Cameron acknowledges that Brooten found more evidence for love between women in Greco-Roman antiquity than scholars had previously supposed was available. However, he then lays out his agenda that her arguments depend on four Greek texts, each of which he will challenge the interpretation of. In two cases, Cameron’s objection is that the verb “gamein,” when applied to two women, does not refer to marriage at all, not even metaphorically.
Greece
Covering the region equivalent to modern Greece in south-eastern Europe, but also the larger scope of Greek-speaking cultures, especially in the Classical period.
LHMP entry
Satan’s Harvest Home is an anonymous polemic (published 1749) railing against the perceived rise of effeminacy, sodomy, and prostitution in English society.
William Walsh was a late 17th century English poet and critic. The work of his that piques our interest is a philosophical treatise A Dialogue Concerning Women, being a Defence of the Sex, which is dedicated to someone identified as Eugenia. The work is in the form of a debate between Misogynes (the misogynist) and Philogynes (the lover of women), with authorial asides commenting on their arguments and directly addressing the dedicatee.
The classical corpus of “pastoral lament” is small (two Greek, two Latin) and the genre doesn’t really come into being until the later 15th century, at which point the genre has shifted from its classical origins. This “lament for a lost companion” in its 15th century form primarily mourns female figures, and early works lack a clear relationship of the poetic voice and its subject. The poems are not clearly personal reactions.
This chapter begins with the problem of using concepts or terms, like “gay” or “homosexual” to describe ancient Greek practices and ideologies. The Greek system was organized around sexual roles, not genders. There is uncertainty regarding just how same-sex eroticism functions in Plato’s writings. Eros did not serve only a literal function, but stood in for the pursuit of truth in the abstract. But the Dialogues also served as instruction for young, aristocratic men in the proper way to act within the Greek sexual system. The focus of this chapter is entirely on relations between men.
This chapter begins with a discussion of what is known about Sappho, her poetry, and her reputation among her contemporaries in ancient Greece. The tragically fragmentary nature of the written legacy of her work is traced, including the nine volume collection lost in the 9th century and the recovery of fragments of her work from papyrus sources in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
This article is a conference proceeding rather than written for publication, therefore it has a somewhat more informal flavor than usual. It takes a methodological approach to questions of how to interpret images of two women in classical Greek art that would be interpreted as involving courtship motifs if the figures were two men or a man and a woman.
The introduction begins with the definition of what we mean by “single” in this context, then looks for Greek and Latin vocabulary that carries that meaning, as well as similar meanings in other ancient languages. The modern sense is “a person not married or in an exclusive relationship.” But cross-culturally, the vocabulary of singleness may emphasize celibacy, solitariness, or loneliness, or distinguish the state for men and women. But in modern international use, the untranslated English word “single” has come into use as a general and neutral term.
This paper looks at the evolution of how the word “lesbian”, originally simply a geographic/ethnic identifier meaning “person from the island of Lesbos” came to pick up a separate meaning of “female homosexual.”
Gilhuly begins with a (very brief) discussion of the abstract uses of locational and geographic language, how geographic signifiers very often acquire secondary meanings rooted in some association with the place (e.g., “Spartan accommodations”), and how classical Greek writers were highly prone to developing these sorts of metonymic geographic shorthands.
Pages
