Heather Rose Jones's Blog, page 79
July 21, 2019
Not So Silly, but Still Sely
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
The use of the word “sely” in this paper’s title is likely to be confusing to anyone not versed in the historic development of the word. Originally (in Anglo Saxon) “saelig” meant “blessed, holy” and was typically applied to religious figures. The meaning shifted in Middle English (as sely) to meaning “worthy, noble, excellent” and sometimes with the sense “fortunate, lucky, prosperous.” One can trace the connections: holy people are worthy and considered to have inherent nobility, and one can conclude that worthy and noble people may have achieved that state due to good fortune and luck.
But then the word took a sideways shift. Lucky, prosperous people are assumed to be happy. And “sely” began being used with a range of meanings in the field of “lucky, happy, pleasant”. It’s likely that this is the sense Chaucer intended when he described the young and sexually-desiring widow Dido as “sely”. (She would be an odd candidate for being considered “holy” though perhaps she would fit “noble, worthy”.)
By the 15th century, the type of happiness and good nature described by “sely” was no longer considered to derive from good fortune and inherent virtue, but rather from a state of innocence of evil. Not innocence from evil, but an obliviousness to the bad things in the world. “Sely” came to mean “innocent, harmless” and then “simple (minded), guileless, foolish gullible.” One finds the word used to describe people with intellectual disabilities, perhaps in parallel with calling them “innocents”.
Once associated with a lack of intellectual capacity, new meanings attached themselves from the common social fate of such persons: “weak, helpless, defenseless” and by extension “wretched, unfortunate, miserable” leading to use as “worthless, trifling, insignificant”. The word has come into modern English as “silly.”
Those familiar with folklore and old ballads may also have encountered the variant “seelie” and “unseelie” as applied to categories of the Fair Folk, with the Seelie Court being those who are generally friendly towards humans (drawing from some of the earlier positive senses) and the Unseelie Court being those who are hostile. (Historic usage data from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sely)
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #264 Amtower 2003 Chaucer’s Sely Widows
About LHMP
Full citation:
Amtower, Laurel. 2003. “Chaucer’s Sely Widows” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
Medieval widowhood was a strongly gendered concept. Only in the 14th century was a parallel term applied to men whose wives had died. The legal status and protections for female widows differed from those for male widowers. Widows occupied an ambiguous status as a sexualized, but uncontrolled, woman, and as an independent legal/social entity who had “paid her dues” to earn that status. Widows were entitled to 1/3-1/2 of their late husband’s estate and in many cases could continue his business, guild membership, and other economic functions. They could represent themselves in law to protect these rights, although this required the skills and knowledge to navigate the legal system. Remarriage could offset some of these handicaps, but conversely had disadvantages. On remarriage, the widow would once again come under a husband’s legal control, though she might negotiate to regain independent legal control over assets from her previous marriage.
Widows were expected to be chaste, but did not have the (hypothetical) ability to “prove” that chastity with their body that virgins were expected to have. They were “unruly” bodies--sexually active but no longer “ruled” by a husband. This paper looks at the concept of widowhood in Chaucer, where widows are often used to represent men’s sexual anxieties. Throughout his writings, widows most often are allowed to “speak” in the text only as a voice for their dead husbands. The exceptions are the sexually aggressive Wife of Bath (in the Canterbury Tales) and the clandestinely sexual Criseyde (in Troilius and Criseyde).
Chaucer’s younger widows generally express a desire for the married state and often are depicted as remarrying. Barriers to remarriage are typically thrown up by their potential partner. These men see them as “safe” targets of sexual interest. Their widowed state is used as an excuse for their sexualization.
The widows use language to have power in the world, either to punish their persecutors or to create justification for their way of life. The Wife of Bath and Criseyde lay verbal claim to their identities in part by claiming that marginal status as widow, rather than in imitation of a single state. Traditional paths are no longer available to them, leading them to question and challenge the status quo.
Time period: 14th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenwidowsEvent / person: Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)
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John Lyly: Secret Ally?
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
I am, of course, quite familiar with John Lyly’s delightfully queer play Gallathea, in which we have two--count them, two!--cross-dressing heroines who inadvertently fall in love with each other. And who still proclaim their devotion and intent never to be parted after they find out their beloved’s true identity. But I hadn’t been aware that Lyly made a career from framing heterosexual marriage as a dispreferred alternative. This article situates it in the political context of Queen Elizabeth I’s singlehood.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #263 Vanhoutte 2003 A Strange Hatred of Marriage
About LHMP
Full citation:
Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. 2003. “A Strange Hatred of Marriage: John Lyly, Elizabeth I, and the Ends of Comedy” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
Comic drama traditionally relies on and enforces the stereotypes and norms of heterosexual marriage. Most Elizabethan comedies do not present female singlehood and independence as a viable option, even when used as a transitional motif in the plot. Comedic resolutions overwhelmingly require the pairing off of single women into heterosexual marriages. Female resistance raises the questions: Must women marry? And must women marry men? Rarely are those questions answered in the negative. John Lyly stands out in offering a negative response. The pairing and marriage of two women (one to be magically transformed into a man) in Gallathea is as close as he comes to offering marriage as a desirable goal for women.
Although anywhere between 5 to 27% of early modern English people remained unmarried, singlewomen received little representation in literature. Lyly is the only early modern playwright who regularly features them. Comedic works are more likely than other genres to acknowledge singlewomen, as they represent an essential conflict in the plot. At the same time, comedy has the potential to highlight the absurdity and artificiality of compulsory heterosexuality. In Lyly’s court plays (Campaspe, Sappho and Phao, Gallathea, and Endymion), only the first involves the central female character marrying a man. His single female characters fall in various categories: chaste goddess, unmarried virgin, old hag. The attitudes he displayed toward these characters is similarly varied, from admiration to sympathy to contempt. He acknowledges the understanding of heterosexual marriage as both compulsory and a patriarchal structure that subjugates women.
These plays were all performed for Elizabeth I, who was the ultimate role model of the time of a powerful singlewoman, though scholars typically focus on how this affected men, not how it could have inspired women. Descriptions of Elizabeth’s reaction to romantic comedies often noted that she took dramatic debates over the desirability of marriage personally. (And, no doubt, many of them were intended to convey a personal/political argument to her.)
Moralists viewed unmarried women as inherently wanton and sexually uncontrolled. The politics of the question of the queen’s marriage was complicated in that her sister Mary had been married (the approved state) but was massively unpopular, while Elizabeth, though single, was loved. Moralists’ arguments that women should obey and serve their husbands complicated the case of a female ruler. Either that position argued against female rulers marrying, or it argued against having female rulers at all.
Earlier in Elizabeth’s reign, drama was a medium for courtiers to comment on Elizabeth’s unmarried state. By Lyly’s day, the marriage debate was essentially over. But drama still had a role to play in making sense of that situation. The role of “virgin goddess” was an obvious one, but Lyly’s works go beyond that to normalize female singlehood. He focuses on issues of subject and sovereignty, and the negative potential: rape, exile, death, and virgin sacrifice.
Lyly’s Venus sees heterosexual love as being about the (desirable) subjugation of women. For her, singlewomen are an affront to be conquered. Lyly’s Sappho finds the resolution of her desire for (the male) Phao untenable and remains single, thus conquering Venus. Similarly, Cynthia in Endymion, will not countenance marriage to her lower status suitor, though multiple secondary characters in Endymion are married off at the end in a resolution imposed punitively by Cynthia. The individual pairings represent negative tropes about marriage.
In Gallathea and Campaspe, the characters avoid the fate they are initially presented with. In Gallathea this fate is to be a virgin sacrifice, in Campaspe, the heroine is a prisoner threatened with rape by the conqueror Alexander and this situation is equated with the essence of marriage. In Gallathea, the two women at risk of virgin sacrifice instead fall in love with each other in an egalitarian desire not paralleled in heterosexual relationships. Instead of accepting marriage/sacrifice, they escape the system entirely. The marriage that concludes the play reveals gender to be arbitrary and capable of being chosen, rather than an essential characteristic. Their love is entirely symmetric and reciprocal. And despite Venus’s promoise to change one of them (randomly) into a man, the play ends at a point when both are still women. The running theme in Lyly’s heroines is that love demands this equal and reciprocal relationship and cannot thrive in a hierarchical and asymmetric coupling.
Time period: 16th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenmarriage resistancemarriage between womenEvent / person: Gallathea (John Lyly)
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Sometimes Being SIngle is an Advantage
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
This is my favorite article out of the entire collection, at least in terms of usefulness for research into potential character data. Not only does it review the data and attitudes about never-married women in 16-17th century England, but it goes in depth into an economic strategy that was differentially more available to single women than to wives. I’m tucking this tidbit away in my file of “strategies for independent female characters”.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #262 Spicksley 2003 To Be or Not to Be Married
About LHMP
Full citation:
Spicksley, Judith M. 2003. “To Be or Not to Be Married: SIngle Women, Money-lending, and the Question of Choice in Late Tudor and Stuart England” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
This is a fairly extensive research paper in two parts. The first looks at the demographics of singlewomen in Late Tudor and Stuart England, along with some of the social forces that affected women’s inclination and ability to avoid marriage. The second part looks specifically at the occupation of money-lender as an option for women to support themselves or to supplement other forms of income.
Demographic studies indicate that the percentage of never-married women in England during the period in question ranged from 10% (the cohort born in 1566) to 22% (the cohort born in 1641). Contemporary literature indicates anxiety about a “man shortage” as a contributing cause. Society was structured around the expectation of monogamous heterosexual marriage, but increasingly there was a perception that marriage was in decline. This perception was of particular concern in the context of considering an increase of population as a desirable goal. Marriage was, in theory, an expected life stage for all women, and male-authored literature depicted women as strongly desiring marriage and aiming to achieve it at a relatively young age.
Because of these attitudes, female singlehood was viewed as being due to a situational lack of opportunity, e.g., as a result of male mortality during the English Civil War, due to greater male participation in emigration, and due to plague. Other concerns focused on male choice not to marry and blamed that, in turn, on women’s behavior. The atmosphere of sexual license in the Restoration court was felt to encourage men to decline marriage in favor of less formal arrangements. This perception led to legal measures to encourage marriage with special taxes on bachelors and childless widowers. There was little discussion at the time of women who were single by choice, although some hint of this concern appears in satirical attacks on spinsters.
But moral literature around marriage also recognized that not all people were suited to marriage, especially those who were not able or disinclined to procreate. Some individuals were advised (or chose) not to marry due to not being suited to the physical and emotional demands of marriage. In other cases, an individual might remain single to to being unable to convince their family of the suitability of their chosen partner.
The most widely accepted reason for not marrying was financial. The north-western European marriage pattern involved formation of a new, independent household on marriage. This required an accumulation of goods and capital, as well as stable employment. A woman’s “marriage portion” was considered an essential contribution for the economic success of the match.
Women of the lower classes acquired this portion from work, legacies, gifts, or charity. Such women generally worked outside the home from their mid-teens until marriage. But work opportunities were contracting in the 17th century. Charity offered to women often took the form of money or goods to enable marriage. Legal regulation of marriage often targeted foreigners or internal migrants who were felt to be “competing” with local women for marriage opportunities. Other statutes were aimed at delaying marriage, such as apprenticeship regulations that required an unmarried state.
Overall, the result was a significant population of mobile, unmarried poor. For example, rural servants were highly mobile. Gender-related differences in migration patterns also affected marriage opportunities. Curiously, disease also contributed to a “surplus” of unmarried women, with men being twice as likely to contract the plague and five times as likely to die from it, though the data is not entirely clear on this point. Similarly, emigration strongly favored men. The next part of the article focuses on an overlooked demographic: women who remained single by choice. [Note: the author identifies them as women who remained “celibate” by choice, but that’s a different question.]
What factors drove this? The 17th century saw increased freedom of choice in marriage partners. There was a general shift from a focus on marriage as a community-oriented action to marriage as an individual action, with an emphasis on personal autonomy and individual happiness. That individual happiness was not necessarily tied up in marriage. For example, Blanche Perry, a maid to Queen Elizabeth I, chose to remain single in order to devote herself to Elizabeth’s service. In other cases, women related their chosen singlehood to the inability to marry a specific preferred partner. In other cases, they ascribed singlehood to “God’s will.”
Popular literature of the day often humorously debated the joys of a single life as contrasted with marriage. This was more typically focused on men, but in the later 17th century the debate was engaged in more seriously by women who were focused on religious celibacy both within formal ecclesiastical institutions and as lay women. Women writers such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and Jane Barker wrote of “single” life in the context of female friendship or as a positive state in the face of negative attitudes toward “spinsters.”
The choice to remain single required financial stability. Demographic data from the middle ages shows a link between women’s marriage rates and economic autonomy. The labor shortages of the late 14th and early 15th centuries were paralleled by an expansion of unmarried women working outside their household of birth, especially in towns. This included a sharp increase in the rate of never-married women. Even for those who married, marriage might be delayed later in life.
While women’s labor was often marginal and badly paid, the article now focuses on one economic opportunity available to some women: the profession of money-lending.
In England, lending money for interest (with a statutory rate of 10%) was legalized in 1571 (though it occurred on a less regulated basis earlier). It was part of a complex system of many types of financial arrangements, making details hard to track. Female moneylenders are also often not mentioned in the historic records of the time, therefore the field is researched primarily in the context of a small number of prominent and wealthy women. This article expands that data to a wider demographic by use of probate inventories that note lending arrangements that were outstanding at the time of death. While these records show that 40% of all persons were engaged in lending, singlewomen were over-represented with 50-60% engaging in moneylending. This holds across all income levels. Income from loan interest often supplemented other income sources available to singlewomen, such as spinning.
The interest return on a sum equivalent to a woman’s typical marriage portion was roughly similar to the typical wages for the same economic class, although wages were generally supplemented by room and board. But lending did not preclude other economic activities. The singlewomen in this study also engaged in farming, renting out animals, dairying, textile production and processing, along with more poorly paid manual labor. It’s unclear to what extent singlewomen chose this path deliberately, but if chosen, it was a sustainable lifestyle. Most loans were within their own community and class, and served as a communal financial resource against economic fluctuations.
Women whose fathers had died had legal control of their inherited marriage portion either at marriage or at majority. And with marriage typically occurring after the age of majority and a higher male death rate, this meant that many singlewomen were in a position to control their assets. Wills typically left cash to daughters more often than to sons (sons being more likely to get real estate and goods). [Note: but see Staples 2011 for counter-evidence to the claim that sons were more likely than daughters to get real estate.]
As married women’s property came under the legal control of her husband (unless there was a special provision in the marriage contract -- a case only typical for widows), singlewomen had more ability to serve as lenders than married women did. This legal situation also provided a motivation to remain single if they wanted to keep control of their property.
The economic independence of moneylending may have given singlewomen more control over the timing and choice of marriage, or as a way to avoid marriage entirely. Women also sometimes viewed moneylending as a type of charitable activity.
Time period: 16th c17th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomeneconomic independence
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Somehow It’s Always About the Men
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
I found this a rather frustrating article within the context of a collection supposedly focusing on women. Because it makes the women’s single status all about how they serve as “currency” in the male establishment of prowess and reputation. I mean, it’s a valid observation about chivalric literature, but I wish space had been given to an article that focused more on women. Goodness knows there are interesting things to be said about singlewomen in chivalric literature who have agency within their own stories.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #261 Armstrong 2003 Gender, Marriage and Knighthood
About LHMP
Full citation:
Armstrong, Dorsey. 2003. “Gender, Marriage, and Knighthood: Single Ladies in Malory” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
This paper begins by looking at the function of single men in chivalric literature as being free to pursue courtly love and service to all women only by not being bound to a specific woman. But the single woman--the one who requires rescuing because she has no man to act for her--is what makes the male character’s reputation possible. The paper discusses how their performance of gendered acts and relationships creates gender concepts in chivalric literature, relying on the contrast of “active man” and “passive woman.” This paper does not address singlewomen as independent actors, but as filling a role within the male/female social economy.
Time period: Medieval (general)Place: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenliterary heroine
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And now I’m imagining Greta Garbo playing Saint Katherine
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
This is a rather delightful analysis that puts a different interpretation on the motif of “Christ as bridegroom” for virgin saints. I like the idea of Katherine as simply resisting marriage in general as unnecessary and only belatedly realizing that holy virginity was a tool she could employ to that end. Or rather, that this interpretation could be developed by medieval writers in the context of popularizing marriage resistance outside the convent. I rather like that there is room in this medieval text for the idea that a woman could be whole and complete and a participant in society without the need for marriage--indeed, viewing a husband as superfluous. To be fair, the Saint Katherine of this version of her legend is depicted with a sort of "wink wink, she's actually having a premonition of Christ" but within the story-context, her attitude is, "Eh, men, who needs them?" And whether or not the author felt that Christ-free singlehood was truly a viable option, it's a concept and a motif that was presented to the audience with the expectation that they wouldn't find it unbelievable. (Or at least, not more unbelievable than any of the other things one finds in saints' biographies.)
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #260 Price 2003 I Want to Be Alone
About LHMP
Full citation:
Price, Paul. 2003. “I Want to Be Alone: The Single Woman in Fifteenth-Century Legends of St. Katherine of Alexandria” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
The legend of the virgin martyr Katherine of Alexandria became immensely popular in the 14-15th century. It presents the fairly standard story of the Christian daughter of a pagan ruler who resists marriage and supports the Christian community despite increasingly violent threats and punishments. With her increased popularity in the later middle ages, there is a shift from the tone of the earlier texts as “passio” (focused on suffering and martyrdom) to a more detailed “life story” (focusing on the details and context of the subject’s life).
Unlike legends of virgin martyrs who resist marriage after--and due to--converting to Christianity, Katherine is still pagan when she initially resists marriage. She is not resisting as a “bride of Christ” who is therefore unavailable to an earthly bridegroom (which stories omit singlehood as an option) but rather because she sees no need to marry in order to be an effective ruler to her people. She envisions the perfect husband who might overcome her objections but only as a hypothetical impossibility (not recognizing that she is describing Christ). Thus, her legend creates a transition between “bride of Christ” as the only alternative to marriage, and singlehood for its own sake.
This theme is even more developed in John Capgrove’s version of the biography (mid 15th century) which focuses on individual and personal details of Katherine’s life and the reasons for her choice of singlehood. He depicts Katherine as expressing a desire for a single vocation apart from a focused dedication to Christ. Capgrove’s Kathering uses the idea of the “perfect man” whom she’d be willing to marry as a rejection of marriage, not a premonition of Christ.
Price considers the question of why a text with this angle should become particularly popular in 15th century England. He suggests it is part of a trend for lay people, and especially lay women, taking ownership of their religious lives. Price provides as supporting evidence other works by Capgrove that are clearly designed and intended for a female patron and reader. There is a shift in women viewing religious life as requiring rejection of the world to including religious devotion as part of a secular life. There is a comparison to anchorites (religious recluses not part of a convent community) who reject the model of religious devotion as a “bride of Christ” and for whom a broader set of options and motivations are considered valid.
Time period: 14th c15th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenmarriage resistance
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Resisting Marriage, Resisting Authority
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
Every once in a while, you find people in history almost stumbling across some fairly radical ideas. In this case, the use of women’s resistance to marriage as a symbol of resistance to unwanted control and authority in general. Alas, the men using the analogy never quite take the last step. Further, there is a double-edged sword in the idea that the only approved alternative to heterosexual marriage is marriage to the church. As I mentioned on Monday, I'm adding in this extra entry this week to make up for the fairly content-free introduction chapter.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #259 Zatta 2003 The Single Woman as Saint
About LHMP
Full citation:
Zatta, Jane. 2003. “The Single Woman as Saint: Three Anglo-Norman Success Stories” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
This paper looks at three female Anglo-Saxon saints, as depicted in Anglo-Norman hagiography: Osith, Etheldreda, and Modwenna. The women are doubly “other” within the texts: Anglo-Saxon lives being portrayed for a readership of Norman churchmen, and women being portrayed by and for men.
Their lives as singlewomen are significant for their temporal proximity to the audience (as compared with legends of early female saints such as Catherine and Margaret). But they’re also interesting in how these women are used to protect the claims of their associated monastic houses against the Norman religious establishment. There is a focus on their intellectual succesion: the Anglo-Saxon religious houses as the establishers of Christianity in Britain. These biographies are used to justify the legal privileges of their houses as pre-existing the Anglo-Noman church and therefore not being subject to its control. The women’s symbolic exemption from the normative female role was used to support the institution’s exemption from external control.
Of the three women, two marry and one is a “career virgin” but both of the married women resist the married state and win their freedom to serve God instead. Unlike the classical virgin martyrs who are obliterated physically by their moral victory, these women are successful socially as well as morally and live fulfilled lives of religious devotion.
The paper provides details of the manuscripts and their texts. In contrast to earlier Anglo-Saxon versions of their hagiography, which presented religious and secular lives as incompatible, the Anglo-Norman versions of the biographies use the structure of virgin saints’ lives to advance socio-political goals. In the process, the women are shown resisting male authority using “feminine” means that traditionally would be framed more negatively. The details of the biographies are interesting but not germane to the LHMP.
Summary: each finds a strategy to resist marriage (or the duties of marriage) and emerge successfully as a virgin-by-choice established in a religious life. This struggle and success is then presented as an analogy for attempts by Norman religious and secular authorities to claim power over the religious houses that they founded.
Time period: 12th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomenmarriage resistance
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All Single All the Time
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
In the context of doing a podcast on the usefulness of singlewomen studies, I plunged into this collection that I picked up at Kalamazoo this year. (Thereby also fulfilling my pledge to try to prioritize new book acquisitions.) There are several really fascinating articles for my purpose, especially one on singlewomen in the profession of moneylender. I’ve started off by scheduling these at the usual one-per-week rate, though I'm not counting this introduction as fulfilling the requirement so I'll be posting the first actual paper on Wednesday. As several of the later articles are of very little relevance to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, at some point I’ll dump the remaining items one-a-day around the rest of the blog schedule to finish them off. But in the mean time, I need some breathing space for my two-week trip to Ireland in August (for Worldcon) plus recovery time while I line up more blog material. Oh, and August is also when I’m doing the editorial revisions for Floodtide. Another reason to set up a series of blogs where I can just hit the button and publish. [Edited to add: I wrote up all the entries for this collection a week ago before I started the Floodtide revisions when I anticipated a longer process. As it happens, we finished two go-rounds of editorial feedback this past weekend and it's all done. Yay!]
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #258 Amtower & Kehler 2003 Introduction
About LHMP
Full citation:
Amtower, Laurel and Dorothea Kehler. 2003. “Introduction” in The Single Woman in Medieval and Early Modern England: Her Life and Representation, ed. by Laurel Amtower and Dorothea Kehler. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. ISBN 0-06698-306-6
Publication summary:
A collection of articles on the general topic of how single women are represented in history and literature in medieval and early modern England. Not all of the articles are clearly relevant to the LHMP but I have included all the contents.
As usual, the introduction to this collection includes laying out the basic concepts of the topic, a review of the existing literature, and then summaries of the papers that discuss how they relate to each other.
Among the social categories for women, “singlewomen” is a complex that includes widows and pre-married women as well as never-married women. It can include well-born “spinsters” and economically independent businesswomen, as well as wage earners (including domestic and agricultural laborers). Existing research includes some in-depth statistical surveys of singlewomen across time and space, but studies have rarely included literary studies and typically begin their focus in the 16th century.
This collection discusses methods for recovering the lives of singlewomen from a broader cultural perspective. Good previous publications in the field include Bennett & Froide (Singlewomen in the European Past), Lewis et al. (Young Medieval Women), Hufton (The Prospect Before Her). All share a focus that women can’t be reduced to a single category or experience. A given woman’s life can represent multiple experiences.
This collection focuses mainly on representation of singlewomen, especially literary representation. It notes how the division of singlewomen into sub-classes masks their pervasive presence in society. There is a discussion of different sub-classes within the category. Each era has a normative model of women’s lives, and those who don’t fit are stereotyped and argued away as non-typical. These essays discuss those various contexts and how they sustain or contradict the model of patriarchal restrictions on women’s options.
The collection is divided into “Celebrating Chastity”, “Repudiating Marriage”, “Imaginary Widowhood”, and “Sexuality and Re-virgination.” One focus of the papers is on the potential agency of singlewomen. How was singlehood understood as an available and even positive choice? The remainder of the introduction is a summary and contextualization of the contents.
Time period: Medieval (general)Renaissance (general)Early Modern (general)Place: EnglandMisc tags: singlewomen
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July 20, 2019
What Wills Can Tell Us About Women’s Lives
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
I picked this book up more for general background research on women's lives and expectations, but since I'm doing a thematic run of publications on singlewomen and on social and economic contexts in which women had the possibility of living lives independent of marriage and patriarchal control, it fits in well enough to include.
Reading through the details of what daughters were inheriting, how those inheritances reflected their life expectations, and how they fit into the social and economic structure of the time, we can easily construct a number of scenarios in which a woman could establish and enjoy a stable, comfortable life, with family bonds and positive community relationships, without ever marrying a man and--here's the key element--without that state being considered unusual, scandalous, or suspicious. And given the structure of households, she would almost certainly share her life with other women: with unmarried sisters or more distant relatives, with female servants, with apprentices (or apprenticed to someone), or even with "very dear friends" who preferred not to live on their own.
You don't need to require your lesbian protagonist to reject her family. To leave her community. To be an outcast or considered "peculiar" if she lives on her own without marrying. Have her parents leave her a few income-producing tenements. Perhaps a house with a "rent" shop attached to it. Her brother and married sister expect that the property will make a good dowry some day, but if she isn't that "lucky" then at least she won't need their charity. Maybe she feels underfoot in her sibling's house and chooses to live on her own. She's learned a trade and maybe even has an apprentice or two of her own. She'll hire a few servants and be very combortable in that house. And the young widow who's set up shop in the "rent" is industrious and friendly and...lonely. There's your premise. Go write!
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
LHMP #257 Staples 2011 Daughters of London
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Full citation:
Staples, Kate Kelsey. 2011. Daughters of London: Inheriting Opportunity in the Late Middle Ages. Brill, Leiden. ISBN 978-9004203112
This book is a study of inheritance patterns for women as their parent's daughters (as opposed to inheriting from more distant relations or unrelated persons), based on a collection of London wills dating to 1300-1500. Within this historic context (i.e., 14-15th century London), 15% of women never married. So although Staples doesn't have a way of correlating her data against the eventual life-pattern of the beneficiaries, I read the text always keeping in mind that greater than 15% of the daughters being discussed (because married daughters were often omitted from wills due to having aready received a dowry) were potentially using that inheritance to establish themselves in a life independent of heterosexual marriage. Even in the case of inheriting daughters who eventually married, there is a usefulness to consider how they used that inheritance in the period before they did so.
The study covers 3000 wills, mentioning 1500 daughters and 1800 sons. The author notes a common assumption that daughters would inherit moveable property (household goods and furnishings, money) while sons would inherit real estate (houses, shops, lands, rental property). But this assumption is contradicted in this data set, with both daughters and sons inheriting both types of items.
There are some large-scale shifts in inheritance patterns (some of which are not reflected in the data set covered here), such as a shift in the 12-13th century towards focusing more on primogeniture (a preference for the eldest son, rather than all children sharing more equally). There were also changes aimed at putting more control of family property into the hands of male heirs, such that family wealth would be kept "within the family" and passed along as a cumulative whole, as well as a tendency for the property women brought into a marriage to come under her husband's control.
But urban patterns were often different from rural ones, and even at this earlier period could sometimes favor women's control of marital property in specific cases, even while downplaying the role of women as "economic producers" in marriage. London in particular has its own patterns, especially with regard to real estate held by burgage tenure (a type of tenure also found in other towns). While the types of land tenure prevalent in rural areas normally came with obligations for providing military service (or equivalent) and required the lord's permission to sell or divide the property, burgage tenure allowed for unrestricted sale or transfer of the property and came with no similar service requirements. These features combined to make it more likely that urban daughters could inherit real estate along with moveable property. Urban families were more likely to follow "partible" inheritance (i.e., equally to all children) rather than focusing on consolidation and transmission of undivided lands. [Note: although the author doesn't explain this specifically, one practical economic reason for this is that there were economies of scale in agricultural lands. At a certain point, inheriting an equal share of a very small amount of land requires more work than it produces value. Whereas inheriting an equal share of an income-producing piece of urban real estate still provides an income, however small.]
London wills clearly show the intent to leave both domestic and commercial real estate to daughters along with sons, and not only to married daughters. The nature of this data confines it to families who did own property. The very poor did not leave wills of this type. And wills don't necessarily mention all the children in a family, only those receiving bequests. So it isn't possible to reconstruct the complete family situation. A son or daughter who had already left the family home and established their own household at the time the will was drafted--quite likely receiving financial support to do so--may not be mentioned at all.
The set of wills studied here (based on a particular registering office) are primarily of wealthy artists and merchants. The wills are primarily drawn up by men (88%) as ownership of property within a marriage devolved on the man. The wills by women are mostly from widows. The categories of beneficiaries (and there was usually more than one) were 25% non-family friends and associates, and roughly equal percentages (ca. 20% each) for wives, daughters, and sons, with sons being slightly more often represented than the others. The remainder of much small categories include siblings and more distant relatives.
Bequests might include conditions for what happened to the property after the initial beneficiary died, such as property left to a wife with the condition that it go to the children after her death, or for "cross-inheritance" by siblings, where the survivor would receive property of a sibling who pre-deceased them. Other specific conditions might be imposed on inheritance especially, but not only, for daughters.
A detailed example: The will of Thomas Curteise (1349) made his daughter Alice his main beneficiary. She received a tenement (see explanation below) for her lifetime and a collection of brewing equipment, presumably with the expectation that she would engage in that business.
The daughters of noble, professional, and artisan families were more likely to receive real estate than the daughters of government officials or merchants, but this is only a general pattern and not an absolute rule.
Among the testators (i.e., the persons making the will), 69% of female testators are identified as widows. (The number may be higher, but these are explicitly identified as such.) Less than 5% of women are identified in the document as a wife with the husband still living who gives permission for the bequests. More than 10% of female testators mention no husband, living or dead, although this isn't absolute proof of never-married status.
Bequests sometimes included restrictions and conditions. A common one was that part of the income from a piece of real estate be used to fund religious commemorations for the soul of the testator after death. (Charity and gifts to religious institutions also made a significant proportion of bequests.) Alternately, the condition might be that the recipient perform some act regularly, like praying or burning a candle for the soul of the deceased. As a general pattern, sons were more likely than daughters to have pious requirements placed on their bequests.
Less common requirements included provision for the support of relatives, use by daughters as a marriage portion, restrictions on marriage portions regarding the timing of marriage or choice of spouse (including a couple of instructions forbidding marriage to a named individual), or the use of funds for schooling (generally sons) or apprenticeship (most often sons, but also some daughters). It's unclear what happened to a bequest earmarked for a marriage portion if the daughter never married [but I've seen mention in other publications that she would gain legal control of is at the age of majority].
Only 7% of daughters mentioned in the wills are described as married (as comparison, less than 1% of sons are described as married). [Note: as mentioned above, part of the context here is that sons and daughters who had already married at the time the will was made may have already been provided for at the time of marriage.]
Women's wills slightly favored female recipients for moveable property and tended to favor sons for real estate, while men's wills were roughly even-handed with regard to the gender of beneficiaries of real estate. But overall these differences are slight.
Looking specifically at daughters as beneficiaries, what did they receive? 78% received some amount of real estate (compared with 86% of sons receiving real estate). The types of real estate are distributed as follows:
46% tenements (a vague general term, but probably mostly indicating residences that could be rented - left to daughters and sons roughly equally)
14% commercial property (shops, brewhouses, inns, bakehouses - more likely to be left to sons)
14% "rents" (in theory, any commercial property, but often used specifically for a street-facing commercial space attached to, but not part of, a dwelling -- left to daughters and sons roughly equally)
11% other
10% houses
4% dwellings and halls
Sometimes sons received real estate with the requirement of providing an annuity to a sister until she married or entered a convent. This served the purposes of providing for both while not dividing the property. Alternately, a son might be given real estate with the requirement that he provide a marriage portion for his sister(s). [Note: one can see the potential personal drama given that the inheriting son has control over the money flow, though the sister(s) had the option to take him to court to collect per the terms of the will.]
A daughter might receive real estate as a direct bequest ("in fee tail") or only as a secondary heir in the case that her brother(s) died without issue. Property in fee tail could be left to anyone, not only blood relatives. But there were many other variants of types of tenancy that included restrictions on who real estate could be left to. Some types specified that if the recipient died without legitimate heirs, the property could only go to another family member. [Note: historical fiction fans maybe familiar from a much later date with property left "in tail male" or "entailed on the male line" in which real estate could only go to the nearest male heir, no matter how distant. This was only one particular restriction and far from universal.]
Types of restrictions placed on inherited real estate include those designed to keep property associated with a married daughter, both during the marriage and in widowhood, or to ensure it went to her children, rather than giving her husband the right to dispose of it at will. English law in this regard differed from that of southern Europe (as a general pattern) in that never-married women enjoyed full legal control over their property rather than requiring a male relative (or other male associate) to act for them.
While inheritance of real estate was important for financial stability and independence, bequests of moveable property can also give us an image of what daughters' lives and expectations were like.
There were gendered differences in what types of movables sons and daughters inherited, but contrary to stereotype, daughters weren't limited to "domestic" goods (i.e., furnishings, kitchen equipment, etc.). English tradition held that a man should leave movable goods in three equal portions: 1/3 to the wife, 1/3 to the children, and 1/3 distributed as alms. This distribution system was adjusted if the testator lacked either a wife, children, or both.
But not all goods would be described and specified in the will, so named items provide only part of the picture. Sometimes wills describe only the proportions. "Movables" included money and annuities and similar fixed incomes. Sons and daughters received monetary inheritances in roughly equal proportions. Sometimes (as with income from real estate) there were restrictions or specifications on use, such as dowries for daughters or apprenticeship fees for sons. Daughters could also receive money earmarked for apprenticeship. One will specified that a daughter could use the money either as a dowry or for an apprenticeship. Annuities were counted as disposable "property" and were a common choice to leave to daughters who had entered convents.
Concrete goods could include household furnishings, but also crops in the field or other commercial inventory and livestock. Certain types of goods were much more likely to be left to sons: commercial goods, sailing vessels, armor, books. Goods given to daughters could indicate a specific trade she was expected to engage in, such as candlemaking or brewing. Often these were types of trades expected to supplement household activities rather than with the expectation of it being a full-time profession. The occupations indicated by these goods often straddled the division between personal consumption and commercial production, such as brewing, making clothing, and spinning.
Household goods could also serve both as useful objects and as a reserve of wealth. Silver spoons were often mentioned in bequests, along with other types of silver household goods which could be easily sold at need.
The broad overlap in types of goods given to sons and daughters weakens the "separate spheres" concept held to by many historians that see medieval lives as sharply separated according to gender. What do these bequests tell us about the assertion that women passed from the authority of fathers to the authority of husbands? For one, daughters who left their parents' households were provided with property not only for domestic life but for commercial income. At least some subset of these inheriting daughters had the option of establishing their own households without the need for marriage.
How did the presence of siblings affect what people received? Statistically, women were more likely to receive real estate if a brother was also mentioned somewhere in the will. And sons were slightly less likely to receive real estate if a sister was mentioned. [Note: no speculation is made on what would motivate this.] In a number of cases--contrary to stereotype--daughters received real estate (houses, rents, lands) while their brothers received money and household goods.
The question arises, to what extent did these daughters manage their own real estate? Across northern Europe, we have tax and census records showing unmarried women pursuing occupations and inheriting businesses. There were women's professional guilds in trades that were dominated by female workers. (Although in other cases, women might be barred from guild membership in their own right despite dominating the profession.) And when wives shared a profession with their husbands, their participation in the trade may be obscured in the records due to the husband being the legal point-of-reference for taxes.
As trades moved out of being practiced within the household environment (and into separate physical spaces) there was a tendency for them to become professionalized and male dominated. By 1600, many women had been pushed out of higher-paying trades. But in the London wills studied in this book, it's clear that daughters were expected to participate in and benefit from property-based income sources.
Even in southern Europe, we find medieval women participating in investment and property management. They may have had fewer opportunities, but the opportunities were still available. Property rental seems to have been commonly available to women as a trade throughout medieval Europe. Often the women would have significant personal freedom in managing that property, even when married, although married women might officially require a husband's permission to actually sell the property out of the family.
In many ways, daughters of urban middle-class families had more expectations and more control over their property and lives than the daughters of the landed nobility.
Even in rural areas, during exceptional times such as after the 14th century plague, daughters can be found as landholders on their own, but this changed once the population recovered. In general rural families were more likely to leave real estate to sons than daughtes.
While customs differed from town to town daughters in many urban areas could inherit property as we've seen them do in London, whether they married or not. Conversely, in some urban areas, married daughters were assumed to have already received their share of the family wealth and do not appear in wills as beneficiaries.
In London and other towns, daughters could apprentice to crafts and could trade as "femme sole" (single woman) merchants whether married or not. (If a married woman was acting as a femme sole, she would need to state this explicitly in legal contexts.) And unmarried women had even more freedom as economic actors. In an early 16th century census of Coventry, singlewomen made up 43% of the female population. Two centuries earlier, in a poll tax of 1377, singlewomen made up around 30% of the female population. (In both cases, these proportions probably included widows.) Overall, women in towns were less likely to marry than rural women. So daughters in London and other towns must have had some expectation that they would use their inheritance to establish a life that did not involve marriage.
Time period: 14th c15th cPlace: EnglandMisc tags: female head of householdeconomic independencesinglewomenwidows
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LHMP: A Guide to Gender-Inclusive Language for Historians
The Lesbian Historic Motif Project
One of the academic mailing lists I subscribe to had the following forthcoming book announcement:
As editors of the forthcoming volume Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), we are delighted to share the pre-print version of the Trans & Genderqueer Studies Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide which we have worked on over the past two years along with a number of trans and genderqueer medievalists and allies. The final version of the guide will be included as an appendix to the volume, and will also be available to download as a free PDF from the Amsterdam University Press website.
The guide is written for a target audience of medievalists who are interested in trans theory, and in employing trans/genderqueer optics in their analysis of medieval texts, but who may not yet be familiar with the nuances of this terminology and its usage.
The pre-print version of the guide can be accessed and downloaded here: bit.ly/tgqsguidejune19
Please share widely - we hope that the guide will be interesting and useful to many of you!
With all best wishes,
Blake Gutt (University of Michigan)
Alicia Spencer-Hall (Queen Mary University of London)
The "please share widely" is my basis for including their announcement here, as both the book and the guide may be of interest to LHMP readers.
Given how often I encounter ambiguities and instersections of gender and sexuality issues in topics I present in the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, this sounded like a very useful resource for aligning the language I use for historic subjects and topics with current approachs in the field. I've developed my own approach, which is somewhat inconsistent. Sometimes I use the language that the contemporaries of my historic subjects used, sometimes I reflect the language used by the authors of the publications I'm summarizing, and sometimes--and especially when I'm specifically focusing on ambiguities of gender and sexuality--I'll use very technically precise language that distinguishes bodies, identities, behaviors, perceptions, and all the other layers.
Gutt & Spencer-Hall's language guide does provide a few useful approaches on that end, as I'll discuss below, but it felt like the substantial majority of the guide was focused, not on language about historic subjects, but on language for one's academic contemporaries. In other words, the current standards of linguistic politeness around contemporary gender identity. And while that is a valuable and useful set of guidelines to have gathered in one place, it isn't quite as useful as what I thought I was going to find, which was guidelines for how to talk about and refer to historic subjects that both takes into account different historic models and understandings of gender, and integrates that understanding with the standards of modern polite and respectful reference. The material that did cover discussions of historic subjects and topics was highly focused on relatively modern concerns, rather than on the medieval subjects of the book it will be included in. This perhaps makes sense in terms of trans and genderqueer studies in general, but was another point where my expectations were disappointed. So here's my very brief overview of the guide, noting the parts I found most useful and the places I felt it had weaknesses as a historian's apparatus. If you're interested in the topic, I encourage you to follow the link and read the original for yourself.
The guide begins with the premise that "linguistic violence" is done to marginalized communities by disrespectful, othering, and offensive language. This harm can be done either deliberately or through ignorance of the meanings carried by choices of terminology. All language use is inherently political. The key is to be aware of how language choice normalizes and reinforces certain perceptions while delegitimizing and erasing others.
This guide is intended as a resource for respectful and inclusive ways of discussing trans, genderqueer, and intersex topics, either with respect to specific individuals or to groups. It's not meant to be a set of fixed rules. Language changes, and communities have a variety of opinions and reactions to specific terms. Terms that were viewed as slurs in the past may be reclaimed and embraced; terms that were previously considered positive and affirming may become outdated or reframed as problematic. Rapid shifts in the current linguistic landscape create the risk that analytic writing that is considered neutral at the time it was produced may be considered distractingly inaccurate or offensive by near-future readers, but the answer is not to turn away from making the attempt.
The granularity of language may mean that different terms apply differently at various levels of specificity or particularity. Terminology may carry culture-specific meanings and be misleading or inapplicable when used to describe other cultures. Language that is descriptive in one cultural context may not fit other contexts well or at all. The authors of the guide recognize that as white Europeans, their understanding of the field will necessarily be shaped by that background.
The guide also hopes to distinguish between language that is generally appropriate for use by everyone, and language that may be potentially offensive if used by those not in the group it applies to.
This work is specifically grounded in, and aimed at, the work of medievalist scholars and their interactions with modernist theories of gender and sex. A number of foundational scholars are noted for their work in the field and for the theoretical grounding in which the guide is rooted. Certain basic vocabulary terms are presented to support common understanding of the guide. In particular, "sex" is used to refer to socially-assigned, biologically-based categories, while "gender" is used to refer to the individual's subjective sense of identity.
The majority of the guide is an alphabetic glossary of vocabulary that discusses the context in which the term has historically been used, the overt and covert meanings it carries (denotation and connotation), and discussions of alternate wordings and phrasings if a term is considered potentially problematic.
For example, the entry for "passing" (in a transgender context) discusses various layers of meaning, synonyms that may have more specific social contexts, comparison to parallel language as applied to sexual orientation, and suggestions for alternate wording that reframes the concept in terms of exterior perception rather than intent. For example, rather than saying "so-and-so passed as a man" consider "so-and-so was read as a man". [Note: This is definitely an term I'm going to work on adopting for exactly that reason--because it describes the social outcome rather than implying a particular intent.]
This is followed by a bibliography of further reading on specific vocabulary or topics.
* * *
My comments as a potential user for this guide.
This appears to be an excellent and detailed guide to language around gender identity in contemporary society. Most of the material was familiar to me, but I probably spend more effort than the average person to listen to current discourse around terminology and politeness strategies around gender. For those who feel confused about the current state of the language, it is likely to be very useful.
With regard to academic discourse, the discussions are not always clear whether the context is the historic material being presented and analyzed or whether the context is talking about the contemporary academic community. For example, in the entry for "Names" there is a detailed discussion of how to handle references to scholars who published both before and after transition, but rather less consideration of how to refer to historic subjects who are potentially readable as trans. And no advice at all on how to distinguish the handling of individual identity (i.e., the individual's own identity) in historic sources from the historic interpretation of how identities were read (i.e., how their contemporaries understood them).
Let me expand on that. One of the topics that I'd love to have more guidance on is how to discuss transgender motifs as presented in historic literature. Sometimes this can involve trying to determine how the literary character understood their gender (that is, within the story-context, how was their understanding of their own gender depicted?), but more often I'm analyzing how the historic author understood and depicted gender and transgender motifs. And that depiction is often based on ideas that are not currently considered acceptable, whether it is the idea that trans women are actually cis men engaging in deception or whether it is the idea that trans men are higher on the great chain of being than cis women. (This is touched on in the entry for "gender-critical" with regard to contemporary applications of the concepts, but that entry provides no guidance for discussing the underlying ideas in a historic context.)
This issue is touched on briefly under "assigned sex" with a caveat about being aware of whether a literary character is assigned a sex within the text or is being assigned a sex by the reader/scholar. There is, unfortunately, no real discussion or examples on how one might approach the question.
Some entries do provide very useful guidance on usage with regard to historic subjects, such as the one for the term "cross-dress(ing)" which explains why to avoid it in transgender contexts (because with regard to gender identity, the clothing isn't "cross") but discusses other contexts where it is appropriate and neutral (such as in dramatic presentations). The discussion of the term "hermaphrodite" is also detailed and useful.
In general, this seems to me to be an excellent guide to the contemporary use of language for contemporary people. But I had anticipated more consideration of how to discuss historic lives, motifs, and textual materials themselves in ways that are clear, informative, and sensitive. There was enough of a taste of that content that I don't think I was mistaken in expecting it, but not enough to feel that expectation had been fulfilled.
Major category: LHMPTags: LHMP
July 18, 2019
Book Review: European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss
I am frustrated in my desire to love this series. I love the concept (all the sff/fantasy/gothic novels of the 19th century were true in the same universe) and I love the characters (the daughters or female creations of the men in all those novels come together in a found family and have adventures). But this is the second book in the series in which I found the plot thin and the narrative style ponderous and somewhat bloated. The characters do a lot of traveling around across Europe and having episodic encounters with the antagonists, but I found it hard to get a sense that there was an overarching storyline. And (without spoilers) I felt that Our Heroines didn't really do much in the final climax other than show up.
Goss has a fractally detailed familiarity with the literature she draws on, and with the historic and geographic settings she uses, but those details were included in the narrative at about two levels above what would have worked for me. Rather than sketching out the setting just enough for the reader to get an impression and fill the rest in, we are told in detail exactly how the rooms are furnished and what the characters are eating, and are repetitively told things about their relationships to each other that we already know. This adds to slowing down the narrative sufficiently that I wasn't sure I was going to stick with it to the end. (I did.) Often at this point in a review, I'll say something about how the writing was solid and the story just didn't hit my sweet spot, but in this case the overall concept was totally sticky with my sweet spot, but the writing kept getting in the way of enjoying it as much as I wanted to.
I was also disappointed for a very personal and completely unfair reason. Other readers had promised me that this all-female-protagonist series was getting a bit of same-sex romance in book 2 and I was totally there for it, despite there being no hint of the fact in the promotional copy. But--and I don't consider this a spoiler--the same-sex element was simply the inclusion of Sheridan LeFanu's Carmilla among the literary characters who make up the supporting cast. Carmilla is canonically attracted to women and comes from exactly the sort of literature this series is based on. But I confess I was hoping that maybe we'd get a bit of queer rep among the protagonists. Who are all fascinating and indiidual characters. And who I'd love to read about in a story that had a more engaging structure.
Major category: ReviewsTags: Reviews: Books
