Michelle M. Sauer

The Lesbian Premodern

Book synopsis: The Lesbian Premodern invites key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies to take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography. Engaging premodernists as well as those interested primarily in modern lesbian history and literature, this book draws new conclusions on the important and often overlooked theoretical, empirical and textual work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures.

“Prei for me mi leue suster”: The Paradox of the Anchoritic “Community” in Late Medieval England

Critics of ‘‘life writing’’ have become enamored of expanding the genre. For instance, Marlene Kadar, editor of Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, believes that life writing is an inclusive genre that encompasses ‘‘autologus texts: diaries, journals, notebooks, letters, travel books, epistolary narratives, autobiography.’’ Yet, even this generous definition concentrates on auto/biographical forms. In truth, life writing has often been reduced to diaries, auto/biographies, and personal essays. This article challenges that traditional concept of life writing, if such a word as ‘‘traditional’’ can be applied to a genre commonly used to describe women’s writing. As a female-oriented genre, life writing is an important function of feminist criticism, not only in the recovery of texts, but also in the examination of subjectivity. As Linda S. Coleman writes:

Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern

The Lesbian Premodern is a collection of essays that responds to, and adapts, Michele Aina Barale’s suggestion by inviting some key scholars in the fields of lesbian studies and queer theory to take part in an innovative conversation in print. This textual discussion transgresses traditional period boundaries and offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history, geography, literary criticism, and theory. The Lesbian Premodern aims to engage those interested primarily in contemporary lesbian theory, history, and literature with the important and often overlooked theoretical, empirical, and textual work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures. Our title, The Lesbian Premodern, is deliberately provocative: both anachronistic and tautological. The term “lesbian” is widely regarded as essentialist, historically redundant, and limiting. One response to this would be to argue, following Karma Lochrie and James Schultz, that the concept of hetero-sexuality is equally anachronistic when applied to the premodern and that heteronormativity itself must be subject to scrutiny.3 However, one of the central questions this book addresses is, when has using the term “lesbian” not been considered an anachronistic gesture? It is a question that is of particular interest to those of us trained in medieval and early modern studies with a research interest in tracing love, sex, and desire between women and their reception in historical contexts prior to the Enlightenment—scholars who also work in the fields of lesbian and queer studies more generally.

Divine Orgasm and Self-Blazoning: The Fragmented Body of the Female Medieval Visionary

Fragmentation, fetishization, and eroticization of body parts can be seen as part of an extended medieval cosmological system whereby human sexuality, as an integral part of humanity, lies at the center of understanding the universe. If we consider cosmology to be not only the study of humanity’s role in the universe, but also the development of myths, deep structures, and archetypes as a way of explaining or understanding this role, then how we structure sexuality, especially in connection to religion, is also a major part of cosmological thinking. Sex lies at the heart of Christian cosmology, beginning with the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. It is clear that part of the knowledge gained from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is sexual knowledge, yet it is still surprising when we are confronted by sexuality or sexual expression in religious texts. Christian notions of sin and sexuality have become the basis of many Western myths, as Alan Watts notes: Mythology is not sexual, but sexuality is mythological, since the union of the sexes prefigures the transcending of duality, of the schism whereby man’s experience is divided into subject and object, self and other.1