Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern

Abstract

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.