Lesbianism in Early Modern Vernacular Romance: The Question of Historicity

Abstract

Carole Levin often uses literature as a source for historiographical innovation. This chapter tests the horizons of this practice with respect to divergences between the social and literary historical archive. As a test case, it reopens the question of lesbian invisibility. Renaissance poets were fascinated by representations of a woman’s first experience of same-sex longing. This chapter looks specifically at two revisions of the topos—one in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and one in Milton’s Paradise Lost—to question what kinds of insight poetic representations might give us into social experience.