BIBLIOGRAPHY OF GAY AND LESBIAN HISTORY Compiled by Rictor Norton
INDEX: [General History] [Anthologies] [Lesbian: General] [Modern Lesbian] [Literary History] [Language] [Art & Film] [Theory] [Famous Homosexuals] [Anthropology] [Ancient] [Medieval] [Early Modern] [Renaissance] [European] [English Early Modern] [English Modern] [German] [Dutch] [French] [Spain & Portugal] [Pre-Modern American] [Modern American] [China, India and Japan] [Middle East] [Latin America] [Africa] [Colonial and Non-European]
Updated 14 May 2012

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.
Binhammer, Katherine
"The 'singular propensity' of sensibility's extremities: Female same-sex desire and the eroticization of pain in late-eighteenth-century British culture", GLQ: a journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 9:4 (2003), 471-98. Publisher: Duke University Press.
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.
Casella, Eleanor
"Bulldaggers and gentle ladies:Archaelogical approaches to female homosexuality in Convict Era Australia", in Archaelogies of Sexuality, London: Routledge,2000.
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.
Craft-Fairchild, Catherine
"Sexual and textual indeterminacy: Eighteenth-century English representations of sapphism", Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15:3 (2006), 408-31. Publisher: Chicago University Press; University of Texas Press.
Crawford, P. and Mendelson, S.
"Sexual identities in early modern England: the marriage of two women in 1680", Gender and History, 7/3 (1995), 362-77.
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.
Dugaw, Dianne and Powell, Amanda
"Sapphic self-fashioning in the Baroque era: Women's Petrarchan parody in English and Spanish", Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 35 (2006), 127-60.
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.
Friedman, Geraldine
"School for scandal: Sexuality, race, and national vice and virtue in Miss Marianne Woods and Miss Jane Pirie Against Lady Helen Cumming Gordon", Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 27:1 (2005), 53-76.
Gowing, Laura
"Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe", Journal of Women's History, 21(2): 146-152.
Gowing, Laura
"Lesbians and their like in early modern Europe", in Robert Aldrich (ed.), Gay Life and Culture: A World History, London, Thames & Hudson, 2006, pp. 125-43.
Hamer, Emily
Britannia's Glory: History of Twentieth-century Lesbians. London: Cassell, 1995.
Hunt, Margaret R.
"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, pp. 270-96.
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.
Marcus, Sharon
Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2006)
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.
Oram, Alison
The Lesbian History Source Book: Love and Sex Between Women in Britain 1780-1970, London: Routledge, 2001.
Oram, Alison
"Telling stories about the Ladies of Llangollen: The construction of lesbian and feminist histories", in L. Ryan et al. (eds), Re-Presenting the Past: Women and History, London: Longman, 2001.
Robinson, David Michael
"Pleasant conversation in the seraglio: lesbianism, Platonic love, and Cavendish's blazing world", The Eighteenth Century [Lubbock], 44:2/3 (2003), 133-66.
Rowanchild, Anira
"'Peeping behind the curtain': the significance of classical texts in the sexual self-construction of Anne Lister", in Pearson, Richard (ed.), The Victorians and the Ancient World: archaeology and classicism in nineteenth-century culture (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2006), pp. 139-51.
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.
Toulalan, Sarah
"Extraordinary satisfactions: lesbian visibility in seventeenth-century pornography in England", Gender & History, 15:1 (2003), 50-68.
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.

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