Toward a Philology of the Premodern Lesbian

Abstract

The recent rise of the term “premodern” has profoundly altered the study of societies, cultures, and literatures in the distant past. It has regrouped academic disciplines once thought to exist in splendid self-sufficiency; it has reshaped scholarly conversations across geographical divides; it has unsettled long-standing period designations. At the same time, the term has rarely shed the binarism it transports. Since its coinage at the threshold between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, modernus has circumscribed oppositional structures of thought. Whether explicitly or implicitly, we are modern only in relation to those described as antiqui. Conversely, premodernity has the potential of invigorating our awareness of what is shared by ancients and moderns. Philology may benefit from such a terminological alignment. As a practice with a deep history, it straddles the many divides associated with the advent of the modern. In this chapter, I deploy a notion of philology that foregrounds questions of exchange and communication. The analysis of two sixteenth-century texts, the so-called Zimmern Chronicle and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Colloquies, will illustrate how texts both reflect and redirect communicative processes on which our own knowledge about the premodern lesbian relies.