Early Modern searching strategies
The Early Modern Era is defined as the 14th century to the 18th century. The Early Modern Era can be separated into 3 categories: Renaissance (14th century CE to 17th century CE), Age of Exploration (15th century CE to 17th century CE), and the Enlightenment (17th century CE to 18th century CE). These can be useful search terms. A lot of the works that focus on the Early Modern era tend to be quite Eurocentric in nature so it is important to indicate geographic region in your searches in order to get a more intersectional view. Try combining your searches with the region or country that you are interested in studying. Proximity searching is going to be especially useful here because it will allow you to ensure that the region is relevant enough to be mention near your key terms.Some of the suggested terms from the Medieval Era can be useful here as modern terms still have not yet come into use.
Suggested terms:
- female homoeroticism
- lesbianism
- female homosexuality
- early modern
- renaissance
- enlightenment era
- age of exploration
- colonial
Resources to check out
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Gay/Lesbian Almanac byPublication Date: 1983This book is an almanac that lists entries on relevant historical documents pertaining to gays and lesbians. The almanac spans from 1607 to 1950 so this book may also be useful for researching the Modern Era. It is a very easy to use almanac because of the fact that it labels which entries most pertain to lesbians. The scope is not at all international however as it primarily focuses on the US.
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The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England
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ISBN: 0521448859Publication Date: 2002-06-06This book offers a look into the representations of lesbian desire in art in Early Modern England. The book is grounded in queer theory and feminist scholarship and argues that lesbianism in the era was not as invisible as originally thought and in fact there was a higher representation of lesbian desire than there ever was before. The book does however only focus on works in England so it does not offer a transnational view.
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Historical Dictionary of Lesbian Literature
This dictionary contains entries of lesbian writers or women writing about desire towards women spanning all the way from 630 BCE to 2004 CE. This source is useful for finding important lesbian writers from almost every era of history and empowers you to start your own research on them. The drawback is that is such a wide scope meaning that it is certainly not an exhaustive dictionary.
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Female Homosexuality in the Middle East
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ISBN: 9780415956734Publication Date: 2007-07-23This book investigates historical lesbianism in the Middle East. This book is important for understanding how the effects of colonization change perceptions of sexuality and that homophobia is a colonial idea. This books covers a large timeline and does not specifically cover the Early Modern period and could have benefited from a better understanding of queer theory.
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Reading and Writing the Ambiente
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ISBN: 0299167844Publication Date: 2000-10-30This book applies queer theory to important texts in Latin American, Latino, and Spanish culture. The first chapter focuses on the writings of María de Zayas and dives into lesbian desires in Early Modern Spain. The book tackles many different authors from a wide variety of time periods and geographies all within the cultures of the Spanish, Latinos, and Latin Americans. Only the first chapter is focused on lesbianism in the Early Modern era however.
