Queer History: Lucy Allen: Queerly Invisible, Female Desire in Medieval England 14.12.2017 by Goldsmiths UOL

Lesbians – or women who desire other women – are almost invisible in medieval English history. We comb through legal and religious prohibitions, reconstruct patchy evidence from nuns’ letters, or read between the lines of historical monuments, often in vain. Yet, I argue that in some of the most popular literature of the period, we can see the details we glean from the historical evidence magnified and intensified to form a rich seam of innuendo concerning female same-sex desire and its often strange and unfamiliar manifestations. This, in turn, sheds light on our own preconceptions as scholars of historical sexual desire, and especially on our own sense of what is and is not ‘queer history’.