The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England

by Valerie Traub

• ISBN13: 9780521448857
• ISBN10: 0521448859
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England is the eagerly-awaited study by the feminist scholar who was among the first to address the issue of early modern female homoeroticism. Valerie Traub analyzes the representation of female-female love, desire and eroticism in a range of early modern discourses, including poetry, drama, visual arts, pornography and medicine. Contrary to the silence and invisibility typically ascribed to lesbianism in the Renaissance, Traub argues that the early modern period witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of representations of such desire. By means of sophisticated interpretations of a comprehensive set of texts, the book not only charts a crucial shift in representations of female homoeroticism over the course of the seventeenth century, but also offers a provocative genealogy of contemporary lesbianism. A contribution to the history of sexuality and to feminist and queer theory, the book addresses current theoretical preoccupations through the lens of historical inquiry.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	x
Preface	xiii
Acknowledgments	xiv
Introduction: ``Practicing impossibilities''	1	(35)
Setting the stage behind the seen: performing lesbian history	36	(41)
``A certaine incredible excesse of pleasure'': Female orgasm, prosthetic pleasures, and the anatomical pudica	77	(48)
The politics of pleasure; or, queering Queen Elizabeth	125	(33)
The (in) significance of lesbian desire	158	(30)
The psychomorphology of the clitoris; or, the reemergence of the tribade in English culture	188	(41)
Chaste femme love, mythological pastoral, and the perversion of lesbian desire	229	(47)
``Friendship so curst'': amor impossibilis, the homoerotic lament, and the nature of lesbian desire	276	(50)
The quest for origins, erotic similitude, and the melancholy of lesbian identification	326	(29)
Afterword	355	(7)
Notes	362	(110)
Subject index	472	(8)
Name and title index	480