you never had a sweetheart?”
He gave me that crooked grin again. “A time or two. It’s…Lena, would you keep my secret if I told you?”
I frowned at him. What sort of secret could he mean?
“It’s only…I was thinking. Because of what you said about watching the soldiers march away to see the world."
“Women don’t do that.”
“Some of us do.”
I stared at Martijn for a long time trying to make sense of what he’d said. While I was staring at him, he shrugged off his blue uniform coat and started unbuttoning the brass buttons on his waistcoat. And just when I was finding my tongue to protest that I hadn’t changed my mind about bedding him, he…she pulled open her shirt to expose the small, round, pale brown bosoms underneath.
“Some of us wanted to see the world badly enough. We wanted to make better wages than we could doing sewing or cooking. It’s not an easy life, but the chance is there to seize if you dare to reach for it.”
Maybe it was what she said about daring to reach for it. Maybe it was not quite trusting my eyes. Maybe it was finally understanding that warmth that crept into the other girls’ voices. I reached out my hand to feel the softness that had lain hidden under the blue uniform. Martijn gave a little gasp and leaned against my palm so that I could feel the bud of her nipple harden.
“I have had a sweetheart a time or two,” she said with that crooked smile. “And they never had anything to complain about.”
By the time we came back down into the common room, only two of Martijn’s companions were still waiting for her. They gave a hoot of laughter and clapped her on the back, telling her it was long past time to get back to the barracks. Martijn came back to whisper in my ear one more time. “That should keep my disguise safe for a while. Having a close companion will keep it safer. Meet me in the lane behind the barracks before dawn. I’ll put your money to good use.”
There were a few long, cold minutes that next morning when I thought I’d been cozened. When I thought Martijn had taken my savings and left me with nothing but a kiss. Then a shadow slipped around the corner carrying a bundle of clothing. Martijn helped me dress in the unfamiliar garments quickly.
“There’ll be time enough to learn marching and all the rest. Having a uniform will be enough for now. Just keep close to me. I told the recruiting officer I’d look out for you and he made me promise to see you learned quickly.”
“I’ll learn quickly enough,” I told her.
And when the drums sounded out their rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, there was one more soldier in a blue coat with brass buttons marching away down the road. A soldier with somewhere to go, something to do, someone to be
(copyright 2018 Heather Rose Jones, all rights reserved)
Major category:
PromotionMonday, January 8, 2018 - 07:00
One of the more biting criticisms in this collection of the popularity of a "queer history" approach of a "lesbian history" approach is that the study of the history of male homosexuality has often rested on inherently misogynistic bodies of work--not merely the historic misogyny that skewed the historic record toward the experiences and opinions of men, but just as often the modern misogyny of historians whose desire to validate and elevate male homoerotic relationships in history relies on a denigration of the presence and valuing of women in society. Post-modern theories of history recognize that the study of the past is a subjective, biased practice, but that doesn't mean that all post-modern historical theories acknowledge and account for their own subjective and biased attitudes towards women. The desire for a unified theory of historic homosexuality cannot help but fail if it builds its theories solely on the evidence and experiences of men, and fails to recognize that women and men lived entirely different lives, regardless of their sexual orientation.
Major category:
LHMPFull citation:
Bauer, Heike. 2011. “Lesbian Time” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9
Publication summary:
A collection of papers addressing the question of what the place of premodern historical studies have in relation to the creation and critique of historical theories, and especially to the field of queer studies.
Bauer, Heike. 2011. “Lesbian Time”
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
One of the more biting criticisms in this collection of the popularity of a "queer history" approach of a "lesbian history" approach is that the study of the history of male homosexuality has often rested on inherently misogynistic bodies of work--not merely the historic misogyny that skewed the historic record toward the experiences and opinions of men, but just as often the modern misogyny of historians whose desire to validate and elevate male homoerotic relationships in history relies on a denigration of the presence and valuing of women in society. Post-modern theories of history recognize that the study of the past is a subjective, biased practice, but that doesn't mean that all post-modern historical theories acknowledge and account for their own subjective and biased attitudes towards women. The desire for a unified theory of historic homosexuality cannot help but fail if it builds its theories solely on the evidence and experiences of men, and fails to recognize that women and men lived entirely different lives, regardless of their sexual orientation.
# # #
Bauer looks at the concept of periodization as it applies to sexuality and how the limitations on lesbian self-representation affect and are shaped by concepts of historic periodization, for example, the extensive debate around Foucault’s division of history relative to an acts/identity divide. By centering the writings and experiences of pre-modern women who loved/desired women, this collection calls the existence that divide into question, as well as calling into question the study of it. If the very concept of periodization and “modernity” rests on traditions that excluded and erased women’s lives, how can its conclusions about lesbian history be valid? Under the rubric of “lesbian time”, Bauer examines shared conceptual spaces that cut across conventional periodization to challenge the gendered concepts underlying it. These questions occur in parallel with similar challenges to racialized periodization.
Historians of male homosexuality draw on a long tradition of evidence made available and prominent by the gendered imbalance of historic records. Similar approaches to female same-sex history must first build an archive of historic data in order to establish a similar antiquity and tradition. Within this, the very existence of the organizing topic “lesbian” is contested.
The cyclic model of historic change evolves from and then is used to support a heteronormative and anachronistically modern concept of “family” as the basic structure. A temporality that rejects a generational model of history allows for the inclusion or even centering of other modes of relating. This includes a challenge to the importance of Foucault’s periodization based on the 19th century “scientification of sex” and demands consideration of structures outside that cultural scope. A consideration of “lesbian time” raises the question of how and by whom our notions of lesbian sexuality were shaped and transmitted. Bauer discusses how the other papers in the collection address this.
Bauer revisits a Victorian “proto-sexological” text, A Problem in Greek Ethics by John Addington Symonds, that examined classical Greek male same-sex desire from a social and philosophical angle to determine how it benefitted its social context. The work set a pattern for 19th century works affirming male homosexuality in arguing for male same-sex bonds as the ideal form of citizenship and the driver of all civilization and progress. He then makes the circular argument that women’s exclusion from social prominence meant that female same-sex desire could not similarly drive progress and thus why lesbian desire was not similarly sanctioned and therefore disappeared. [!] Symonds then argues that a shift from elevating male same-sex love to a “romantic cult of woman” resulted in the decline of civilization from the classical ideal. Thus, he simultaneously dismisses the relevance of the middle ages and of women as a class.
Bauer concludes by calling for attention to the way in which acceptance of current models of periodization similarly erase lesbian history and sexuality.
Saturday, January 6, 2018 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episodejj 35 (previously 18a) - On the Shelf for January 2018 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2018/01/06 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for January 2018.
Fiction Submissions Open
It’s new year with a lot of exciting things to look forward to. By the time you’re listening to this, the submissions period for our new fiction series is well underway. The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast will be presenting original audio fiction in our occasional 5th week episode. Submissions are open duing the month of January and we’ll be buying at least two stories to produce. For more details and submission requirements, go to alpennia-dot-com and look under the LHMP tab for the call for submissions, or look for the link in the show notes.
One of the purposes of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has always been to promote and encourage the writing of great lesbian historical fiction and we’re really excited to do so in this very direct fashion!
Publications on the Blog
For the last month and continuing on through January, the blog has been covering articles in a collection titled The Lesbian Premodern, which combines a variety of approaches to lesbian themes in history with a consideration of the nature of historic research and analysis. The authors ask important questions about the importance of lesbian history, especially when challenged both from the directions of “what do we mean by lesbian?” and “what do we mean by history?”
I’m doubling up on the articles, since many of them are either short or addressing topics that are tangential to the focus of the Project. In December we covered thoeretical considerations from authors like Valerie Traub, Anne Laskaya, Lara Farina, and Carla Freccero. There are comparisons of how lesbians and dedicated virgins presented similar challenges to the male power structure and the ways in which women-only communities such as convents created a context for bonds between women. Several articles look at examples of non-traditional relationships that have resonances for lesbian history, such as same-sex relationships that result in pregnancy in Indian legend, and grave memorials in England that commemorate same-sex pairs using symbolism reminiscent of marriage.
Moving into January, Helmut Puff looks at how the language used to talk about same-sex desire gives us clues to the prevalence of knowledge about non-normative sexuality in early modern Europe. Heike Bauer returns to a more theoretical concern in looking at the concept of periodization in historical study and how this framework acts to center men’s experiences and erase women’s. Lillian Faderman discusses the advantages and problems with having a personal stake in the pursuit of history while Elizabeth Freeman looks at historical theories as a type of philosophical or religious practice and challenges the ways in which queer theorists have often forgotten the roots of their movement in lesbian and feminist historical studies.
The collection moves on to a series of articles summing up the topics and looking to the future. Linda Garber examines the political consequences of historical frameworks while Martha Vicinus reflects on how the life of Victorian author Vernon Lee embodies many of the problems of analysis. Robyn Wiegman addresses the ways in which movements in historic study represent chains of reaction against what came before and challenges claims that the very concept of lesbian history is anachronistic--or at least any more anachronistic than other topics covered under queer studies.
I found this collection to be dense and challenging, but not in a bad way. When I read about the debates and conflicts in academic considerations of the history of sexuality, I see regular parallels with the treatment of history in lesbian fiction. I would love to have a chance to bring authors and academics together to explore those parallels.
Author Guest
This month’s author guest will be Kathleen Knowles who has written a series of connected novels set in the San Francisco Bay Area around the time of the Great Quake. A bit of trivia: although Kathy and I only recently reconnected around the topic of lesbian historical fiction, we worked for the same biotech company back in the ‘80s and I was delighted to have a chance to include her in the interview series.
Ask Sappho
This month’s As Sappho question is from Nina, via the Lesbian Review facebook group, who writes, “Can anyone recommend older literature with subtle (or not so subtle) sapphic undertones? I just read Cousin Bette and really enjoyed the little lesbian romance going on between Valerie and Bette. Apparently the Victorian era had lots of these covert lesbian romance narratives, and I need more!”
For those who are interested in 19th century literature with lesbian themes, there are several books that discuss the topic and have many examples you might be interested in tracking down. Emma Donoghue’s book Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature traces several running themes in Western literature from the Renaissance through the 20th century and has an extensive list of works mentioned. Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men looks extensively at how women’s relationships are treated in fiction, especially during the 18th through 20th centuries. If you want to look at some excerpts before tracking down old novels, Terry Castle’s The Literature of Lesbianism includes many excerpts, along with a discussion of the context in which they were written. Another anthology of this type is Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the 17th Century to the Present, edited by Lillian Faderman. Also useful is Jeanette H. Foster’s Sex Variant Women in Literature.
In the 19th century, there are two very different strains of literature that include sapphic undertones. Cousin Bette published in 1846 by French author Honoré de Balzac, represents the themes of lesbian desire as shocking and decadent. Either the reality or the implication of desire between women was used by these authors as the epitome of predatory evil. The supposedly innocent women who are drawn into the coils of their lesbian protagonists descended into madness, drug addiction, and death unless rescued at the last minute by the jealous and possessive love of a man. (Alternately, the women triumph leaving the male protagonist in suicidal despair.)
Novels in this strain were generally written by men and intended primarily for male audiences. Another novel by de Balzac that falls in this genre is The Girl with the Golden Eyes, published in 1833. Sheridan LeFanu’s vampire novel Carmilla published in 1872 is an example that has gained some renewed popularity. Other so-called classics in this field are Emile Zola’s Nana (1880) about lesbian relationships among the French demi-monde. A book that stops somewhat short the usual tragic or catastrophic climax is Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin published in 1835. It is inspired extremely loosely by the life of 17the century biseuxal opera singer and swordswoman Julie d’Aubigny but has turned her into something of a gender-queer rival of the protagonist in a romantic triangle.
The other genre of 19th century literature with sapphic themes comes out of the Romantic Friendship movement and is dominated by female authors, though men wrote in this field as well. Here, the sexual aspects of the relationships tend to be more sublimated and the focus is on the development of an intense emotional partnership that rivals--though not always successfully--the expectation of heterosexual marriage. In this genre we find a few rare stories that both depict women’s relationships positively and allow them a happy ending. There are many excellent examples of this genre from the 18th century, such as Sarah Scott’s utopian A Description of Millennium Hall from 1762, but I’ll focus here on a few from the 19th century.
The Rebel of the Family published by Eliza Lynn Linton in 1880 depicts relationships among a group of women involved in the early suffrage movement. It’s likely that a modern reader will view the protagonists more favorably than the author intended. And the depiction of the women forming passionate same-sex households will have different resonances today. Henry James’s The Bostonians written in 1886 covers similar themes of early feminism and the rivalry between a woman and a man for the love of the female protagonist. The man wins in the end, but the women’s love is depicted in a postive light. There is a film version of this story people might be interested in.
A much more positive outcome--at least by the standards of the audience of this podcast--comes in Florence Converse’s 1897 novel Diana Victrix. As one might guess from the title, here the women’s love is victorious against assault by a male suitor.
In a departure from my usual custom of putting buy links on the show notes, this time I decided to include links to Project Gutenberg, a site that offers free e-books of texts in the public domain. Rather annoyingly, I found that of the 9 books I mentioned, all 6 of the books with male authors were available there, while only 1 of the 3 with female authors was there. I don’t think this is random coincidence. For the last two books I’ve linked to archive.org. And because I often find that older literature is easier to manage in audio format than on the page, I’ve also linked to audiobook versions at the free crowd-sourced public domain site Librivox.org, which I highly recommend to those who enjoy both audiobooks and classic literature.
Show Notes
Your monthly update on what the Lesbian Historic Motif Project has been doing.
In this episode we talk about:
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- The Lesbian Premodern
- Announcing this month’s author guest, Kathleen Knowles
- New and forthcoming fiction
- The new and forthcoming books segment starts next month. I swear.
- Ask Sappho: Nina, from The Lesbian Review facebook group, asks “Can anyone recommend older literature with subtle (or not so subtle) sapphic undertones? I just read Cousin Bette and really enjoyed the little lesbian romance going on between Valerie and Bette. Apparently the Victorian era had lots of these covert lesbian romance narratives, and I need more!”
- Literary Studies:
- Castle, Terry (ed). 2003. The Literature of Lesbianism: A Historical Anthology from Ariosto to Stonewall.Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 0-231-12510-0
- Donoghue, Emma. 2010. Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature. Alfred A. Knopf, New York. ISBN 978-0-307-27094-8
- Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6
- Faderman, Lillian (ed). 1994. Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian and Bisexual Literature from the 17th Century to the Present. Viking, xx. ISBN 978-0-670-84638-4
- Foster, Jeannette. 1985. Sex Variant Women in Literature. The Naiad Press. ISBN 0-930044-65-7 Third edition of the original 1956 publication.
- Decadent Novels:
- de Balzac, Honoré. 1846. Cousin Bette. gutenberg.org, Librivox audiobook
- de Balzac, Honoré. 1833. The Girl with the Golden Eyes. gutenberg.org, Librivox audiobook
- Gautier, Théophile. 1835. Mademoiselle de Maupin. gutenberg.org
- LeFanu, Sheridan. 1872. Carmilla. gutenberg.org, Librivox audiobook
- Zola, Emile. 1880. Nana. gutenberg.org
- Novels of Romantic Friendship:
- Converse, Florence. 1897. Diana Victrix. gutenberg.org
- James, Henry. 1886. The Bostonians. gutenberg.org vol.1, gutenberg.org vol.2, Librivox audiobook
- Linton, Eliza Lynn. 1880. The Rebel of the Family. gutenberg.orgbook
- Scott, Sarah. 1762. A Description of Millennium Hall. gutenberg.orgbook
- Call for submissions for the 2018 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
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LHMPThursday, January 4, 2018 - 07:00
Research into an awareness of same-sex desire in history often fixes on the use of specific vocabulary or the clear understanding of certain definable categories of behavior. But in this article, Puff looks more deeply at oblique ways in which social knowedge of same-sex desire is made evident. The case of Greta von Möskirch demonstrates that her contemporaries were clearly aware of the possibility that female-presenting individuals might desire other female-presenting individuals, but also that they had a variety of frameworks for "explaining" that phenomenon. Those frameworks included several variations on "born that way" as well as the possibility that it was personal choice (though framed as sin). The way these several possibilities are brought together in a single analysis points out the hazard of taking any one historic "explanation" as reflecting the beliefs and understandings of the times. And just because a particular historic culture didn't have a vocabulary term that corresponded to a particular "explanation" (e.g., no term that narrowly meant "a woman with a lifelong predisposition to desire women, present as a personality trait rather than a physical condition") doesn't mean that the concept wasn't possible.
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LHMPFull citation:
Puff, Helmut. 2011. “Toward a Philology of the Premodern Lesbian” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9
Publication summary:
A collection of papers addressing the question of what the place of premodern historical studies have in relation to the creation and critique of historical theories, and especially to the field of queer studies.
Puff, Helmut. 2011. “Toward a Philology of the Premodern Lesbian”
[The following is duplicated from the associated blog. I'm trying to standardize the organization of associated content.]
Research into an awareness of same-sex desire in history often fixes on the use of specific vocabulary or the clear understanding of certain definable categories of behavior. But in this article, Puff looks more deeply at oblique ways in which social knowedge of same-sex desire is made evident. The case of Greta von Möskirch demonstrates that her contemporaries were clearly aware of the possibility that female-presenting individuals might desire other female-presenting individuals, but also that they had a variety of frameworks for "explaining" that phenomenon. Those frameworks included several variations on "born that way" as well as the possibility that it was personal choice (though framed as sin). The way these several possibilities are brought together in a single analysis points out the hazard of taking any one historic "explanation" as reflecting the beliefs and understandings of the times. And just because a particular historic culture didn't have a vocabulary term that corresponded to a particular "explanation" (e.g., no term that narrowly meant "a woman with a lifelong predisposition to desire women, present as a personality trait rather than a physical condition") doesn't mean that the concept wasn't possible.
# # #
Puff examines terminology for women in same-sex relations in a context of exchange and communication (that is, the question of how such terminology was shared and disseminated) using two focal texts: the Zimmern chronicle and the Colloquies of Erasmus. The Zimmern Chronicle was composed ca. 1564 by Count von Zimmern, covering the German family’s history from antiquity onward. It is a massive collection of all manner of trivia, left unfinished by the count’s death around 1566. [See Puff 2000 for a specific look at the episode in this document.]
In a chapter covering the life of one ancestor, there is a brief reference to “a poor servant-maid” named Greta who worked in the marketplace of Messkirch (or Mösskirch) who courted young women with a “masculine affect”. This activity provoked concern among the residents which resulted in a physical examination to determine if she was a “proper woman”. And that’s it: no consequences, no closure, no follow-up. The episode isn’t told in the style of a fabliau (which are featured elsewhere in the chronicle) or as a moral lesson or joke. It’s simply offered as a curious anecdote. Several frameworks for understanding were explored in the text: anatomy, astrology, ancient literature, or history
Puff argues that this is evidence that the knowledge of lesbianism in pre-modern Europe was more diverse and widely shared than is generally recognized. He posits that the presence of the woman who loved women crossed boundaries of language, genre, and knowledge systems and that understanding of this has been hampered by the silo effect of national philology studies.
The chronicle author’s confusion regarding Greta is not individual but is reflected in the various knowledge systems he brings to bear. For example, we know that Greta’s contemporaries believed that physiology might explain her behavior. Although examination contradicted that theory in Greta’s case, that knowledge didn’t put the concern to rest. A second theory was that an “unnatural constellation” at her birth might be the cause of her behavior. Any number of astrology manuals (beginning in classical times and handed down in later interpretations) discuss contexts that provoked sexual disorder. Alternately, the count turned to references to “hermaphrodites or androgynes” in ancient literature as a model for understanding. The term “hermaphrodite” also shows up in the 1405 request for pardon in the French case of Jehanne and Laurence. [See e.g., Benkov 2001 for details.] As in Greta’s case, theirs involved sexual behavior rather than visual gender transgression such as cross-dressing. The concept of the hermaphrodite staked out an unstable position between gender and sex, body and behavior, text and experience. The Count von Zimmern’s final theory was that Greta’s behavior was a sign of “the sinful times.”
Greta’s life and behavior belongs to the experiential world, but the interpretations placed on it come out of theoretical systems. Some of those systems (such as physiology) could be contradicted by experience, but the framework of morality could not. As the chronicle was meant to analyze and provide guidance on the Zimmern family’s fortunes, the question of Greta’s significance (in the section covering the author’s uncle) reflects the indeterminate status of those fortunes.
Where would the count’s knowledge about women who desired women come from? It would come from all levels of society, by both written and oral transmission. The chronicle accumulates information from a demonstrably wide range of sources. The nature of the anecdote suggests oral transmission through multiple iterations before being recorded. Oral networks involving both men and women were important for establishing and communicating standards of sexual behavior. If such informal debates were loud enough, they might be taken up by legal authorities. Legal records in south-western Germany attest to a wide variety of types of female same-sex behavior that came to the attention of authorities, and a variety of outcomes. The count’s chronicle became part of continuing those concerns at a remove from the original events.
Erasmus’ colloquies stand at another pole of communication: that of staged, formal argumentation, despite the superficial format of natural speech. [Note: “colloquy” literally means “conversation” and indicates a text in the form of a conversation between multiple parties. The purpose of a colloquy might be to make a logical argument, but the term was also used for language-learning texts intended to present vocabulary and grammar for everyday conversation.] Such texts, especially Latin ones, are less studied in the context of the “renaissance of lesbianism”, when 16th century vernacular translations of Sappho are treated as a watershed in accessibility and influence. Questions of transmission and translation are rarely addressed. Despite this glossing over of the Latin material, it is clear that knowledge of Sappho’s homoerotic reputation was in common currency before translations of her were into the vernacular were available.
Erasmus, in a colloquy of 1523, demonstrates this “common knowledge” in a passage where a young man is trying to persuade his beloved not to enter a convent. He points out with respect to the intellectual climate of the convent, “there are more who copy Sappho’s behavior than share her talent.” The young woman (who is identified in the title of the colloquy as “the girl with no interest in marriage”) is portrayed as innocently clueless to the allusion, saying, “I don’t know what you mean.”
Who, then, was the audience for this innuendo? Although the colloquy’s overt audience was young male students, the text was widely disseminated among elite readers, although it was translated from Latin to German somewhat later than his other works. “Sapphism” is only one of the hazards of convent life implied in the text, though the only one the woman claims ignorance of. Though women were denied formal schooling in Latin, they had access through family and private tutors.
Later in the colloquy, the woman leaves the convent after an unnamed encounter with clerical depravity. Did Erasmus mean to refer to Sappho the sexually voracious heterosexual, or Sappho the lesbian? The former interpretation was promulgated by the more familiar Phaon story, as opposed to the less familiar homoerotic verses. Further, even Latin translations of Sappho’s poetry weren’t yet published at the time Erasmus was writing. So was Sappho’s homoeroticism public knowledge even at that remove?
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Wednesday, January 3, 2018 - 12:49
I hope that thing about "New Year's Day is a sign of what your year will be like" thing isn't true for me, because early on the 31st I started getting that throat-tickle thing that presages a cold, and sure enough I spent the next two days in bed trying to sleep off the germs. I can't control that aspect of how my year started, so here's something I can control. I made an off-hand commitment on Twitter the other day to balance out my self-pitying "what have I done all year" posts with a positivity post about nice writing-related things that have happened this year. In no particular order:
1. The Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast has been given a shout-out in several places online (by people who aren't personal friends of mine). And I've seen a good handful of twitter mentions go past along the lines of "OMG where has this been all my life?"
2. The LHMP blog has achieved one of its tongue-in-cheek bucket list goals by being linked on a "term papers for sale" website. They do say that plagiarism is one of the most sincere forms of flattery!
3. Several people have produced lovely pieces of Alpennia fan art and shared them with me. And I've become aware of at least one piece of Alpennia fan fiction in existence though of course I will pretend I don't know anything about it.
4. The author interview series for the podcast has emboldened me to do some moderately ambitious cold-contacts. In this case, success isn't measured by nailing down an interview, but only by having the nerve to ask for one.
5. For all that I sometimes mope about feeling like my publishing context creates a bar between me and SFF professional spaces, I continue to be regularly invited/accepted to be on programming at SFF conventions and to be given feedback that my contributions are considered interesting and valuable.
6. Keyword monitoring on twitter has indicated that people who aren't personal friends of mine are recommending the LHMP to other people who aren't personal friends of mine as a resource.
7. A rather surprising number of people signed up for my monthly author newsletter.
Well, that's surely a positive way to start the year?
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ThinkingMonday, January 1, 2018 - 10:00
The inclusion of this article in The Lesbian Premodern was what spurred me to track down Bennett's more extensive article on this memorial, and thus to create the podcast episode on joint same-sex grave memorials through the ages. Artifacts like this and the context around them always inspire me to imagine the personal stories of the women involved. Maybe my imaginings drift far afield from the lives they actually did live, but as a writer of fiction, I'm content to dream up some of the stories they could have lived. What caused Elizabeth's death at so early an age? A sudden fever? An accident? She and Agnes must have been close for their bond to be commemorated so significantly thirty years later. Was that why Agnes never married? Because her heart had already been given? But this wasn't an age when marriage was driven by romance. What reason did Agnes give her family for choosing not to marry? What pressures were brought to bear? Or did fate simply hand her that option coincidentally? Where did Agnes spend those thirty years after Elizabeth's death? Had they been together at Elizabeth's home of Etchingham and Agnes stayed on as an unofficial member of the family? Or did Agnes live out her live in her own family home, surprising them all at the end with her choice of resting place? Therein lie the seeds of so many stories!
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LHMPFull citation:
Bennett, Judith M. 2011. “Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge” in The Lesbian Premodern ed. by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer & Diane Watt. Palgrave, New York. ISBN 978-0-230-61676-9
Publication summary:
A collection of papers addressing the question of what the place of premodern historical studies have in relation to the creation and critique of historical theories, and especially to the field of queer studies.
Bennett, Judith M. 2011. “Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge”
[I’ve also covered a more extensive article by Bennett on this monument that focuses more on the details of the artifact, its manufacture, and untangling the genealogy and relationships of the two families. This present article goes into more detail of the social interpretation.]
The central topic of this article is a 15th century brass memorial located in a small parish church in Sussex that shows two women turned toward each other, with an explanatory inscription. Elizabeth Etchingham (on the viewer’s left) is the smaller figure, shown with loose flowing hair. Agnes Oxenbridge (on the viewer’s right) has tightly pinned up (but uncovered) hair and is shown larger. The two are dressed identically. Elizabeth’s text identifies her as the first-born daughter of Thomas and Margaret Etchingham, died December 3, 1452. Agnes’s text identifies her as the daughter of Robert Oxenbridge, died August 4, 1480, and asks God’s mercy on both women.
Bennett takes us on a consideration of the context of the monument, the women, and the iconography of memorial brasses to show the evidence for situating this story within a lesbian history.
The use of a brass memorial indicates a good birth, and both women came from land-owning gentry. Their families lived in the neighborhood of the church where they are buried, which belonged to the Etchingham family.
The usual pattern for young women’s lives for this time, place, and class would be to be raised at home until the beginning of adolescence and then be placed out into another household as part of their social training and to form bonds between families that would shape their later lives. It’s quite possible that the two women lived in the same household as part of this sort of arrangement. The usual expectation would be to marry in the late teens or twenties, although perhaps 5% of women (in this time/place/class) remained single life-long. Only a few of those singlewomen became nuns; others remained with their families.
Despite the lack of contemporary records for the two women (other than the memorial) we can know that neither married, based on the absence of references on the memorial to husbands, and from their depiction with uncovered hair. Both likely were born in the 1420s, with Elizabeth dying in her mid 20s and Agnes three decades later.
The Oxenbridge family mausoleum was in Brede, so the choice to bury Agnes next to Elizabeth in Etchingham with a joint memorial is unusual and indicates the joint approval and cooperation of both families, in the persons of the heads of the households: Elizabeth’s brother Thomas Etchingham and Agnes’s brother Robert Oxenbridge. But the arrangement is unlikely to have been driven by anyone other than Agnes herself as expressed in her will (which has not survived). Implementing this desire required the support and approval, not only of both families but also the workshop that made the memorial. As such, it’s unlikely that anyone involved considered whatever relationship the women had to be scandalous or unacceptable.
The design of the brass provides clues to how that relationship was viewed. There is a symbolic vocabulary for the layout of memorial brasses. Paired memorial images conventionally involved a married couple. The husband is usually placed on the viewer’s left in the more prestigious location, the place Elizabeth occupies, perhaps because the burial was done in her family’s church, but perhaps because the Etchinghams were a more prominent family than the Oxenbridges. The difference in size and hairstyle of the women most likely is intended to reflect their age difference at death. Loose, flowing hair was associated with young women, whereas Agnes’s pinned-up style is seen on mature women. The lack of a head covering is a strong symbol of unmarried status. The third aspect of visual symbolism indicates the relationship that motivated the joint memorial. Here, from among various possible arrangements of the figures, the brassmakers chose the one that represented an affectionate marriage-like bond. This is shown not simply in the joint memorial itself, but by having the women face each other, looking directly into each other’s faces. (Elizabeth’s head is tilted up slightly to gaze at the taller figure of Agnes, whose head is bowed slightly.)
The majority of joint effigies have both figures front-facing, reflecting the earlier style of sculptural effigies with reclining figures. The facing-in-profile style was relatively new at the time this brass was made. Scholars of memorial symbolism see it as a development to express “the intimacy of marriage” (as well as to better display newer fashions in headwear on the female figures--a consideration not relevant in this case). But the Elizabeth-Agnes memorial avoids two features that could undermine this impression of intimacy. The workshop that produced the brass more typically showed the facing figures leaning slightly backward, away from each other, depicting a static and immobile pose via the arrangements of the folds of skirt drapery. Instead, Agnes and Elizabeth appear to be in motion towards each other, with their skirts spread backwards and their bodies angled forward.
As brasses are not portraits and these details were unlikely to be specified by Agnes herself, they are more likely to reflect the communal understanding of their relationship by their families. Commemoration of same-sex friendships in joint memorials is widespread (though not common) but the overwhelming majority are male pairs and have later dates than the 15th century. Alan Bray’s work on the history of friendship cited no female examples before the 17th century, so the Etchingham/Oxenbridge memorial and others like it expand the scope of this data considerably. The emphasis of Bray’s study is on emotional intimacy but not necessarily sexual love. Similarly in this case, we can solidly understand Elizabeth and Agnes’s memorial as commemorating a close, intense, lasting emotional bond, but we have no evidence one way or the other regarding whether that bond was also erotic.
Bennett pauses to discuss why she created the concept of “lesbian-like” to discuss examples like this (Bennett 2000), without having to apply some rigid standard of evidence and definition to whether they “counted” as lesbians by modern identity-based definitions. Resistance to viewing examples like Elizabeth and Agnes via a “lesbian-like” category are often overtly driven by a horror that it “slanders” the women involved. It also leads to convoluted interpretation of the evidence, such as the counter-factual claims that Elizabeth and Agnes’s memorials were actually separate objects coincidentally placed side by side. Bennett asks why we should demand a greater stability and clarity of definition of “lesbian” in history than we have at the present time. She points out that some scholars argue that medieval European society only recognized one gender--male--with women being considered “imperfectly male”, while other historians view the evidence as showing a rigid two-gender system. Similarly, some scholars argue that the medieval world had no concept that would correspond to heterosexuality, no sense of “normal” against which to define “abnormal” sexuality. In this context, viewing the Etchingham-Oxenbridge memorial as “lesbian-like” doesn’t close off interpreting the women as heterosexual, if that is a category that has no validity in the medieval context in the first place.
Coming back to the theory focus of this collection, Bennett argues that viewing the memorial as lesbian-like helps break free of anachronistically modern assumptions about the women’s lives (rather than identifying them by anachronistically modern identity labels). Using the word “lesbian”, which has carried through the centuries with unstable but related senses, helps with this process, Bennett argues, more than the deliberate avoidance of the word “lesbian” does. She points out that singling out “lesbian” as problematic while using similarly unstable terms such as “housewife” [or for that matter “household”] is suspect. Identifying Elizabeth and Agnes’s memorial as “lesbian-like” does not claim them as “lesbian” but as exploring a related set of affinities between women. “Lesbian-like” refuses to privilege sexual relations and our knowledge of them as a definition for the borders of lesbian history. In the face of historical claims that the middle ages were hostile to medieval lesbianism--or at best indifferent to it--examples like the Etchingham-Oxenbridge memorial suggest other intriguing possibilities.
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Sunday, December 31, 2017 - 10:21
I’m debating whether I want to put out any New Year’s resolutions (or my more usual irresolutions) for 2018, but the end of the year is a good time to look at my post from 2016/12/29 when I laid out my resolutions for this past year and see how they played out. My one solid resolution was: “I'm going to stop doing things just to try to impress people who don’t actually care. And one of those things is blogging five days a week.”
I committed to continuing to blog on projects that gave me personal satisfaction, regardless of whether anyone else was reading them:
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
- The LaForge diaries
- Reviews (although without the absolute commitment to review everything I read)
- Information and discussions about my writing projects (though not on any obligatory schedule)
- I also made a vague resolution to set up an author’s newsletter and do some new things for promoting my writing.
So how did I do? Working from my blog tracking spreadsheet, I posted 228 substantial blogs (i.e., not including administrative posts and the like), so if my goal was to post fewer than an average of 5 blogs per week, I succeeded, though not by a large margin since it comes up to about four and a half per week.
I posted 54 LHMP entries (including the tag essays at the beginning of the year that I posted while the other content was suspended for the website migration). But I upped the number of LHMP podcast-related blogs, with a total of 32 blog entries covering 29 separate podcasts, largely due to the expansion of the podcast to a weekly schedule. And I’m just beginning to get a trickle of second-hand evidence that the podcasts are getting an active specific audience as opposed simply being part of the Lesbian Talk Show feed. The show has been mentioned online at some websites and I've seen it recommended to people interested in lesbian history, both authors and not. There's still obviously a discoverability problem and a dearth of direct feedback. It isn't clear that people are successfully tracking back from the podcast to the website or that they're making the connection between the history project and my fiction output.
I posted 15 items for the LaForge Civil War diaries series, although I dropped that ball in May when travel plans and other projects intruded and haven’t picked it up again. I posted 32 reviews, mostly novels, and started participating in the Short SFF Reviews website (which doesn’t show up in my blog stats). I wrote 23 blogs about my writing (not counting minor updates and promo pieces). About a third of them were finishing up the chapter-by-chapter teasers for Mother of Souls. (Unlike The Mystic Marriage I couldn’t time the teasers to conclude with the release date.) The rest of the writing blogs were mostly sparked by reader questions. Reader questions are great because I’ll blather on about any topic that comes to me, but reader-inspired posts guaratee that someone’s actually interested in the topic.
After a great deal of dithering around, I completed my last two irresolutions by tackling Hootsuite to automate the posting of a rotating schedule of promotional material to Twitter and facebook. It’ll be a while before I can have a sense of how that’s working out, but at least it provides a consistent public presence in people’s faces that doesn’t require me to take the emotional hit of crafting it one item at a time. And I set up a monthly Alpennia newsletter to help provide a more direct line to the people who are actively interested in my writing and to provide them with some exclusive content as a reward.
So there you are. Any suggestions of what I should commit to in 2018? (No promises, but my deep dark secret is that I am willing to do all sorts of things to try to impress people who do actually care.)
Major category:
ThinkingSaturday, December 30, 2017 - 07:00
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 34 (previously 17e) - 2017 Roundup - Transcript
(Originally aired 2017/12/30 - listen here)
It’s an extra Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast falling at the end of the year, so I thought I’d use if for some musings on the podcast and the blog. On what I’ve been doing with it, what I have planned, and where I hope to go.
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog started out as one of those cataloging projects I do for myself. For decades, I’d been collecting up research materials and bibliographic references to use in my own historic fiction projects. Originally I thought I might publish a sourcebook based on the material, but just like every soucebook idea I’ve ever had, I realized that a single finished product was neither a convenient end product nor a realistic way to motivate myself. I’ve had this happen with my catalog of surviving medieval garments and my database of medieval Welsh personal names. The project keeps expanding as I work and eventually I move on to other things.
So I knew that if my goal was to write a comprehensive sourcebook of historic materials on lesbian history, I’d never actually finish it. And so in a fit of rationality in 2014, I decided to start blogging about the materials I’d collected. I’d read each book or article, summarize it, add content tags for convenient searching, and make it available to the world. I’ve often found that success is a matter of tailoring your goals to your natural method of working. And from that point of view, the blog has been very successful.
At this point, I’ve blogged summaries of 170 books and articles for a total of about 360 blog posts. When I started this research back in the ‘80s I never would have believed there would be that much relevant content in the world--and at the time, there wasn’t. There has been an immense expansion of historic research into issues of sexuality in the last couple decades. The available resources for authors who want to research historic settings for lesbian historical fiction, while far from perfect, are so much better than they were when I first contemplated entering the field. But it’s still the case that many people who want to write these stories have only a limited amount of historic data avaliable to them.
This is the second purpose of the blog and podcast. In addition to re-familliarizing myself with the research materials I’ve collected, I wanted to share knowledge of those resources with authors who might not have the same access to academic publications that I do. In any research endeavor, the most immediate and important step is to know that the information you’re looking for actually exists. To know that there’s a hope of success. The second most important step is to have some clue where to look for it. These are the two steps where I hope to be of some use to my fellow authors of historical fiction.
The blog is far from any possibility of completion. I’ve covered 170 publications so far, but my database of references to follow up on contains 470 listings. At some point, I may stop adding new titles faster than I can possibly read them, but it hasn’t happened yet. What has happened, though, is that for my core area of interest--pre-modern Europe--I’m running across less and less new historic data that I haven’t encountered before. There are still occasional new discoveries--new either to me or to the historians writing about them. But mostly I’m finding additional discussions and analysis of the material I already know about. In part, this is because the cutting edge of historical research moves from topic to topic. In the 1990s, there was a lot of interest in medieval sexuality. In the first decade of the 21st century, there has been something of an explosion of interest in lesbian history of the 18th century. So I have high hopes of learning something new for as long as I keep the project going.
When the blog had been going for about 2 years, there was an opportunity to add the podcast, thanks to the offer of being hosted by The Lesbian Talk Show. I think Sheena and I had started talking about it maybe half a year before that. We’d kind of come up with the idea simultaneously and when I pitched it to her she was right on the verge of suggesting it to me. It took me a while to sort out exactly what sort of approach I wanted to take, and I wanted to have a few shows worth of ideas written up before committing myself. That’s something of a regular theme in my project expansions, but it’s because my time availability can be variable and I always try to have a buffer of material available.
So I started out in the podcast by taking examples of specific women from history whose stories I thought woud be inspiring and interesting to people who read lesbian fiction. Not all of them are women that we can clearly identify as lesbian, but just as with the blog, the core idea is to identify themes and people that can serve as a basis for creating fictional lesbians.
As the podcast has developed, I’ve also done programs with a theme, such as medieval love poetry between women, rather than focused on a specific person. Because of the audio nature of a podcast, I’ve tried to look for topics where I can include historic texts, such as my episode on translations of Sappho’s poetry across the centuries, or the episode on Catherine Vizzani, that included excerpts from the 18th century biography of her life.
The idea to expand the podcast from a monthly schedue to weekly was another step that took some time to prepare for. I didn’t entirely commit to the idea until I had the idea of doing a rotation of 4 weekly topics--a structure that I’d found worked well for me in my blogging. The idea of including author interviews grew out of a discussion I’d had on facebook with some other authors of lesbian historical fiction, where we were trying to brainstorm ways of encouraging readers to take a chance on our genre.
It took about half a year of setting things up from my first stabs at lining up interviews. Try to imagine what it’s like for a shy introvert to tackle the cat-herding challenge of chasing down authors for interviews! But with half a year of episodes in the bag, I think I’ve got the hang of things. From the start, I wanted to use the interviews not only to showcase authors within the lesfic community, but to expand people’s idea of lesbian historical fiction by bringing in people pubishing in the mainstream or at the intersection of history and fantasy.
The next big step for the podcast will fulfill a dream I’ve had for some time. One way to support lesbian historical fiction is to write my own, of course. But I’ve long dreamed of supporting and encouraging it as a publisher. Currently I have neither the time nor the skills to set up my own publishing house. I have a very realistic notion of what that would take, having had a chance to watch my friend Catherine Lundoff work through the process of setting up Queen of Swords Press.
But when I realized that my rotating schedule of podcast topics meant that I’d have the occasional 5th show, I started thinking about the idea of using it to publish original audio fiction. One of the models for this idea is the SFF fiction podcast group Escape Artists, which includes the fantasy show Podcastle where I’ve had two stories published. Looking at their format, and seeing how they operated, it felt like a framework that I could adapt relatively painlessly.
So as this episode come to air, I’ll be right on the verge of my first open submissions window to select two (or maybe more) stories to produce as part of the Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast. It’s an experiment. If it doesn’t work--if I don’t get enough good submissions, or if it turns out to be more work than I can manage--I haven’t committed myself to more than I can handle. And if it works really well...well, the sky’s the limit, isn’t it? Though if it works really well, I’m going to need a more sustainable financial model!
I’m always looking for more ways to get the listeners interacting with the show. I’ve received some lovely questions for the Ask Sappho segment from the facebook groups associated with The Lesbian Review and The Lesbian Talk Show, but people can always send questions directly to me either through my website, on twitter, or through facebook. And I’m always looking for suggestions of authors to interview, especially people outside the usual lesfic circles, and very especially people writing in less common settings or with marginalized characters.
I hope you are enjoying the blog and the podcast so far and that you will enjoy the new directions coming up.
Show Notes
I take the opportunity for a year-end review of the Lesbian Historic Motif Project blog and podcast.
In this episode we talk about
- What inspired me to first start the blog
- How the podcast started and how it differs from the blog
- The podcast expansion and why I enjoy doing author interviews
- The upcoming fiction project
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com/lhmp
- Blog: http://alpennia.com/blog
- RSS: http://alpennia.com/blog/feed/
- Twitter: @LesbianMotif
- Discord: Contact Heather for an invitation to the Alpennia/LHMP Discord server
- The Lesbian Historic Motif Project Patreon
Links to Heather Online
- Website: http://alpennia.com
- Email: Heather Rose Jones
- Twitter: @heatherosejones
- Facebook: Heather Rose Jones (author page)
Major category:
LHMPPages
