History & The Arts
Reading Between the Lines: uncovering racism and homophobia in British history
...writing had a persistent tendency to ascribe lesbianism to ‘other’ nations. This is certainly clear from the writings of seventeenth-century poets (including Alexander Pope) and prose writers, who often drew on Ovid’s epistles to suggest that the Greek poet Sappho was the ‘inventor’ of lesbian sex. Further than this, though, medical texts like Jane Sharp’s The...