The Sexuality of History

We learn here that the logic of woman + woman which is to say, the centrality of the sapphic is a constant in the two and a half centuries that constitute the early modern era in Europe (from the Dutch revolt against the Habsburgs, circa 1565 to the French Revolution). For starters, Sue Lanser shows how a significant number of women writers in Italy, England, France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland were able to use a sapphic perspective for defining themselves, and women in general, as political and social subjects. We see what it means for sapphic representations to travel from the longings of Sappho for Philaenis, to the romps of the "Sappho-an," from the picaresque Mademoiselle de Richelieu and her Arabella to the confinements of a Clarissa, from the Lodge of the Lesbos to sisters in love. Lanser obviously covers a very wide geographic and temporal terrain in comparative perspective here, and puts to use a large body of publicly circulated writings. Whether she is talking about a broadside published against the notion of the female husband or a gender-shifting romance, Lanser gives us well-considered readings of the particular texts as well as their larger contexts. Which brings us to the larger goal: women, lesbians in particular, are indeed central in very key ways during this period, not only as harbingers of the modern, but as actors in historical processes that come to comprise modernity itself. "The Sexuality of History" brings sapphism into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe from the middle of the 16th century to the beginning of the 19th. This book explores links between sapphism and the state, with particular attention to the role of sapphism in tensions between aristocratic and revolutionary rule, as well as in representations of geographical and national difference. The woman + woman configuration as a viable human arrangement, brought to prominence during this era, has radical implications for the new understandings of nature and desire that challenged secular and religious orthodoxies alike. Lanser s story of female same-sex desire that preoccupied emergent modernity thus becomes in important ways the story of modernity itself. This story gives Lanser the means to flip the scholarly coin from the history of sexuality to the sexuality of history. She has accomplished this stunning coin flip through a marvel of primary research, critical study, and theoretical acumen. The book is destined to make a splash in feminist, queer, and 18th-century studies, and its compelling case for the routine integration of sexuality into historical analysis will draw in historians and literary critics across the board."