modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830
- Categories
- Book/Boek
- Creator
- Lanser, Susan S.
- Publish Year
- 2014
- Shelfmark
- WER 3 2014 - B
- Thesaurus
- lesbische vrouwen, seksualiteit, literatuur, rechtspraak, reizen, Nederland, Europa, 16e eeuw, 17e eeuw, 18e eeuw, 19e eeuw
- Description
- The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye. In this book Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality.