“Many Have Loved You with Lips and Fingers”

Abstract

Sapphistries covers fortytwo thousand years of world history with the panache of a swashbuckling, feminist lothario. Leila J. Rupp packs her ambitious project into 233 pages, augmented by footnotes and an extensive bibliography. Sapphistries is a worldwide tour of love between women in locations as disparate as India, Germany, Japan, Nigeria, Malaysia, and Sudan. From these global travels and an expansive time frame emerges a wellwritten and engaging synthetic history. Throughout Sapphistries, Rupp delights in historical attention to detail while savoring the literary; each page is punctuated with beautiful language, imagery, and flights of intellectual fancy. Imagining a past that includes love between women is a persistent theme in writing by lesbians. From the Sapphic poems of Michael Field to Judy Grahn’s Another Mother Tongue, from Jeannette Howard Foster’s work in the literary archive to identify lesbian characters and lesbian themes to articles in small press publications like the Furies’s celebration of Sweden’s Queen Christina as a lesbian foremother, lesbians have researched, written, and imagined history.1 Rupp eschews a universalizing impulse that characterizes some of the prior lesbian forays into history and instead transforms the desire for a long history and for a history not tied to geography into a trenchant and rigorous historical narrative. She mobilizes contemporary theory and historical scholarship to narrate her history. At the center of Sapphistries is the synthesis of historical scholarship from disparate sources. When the historical record is oblique on the subject of love between women, Rupp uses contemporary literary texts such as Jackie Kay’s Trumpet,