Sappho in Early Modern England by Harriette Andreadis

Harriette Andreadis examines public and private expressions of female same-sex sexuality in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Before modern sexual identities, literary and other texts, including travel narratives, anatomies and marital advice books, began to build a vocabulary of female intimacy. Andreadis shows how respectable middle-class and aristocratic women who did not see themselves as transgressive developed new language for their desires, while women then called tribades, fricatrices or 'rubsters' appeared in erotic writing that let them acknowledge their sexuality and still evade disapproval.