We now turn to the non-poetic sources from the Archaic era. We start with a painted plate from circa 620 BCE from the island of Thera. It shows two female figures facing each other, each holding a garland. One is touching the other’s chin, otherwise the figures are symmetric and show an equal interaction in their postures and gazes. This contrasts with the use of the same tropes for m/f or m/m couples where there is an asymmetry (in m/m couples, the person doing the chin-touching is always an older man and the one being touched is younger).
female mentors
There is a regular theme over time, expressed in a number of different ways, where same-sex erotic relationships (both male and female) exist within the power differential of a mentor-student relationship. This tag also covers some situations where a close non-familial mentorship bond exists between women without erotic overtones when other circumstances make it relevant to the purpose of this Project.
LHMP entry
LHMP #334b Boehringer 2021 Female Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome Chapter 1a Archaic Poetry
Introduction: Scope
I forgot to include this last bit of the introductory material. The author discusses the scope of the work and the nature of the evidence. The late cut off is to exclude Christian texts. But the types of data vary across the scope and this corresponds to different attitudes towards f/f sex. So the analysis can’t entirely be a comparison across eras or a clear picture of development over time.
Chapter 1: Myth and Archaic Lyric Poetry
This article examines the plot and narrative structure of the 4th century Christian Acts of Xanthippe and Polyxena (AXP) within the context of the genre of Greek romance novels of the time.
Wiethaus addresses the problem of finding and identifying women’s same-sex relationships in history by looking at the general context of women’s same-sex friendships and especially features of those friendships that are specific to women’s experiences.
The author looks at texts that can be read as homoerotic addressed between religious women in medieval Germany. She specifically rejects the approach of treating women’s homoerotic experiences as equivalent to, or subsumed under, men’s experiences. After examining this type of literature in general, she applies that understanding to the writings of a specific woman who helped develop the concept of Christian bridal mysticism: Hadewijch of Brabant (early 13th century).
Leach’s biography of Charlotte Cushman takes a detailed “gossip column” type of approach, working in detail through all her travels, performances, and social interactions. He attributes motivations, emotions, and reactions both to Cushman and to those around her, dramatizing and fictionalizing the bare facts drawn from letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts. This can leave a seriously mistaken impression of what the evidence is behind his assertions.
The association of the name Sappho and the word Lesbian with female homoeroticism is so well entrenched that the question is rarely asked: what evidence do we have that Sappho was a lesbian (in the orientation sense, rather than the geographic one)? And how would such an orientation have been understood in her age and culture? Lardinois addresses these questions from empirical (if scanty) evidence.
