It is not at all surprising that there is a vast academic industry of Sappho studies. In the past I’ve covered a number of excellent, detailed publications that speak directly to the historic and social context of Sappho’s life and work, especially as it speaks to female same-sex relations. (Or to the reception of her life and work in other eras.) So I’ve gotten past the point of trying to include every Sappho publication I run across in someone’s bibliography, unless it looks like it might add to my existing coverage.
LHMP
Blog entry
I found this a compelling analysis (though perhaps it was simply the goddess compelling me?)
Continuing with some articles on ancient Greek topics, this one offers some entirely different interpretations of Anacreon's disinterested Lesbian.
Researching queer history involves embracing ambiguity, but ambiguity is present on many levels with many different purposes. This article, though otherwise somewhat tangential, is a useful exercise in recognizing that.
Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 325 - On the Shelf for October 2025 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2025/10/04 - listen here)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2025.
Not much of interest here. Just more housecleaning of assorted articles, grouped thematically. (You might guess that I've been working through Classical Greece currently.)
I guess I quit too early in Christine Downing's Myths and Mysteries of Same-Sex Love, because this article basically recapitulates a couple of chapters from it. On the other hand, by waiting to summarize this version of the content, I didn't have to wade through the Freudian psychoanalysis.
As noted previously, sometimes I cover publications because I think they'll be useful to the Project; sometimes I cover them to document that they're not useful. And sometimes the way I pre-schedule and write up materials out of order means that I blog things that I might have otherwise just noted as "not useful" in my database. So I blogged Downing 1989 to document that, despite the intriguing title, it isn't really useful for historical study.
Because I have two papers in my to-do folder that follow up on this book, I thought I’d take a look at the book first. Alas, It doesn’t appear to be very useful, so I suspect the followup articles will also be covered very briefly.
As noted previously, I'm working through a bunch of articles in my "to do" folder that got deprioritized for various reasons. This one is focused primarily on male relations, but does toss in an appendix with brief mentions of f/f possibilities.
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