Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern

Abstract

The Lesbian Premodern is a collection of essays that responds to, and adapts, Michèle 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.

We have chosen not to delineate between the periods referred to as “medieval” and “early modern” in the title of this volume. This is deliberate because one of the objectives of The Lesbian Premodern is to challenge disciplinary boundaries and cultural constructions relating to periodization. See Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger’s discussion of queer theory’s investment in “a logic of the preposterous” [“Introduction,” in Burger and Kruger, ed. Queering the Middle Ages (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. xi-xxiii] for challenging scholars to “rethink what we have come to know as the Middle Ages not as preceding modernity but as the effect of a certain self-construction of the modern,” p. xiii. Carla Freccero employs slashes in the title of her book, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006) “to interrupt the current notion of the Renaissance as the early modern period and to force a pause on what it means to say that something is historically early in our genealogies of Western modernity, as well as to focus in on what is meant by modern,” p. 3. We have used the term “premodern,” not to cover over differences or smooth out disagreements between the fields of medieval studies and early modern studies, but to encourage readers to question their investments in those delineations (if they are thus invested) and further to think about the effects of such attitudes on the study of pre-Enlightenment events and the reception of this work within, between, and outside of both fields.