Premodernists are always complaining that people who work on the modern or postmodern period ignore and isolate them. If only those people would read our work, we lament, they would see how much we have to contribute. This volume attempts to remedy the situation by having a distinguished group of scholars of later periods comment on the work of medievalists and early modernists.

Although the editors and a number of the chapter authors discuss the theoretical underpinnings of history and historiography, there are relatively few historians involved. The distinction between doing theory and “traditional methodologies” including “reconstructive histories” (8) leaves out a lot of fine scholarship in the middle. The chapters by Helmut Puff and Judith Bennett are indeed reconstructive or recuperative, in the sense that they use little-known sources to inform us about little-known nonfictional women. But they do so in order to use these women to address larger questions. There is nothing here that is wholly recuperative.

There are, however, a number of pieces that are wholly theoretical. Of five chapters in the first section, “Theories and Historiographies,” three of them contain not a single quotation from any premodern text and precious few passing references to specific texts. These are authors who have elsewhere discussed theory in relation to close readings of texts but, for the purpose at hand, when they are limited to a brief chapter, have chosen (or been asked) to focus on the theory. That by no means deprives the chapters of value: Valerie Traub’s chapter, in particular, attempts to get around the debate between alterity and continuism by posing the idea of “cycles of salience,” in which enduring themes “assume different contours, contents, and emphases when examined from historically specific locations” (30). Her list of themes could easily be the jumping-off point for any number of syllabi, colloquia, or books, not just on premodern Europe but cross-culturally and cross-temporally.

The one chapter in the book that deals with issues from beyond Europe, by Ruth Vanita, raises a number of fascinating issues. First, why does “imaginative excess” in some Bengali texts take the form of explicitly sexual unions between two women, when it does not in Europe? Second, what is the role of fertility (or lack thereof) in the way a culture views or represents lesbian relations? Reproduction was crucially important in many premodern societies. While Karma Lochrie is right in pointing out that “heteronormativity” is an anachronistic concept (xiii), reproductive normativity—or if we cannot speak of norms, reproductive expectation—was very common in premodern Europe. Scholars of same-sex relations in Europe, both in this volume and elsewhere, might well consider the relation of such unions to nonreproductive sex between men and women, as Anna Kłosowska does (112). They might also consider what role the possibility of reproduction plays in making, in Theodora Jankowski’s words, “the addition of a penis” (84) the key to whether a union is transgressive or not.

As the editors problematize the premodern in their introduction, they discuss “just how important it is for those writing about the lesbian past to cross borders” (7), but while Vanita’s chapter provides fascinating contrasts (as well as parallels to which the editors refer), it is solitary in this volume. Chapters on other regions, for example East Asia, could have raised similar productive contrasts, and given the number of chapters here that focus on lesbian-like behavior (e.g., rejection of marriage) rather than on cases where we can identify what Lillian Faderman calls “affectional or sexual same-sex interests” (177), the net could be cast rather wide.

Several of the articles, unsurprisingly, address religiously cloistered women. It is important to recognize, as Lisa M. C. Weston does, that “though monastic women … bound in homosocial community, may seem ‘lesbian-like’ to modern readers … monastic rejection of physical acts of desire surely problematizes the legibility of lesbian(-like) sexualities” (93). The single-sex space of the convent, male or female, is a good place to look for same-sex desire. Were all affectional interactions there in some way homoerotic? Perhaps they were to the same extent that all affectional interactions between women and men can be said to be in some way heteroerotic. But we need to remember that premodern people, who had not read Freud and Lacan, would not have seen them that way, might indeed have vehemently denied an erotic aspect.

Our analyses or theorization of premodern texts certainly do not have to be limited to how contemporaries would have explained them, but the question is not irrelevant. Kłosowska suggests that portrayals of sexually attractive women in manuscripts for female readers represent a femme sensibility. However, she does not address how the relation between desiring someone and desiring to be like that person was different in the premodern period (with its ideas about exemplarity and imitatio) and in our postmodern age (with its commoditization, hence, the Barbie doll to which Kłosowska analogizes the images).

In many ways, this book is too short. Several pieces are abridged from work that appeared elsewhere. Longer chapters in which the authors could have included more textual examples to illustrate theory, illustrations for chapters that make extensive use of images, and more chapters that address the world outside Western Europe would have filled in some tantalizing gaps. The editors set out the expected audience as “those interested in contemporary lesbian theory, history, and literature” (1), but what the audience learns from the book will not include as much about premodern texts and contexts as most premodernists would like. As Linda Garber, one of the post-premodernist commentators, puts it, “in their specificity the research examples undergird the suitability of concepts and terms that are methodologically necessary to doing anything we might call ‘lesbian’ studies” (191), and more specific research examples would be very welcome.