The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565-1830 | Susan S. Lanser
During the 17th and 18th centuries, as European cultures grappled with the challenges of emergent modernity, ideas about female same-sex relations became a flash-point for contests about authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Exploring a wide range of texts from more than two centuries and multiple language cultures, this book argues for the significance of relations between women to the early modern social imaginary.