Gender and Sexuality in History

Written in the form of a testamentary letter from the Emperor Hadrian to his successor, the youthful Marcus Aurelius, this work is as extraordinary for its psychological depth as for its accurate reconstruction of the second century of our era. The author describes the book as a meditation upon history, but this meditation is built upon intensive study of the personal and political life of a great and complex character as seen by himself and his contemporaries, both friends and enemies. Marguerite Yourcenar reconstructs Hadrian's arduous early years, his triumphs and reversals, and his gradual reordering of a war-torn world.

In Metamorphoses

Publius Ovidius Naso, is perhaps best known for his oft-imitated Metamorphoses. But the Roman poet also wrote lively and lewd verse on the subjects of love, sex, marriage, and adultery--a playful parody of the earnest erotic poetry traditions established by his literary ancestors....

Ovid's stories melt moral conventions, explore ambiguities, and dissolve boundaries between men, women, animals, gods, plants, and the mineral world; in doing so they contrive to seduce readers.....

Unmistakable by virtue of his exaggerated phallus, Priapus -- one of Rome's minor fertility gods -- inspired a host of epigrammatic poems that offer one of the best primary sources for the study of ancient sexuality.....

A taste of amour in the ancient world-newly translated. From the famous erotic poetry of Sappho to love scenes from Homer's The Iliad, as well as works from such eminent Roman poets as Virgil and Catullus, this enthralling collection taps into a range of passionate, timeless emotions.

What did sex mean to the ancient Romans? In this lavishly illustrated study, John R. Clarke investigates a rich assortment of Roman erotic art to answer this question....

....This volume will provide readers with a substantial selection of primary sources documenting sexualities, sexual behaviors, and perceptions of sex, sexuality, gender, and the body among people in the ancient Greco-Roman world.....

A visual dictionary of depictions of mythological figures in classical art.

The first comprehensive study in over 100 years, cataloging the issues of each coiner in the period 280-31 BC and describing and dating them as accurately as the evidence permits.

"Love Letters from Tegernsee (pp. 229-256)
These mainly female-authored letters are preserved in a manuscript from the Bavarian abbey of Tegernsee: Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS Clm 19411, fols. 69r–70r (nos. 1–7), 100v (no. 10), and 113v–114v (nos. 8–9)."

Article includes translation of Tegernsee letters.

"Comprising 1132 lines, printed by William Copland around 1560, while two fragments, of 60 and 120 lines respectively, survive of an earlier edition printed by Wynkyn de Worde c. 1520."
from: Sentimental and Humorous Romances, 2005.

Full book on Google Books.

Full volumes on Google Books.
Recommended scholarship: Diane Watt's Amoral Gower : language, sex, and politics.

University of Nottingham holds the manuscript of Romances and Fabliaux (WLC/LM/6).
Parallel texts in English and Old French, with critical matter in English.

See, for example, “Sonnet 11”

This book will satisfy the curiosity of the many who became acquainted with Lister through I Know My Own Heart and are eager to learn more about her revealing life and what it suggests about the history of sexuality.
For scholarship, see Clark or Liddington as well as more recent work.

"King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire presents a modern-spelling edition of seventy-five letters exchanged between Buckingham and James. Across the centuries, commentators have condemned the letters as indecent or repulsive. Bergeron argues that on the contrary they reveal an inward desire of king and subject in a mutual exchange of love."

"Margaret Clap was indicted for keeping a House in which she procur'd and encourag'd Persons to commit Sodomy , on the 10th of December last and before and after."

The readings gathered here include many rare texts that have not been reprinted for centuries, excerpted from biblical commentary, legal writings, medical and scientific writings, popular encyclopedias, and literature, as well as continental vernacular and Latin sources never before available in English translation. The selections are assembled in ten chapters addressing particular discursive fields - Theology, Law, Medicine, Astrology, Physiognomics, Encyclopedias and Reference Works, Prodigious Monstrosities, Love and Friendship, the Sapphic Renaissance, and Erotica. Each chapter includes a substantial introduction summarizing its topic and its relation to early modern homoeroticism. The volume also poignantly addresses key issues in Renaissance thinking about sexual identity, and newly clarifies central problems and debates in the historiography of same-sex love.

In Sappho in Early Modern England, Harriette Andreadis examines public and private expressions of female same-sex sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before the language of modern sexual identities developed, a variety of discourses in both literary and extraliterary texts began to form a lexicon of female intimacy. Looking at accounts of non-normative female sexualities in travel narratives, anatomies, and even marital advice books, Andreadis outlines the vernacular through which a female same-sex erotics first entered verbal consciousness. She finds that "respectable" women of the middle classes and aristocracy who did not wish to identify themselves as sexually transgressive developed new vocabularies to describe their desires; women that we might call bisexual or lesbian, referred to in their day as tribades, fricatrices, or "rubsters," emerged in erotic discourses that allowed them to acknowledge their sexuality and still evade disapproval.

play

"Quoi que le censeur puisse dire,
Je fais moins de cas d'un empire
Que d'un bon c . . . , d'un bon repas;
Car sans le vin, la fouterie,
Morbleu, je ne donnerais pas
Un viédaze de notre vie."

Edited by Richard A. Carr. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1977.

""Homosexuality in early modern France is an edited volume of translated documents about male and female homosexuality in France from the Renaissance through the Revolution."

e. Edited by Anne Verdier, with Christian Biet and Lise Leibacher-Ouvrard. Vijon: Lampsaque, 2000

"The trial of Théophile is not only important for the appalling role it played in the life (and early death) of the poet, it is also one of the most significant dates in the literary and intellectual history of the 17th century."

A 17th century cleric accused of atheism and sodomy. Texts focus on proof of the divine.

Pietro Aretino (1492-1556) was one of the most important figures in Italian Renaissance literature, and certainly the most controversial. Condemned by some as a pornographer, his infamy was due largely to his use of explicit sexuality and the vulgar tongue of ordinary speech in much of his work.
Erotica, same-sex encounters in a nunnery.

“In Antopoli: Stamperia Regia,” 1619.

Edited by Luigi
Monga. Moncalieri: Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerche sul “Viaggio in Italia,”
2000.

A fresh translation of five important and popular comedies from the Italian Renaissance, along with an introduction addressing the texts, their translation, and the social and cultural world of Renaissance comedy. At the turn of the sixteenth century, Italian playwrights rediscovered and recast an old art form--the ancient Latin comedy--to create witty, ribald, and intricately plotted plays that delighted Renaissance audiences with their clever reversals of gender and class roles.

"Born of well-to-do parents, Benedetta Carlini entered the convent at the age of nine. At twenty-three, she began to have visions of both a religious and erotic nature. Benedetta was elected abbess due largely to these visions, but later aroused suspicions by claiming to have had supernatural contacts with Christ. During the course of an investigation, church authorities not only found that she had faked her visions and stigmata, but uncovered evidence of a lesbian affair with another nun, Bartolomeo. The story of the relationship between the two nuns and of Benedetta's fall from an abbess to an outcast is revealed in surprisingly candid archival documents and retold here with a fine sense of drama."

From The Philosophical Forum 42, no. 4 (2011): 497–506.
See alternative translation into English by J. C. Rawnsley with an afterword by Don Mader, Amsterdam: Entimos Press, 2000.

tr. by J. Addington Symonds, with introduction and notes.

Rome: Antonio de’ Rossi,

"The French essayist Michel de Montaigne does not offer the con temporary testimony closest to the events at the heart of this book, but he is the logical point of departure since his account, coming from the pen of a famous writer and thinker, is by far the most well known today; it is his version of the story that has generated scholarly interest and stimulated research. "

The Marquis de Sade, vilified by respectable society from his own time through ours, apotheosized by Apollinaire as "the freest spirit tht has yet existed, " wrote "The 120 Days of Sodom" while imprisoned in the Bastille. An exhaustive catalogue of sexual aberrations and the first systematic exploration -- a hundred years before Krafft-Ebing and Freud -- of the psychopathology of sex, it is considered Sade's crowning achievement and the cornerstone of his thought. Lost after the storming ofthe Bastille in 1789, it was later retrieved but remained unpublished until 1935.

Translation in the appendix of Gary P. Leupp's Male colors : the construction of homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan

A collection of stories.

Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf Tīfāshī -1253 or 1254

18th/19th century thief who frequently dressed as a woman. Sources in Swedish.

"In the long history of the West's encounter with Hawaiian culture, which began in the late 1700s with Captain Cook, translators and translations have often been the tools of intentional falsehood, thus demonstrating the truth of the Italian proverb, Traduttore, traditore (“the translator is a traitor”) particularly with regard to same-sex texts."

For a discussion of Mahu, see page 264. Be aware that this is an English sailor writing about Tahiti.