ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book outlines the late seventeenth-century shifts in the cultural discourse of female homoeroticism' analysed by Valerie Traub in her monumental study, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England: From a governing logic of innocuousness and impossibility to a governing logic of suspicion and possibility. A social constructionist reading would see the term lesbian' itself as an anachronism for the eighteenth century, believing that sexual identity categories cannot exist before the coining of terminology to describe them. Eighteenth-century lesbians learned by doing, by seizing the opportunities that were available to them and following the same experimental routes by which most people discover sex and sexuality. The scholarship collected provides a multiplicity of new paths into the fields of women's studies, lesbian historiography, queer theory, and eighteenth-century studies, enabling a new generation of scholars to seek out their own lesbian dames.
