Jacqueline Murray

Desire and discipline : sex and sexuality in the premodern West

The history of sexuality is one of the newest and fastest-growing areas of scholarly and popular interest. This collection of original essays looks at sexuality in the long stretch between the twelfth and the early seventeenth centuries - a period that remains relatively unexplored, yet one that has deeply informed contemporary ideas about sex. The volume grew out of a conference at the University of Toronto on human sexuality in the medieval and early modern world. Featuring works by world-renowned scholars, it presents a broad cross-section of current research and a diversity of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries, including legal history, art history, textual analysis, codicological analysis, and feminist theory. Some essays focus on the universal values of the Church, and highlight the intellectual and religious homogeneity that characterized Europe for much of the period. Others are more localized and look at a specific social and historical context. As a whole the collection points to the ongoing tension between societys desire to control sexuality and peoples need to express it. Informed by contemporary trends in scholarship, including feminism, gay studies, post-colonialism, and deconstruction, these essays introduce scholars to some of the riches that are only now being unearthed in this young discipline.

The rewards of lesbian history

So states The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, a 1995 reference work notable for its thorough and scholarly treatment of a vast range of topics. Unthinkable, silent, invisible: notwithstanding a significant body of work that has demonstrated the contrary, judgments such as these continue to deny the presence of lesbianism in Western European history.2 Authorized by the greater visibility of male sexuality as well as the presentist bias of much gay and lesbian inquiry, many responsible scholars have been content to treat the invisibility of lesbians prior to the Enlightenment as an unexamined commonplace. This critical cliche has held, despite the fact that in the 1980s Lillian Faderman briefly treated Renaissance images of lesbians in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women, from the Renaissance to the Present, Judith Brown published a history of the ecclesiastical trial of an Italian lesbian nun, and Harriette Andreadis offered a cautious appraisal of the sapphicplatonics of the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips.3 In the decade since this groundbreaking work, historical analysis of lesbianism and representations of lesbians, particularly in English Feminist Studies 25, no. 2 (summer 1999). @ 1999 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 363

Corps mystique, corps sacré : textual transfigurations of the body from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century

The body as erotic object pervades Western literature. This volume examines a variety of textual incarnations of the sacred and mystical body in French texts of the Medieval and Early Modern period. Articles examine Old French hagiography, epic and romance; Renaissance court ballet; seventeenth-century political treatises; memoirs of royal wedding ceremonies; and utopian, satirical, philosophical, and didactic literature. The intellectual scope of the volume covers topics as diverse as medieval scholasticism, seventeenth-century political thought, relations between representations of the male and female body, and the theatricalization of the body.

Flexible Friendships: Martha Vicinus Explores Women's Intimacy

M Vicinus is one of those rare scholars whose mere name instantly conjures the history of a field of study, a vision of research breadth and depth, of analytical originality and brilliance. Her reputation has transcended the geographical and chronological limits of the context of her primary research, nineteenth-century England. Indeed, the boundaries that define and separate disciplines cannot contain her: she is, herself, professor of English, women’s studies, and history. One suspects that there are other departments, centers, and research fields that would wish to claim her as their own as well. This is the context in which Vicinus’s work is read, and this accounts for the almost unreasonable levels of expectation the reader brings with her. Yet for all that baggage, Vicinus does not disappoint: Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 is a landmark in whichever field of research the reader wishes to locate it—women’s / gender history, the history of sex / sexuality, nineteenth-century history. This is a work of immense learning, written in an accessible style. It will serve to enlighten, entertain, or even affirm scholarly and popular audiences equally well. Intimate Friends comprises a series of case studies or microhistories. The intimate life and relationships of various women are recuperated and discussed, as far as possible, based on their own words and those of their friends and relations, both female and male. Stretching from the legendary Ladies of Llangollen (1778–1829) to the equally legendary Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943), Vicinus presents lively portraits of fascinating women alongside her analysis of the qualities, structures, and social contexts that informed their lives. By examining both the internal dynamics of relationships and the external perceptions of them by individual and institutional observers, Vicinus reveals the opportunities and challenges that confronted women as they sought to structure their lives in ways that accommodated and nurtured their same-sex desire. Over the 150 years considered, women employed a variety of models to develop emotional and erotic relationships with other women, to express their feelings to each other, and to present themselves to the world. Some of the models women invoked to structure their relationships and to make sense of their individual predilections, desires, and identities will be familiar, even comfortable; others may prove disquieting or disturbing. The exemplar available to the earliest couples was that of traditional pairings