Are there any written accounts of lesbians in medieval and renaissance times?

Great question!

While I can not speak for Medieval Europe, I can shine some light on what Middle Eastern authors had to say about lesbians and other queer women in the Middle Ages.

So to begin with it is worth pointing out that modern sexual identities are just that, modern, and they are often inadequate to describe ideas of sexuality, eroticism, desire, and identity in the premodern world. This is not to say that social and sexual roles did not play an important role in shaping premodern identities, just that Medieval women and men would have interpreted themselves in a very different way than we might today.

The term “lesbian” is actually a good example of the limitations of projecting modern sexuality onto the past. it was coined in the 19th Century and is derived from later interpretations of the 7th Century BC poet Sappho, a native of Lesbos, as a queer woman. By the early 21st Century, it has acquired many different connotations and transformed into a distinct sexual identity with associated subcultures. Not to mention that exactly who counts as a bona fide lesbian is an endlessly moving goalpost. For instance, is it unfair to leave out women who might have been sexually intimate with both men and women by defining “lesbians” as those women who are exclusively attracted to women? Can we include sexual attraction in the absence of sexual contact between women, and if so how do we go about finding certain examples of this with our limited body of evidence? Equally important, modern conceptions of “lesbianism” carry strong associations with contemporary feminist thought and gender studies, ideas which would have been totally alien to the Medieval world. To be a “lesbian” would have meant something quite different to a woman in the Medieval world than what it might mean to women in the 20th/21st Century.

Nevertheless, Medieval Arabic had many terms that are broadly equivalent to the term “lesbian” in the sense that they refer to women who were sexually or romantically attracted to other women and who pursued same-sex relationships. If I were discussing ancient Greece or the Roman Empire, this is the point where I would add a disclaimer about how sexual identities and subcultures based around sexual identity did not exist, but this is not strictly speaking true of the Medieval Islamic world. This means that we can piece together an answer to your question and for the sake of brevity and clarity I am going to use the term lesbian as a broad umbrella for homosexual women and same sex relationships between women.

#Part 1/3: Lesbians and lesbian identity in the Medieval Islamic world

Religion obviously played a key role in dictating the ethics and morality of sexuality in Medieval society, but it is equally clear that religious ideals changed dramatically over time and that they did not always line up with reality. Medieval Islamic literature is not entirely straightforward in its attitudes towards same-sex desire but it appears that religious prohibition of homosexuality did not become a major influence over sexual expression until at least the 13th Century.

Firstly, it is important to note that lawful sex and sexual desire as a whole was viewed quite positively in Medieval Islam whereas it was more or less a necessary evil to Medieval Christianity. This more generally sex positive attitude probably played a large role in the relatively more lenient attitudes towards homosexuality. By and large the unforgivable sexual sin in the Medieval Islamic kind was adultery, and this occurred between a man and woman. Male homosexuality, particularly anal penetration, is often compared to adultery in Islamic jurisprudence. Sahq was similarly seen as criminal, but warranting a lighter punishment than liwat (sodomy) or zina (adultery).

The religious condemnation of homosexuality seems to have been largely ignored by society as a whole at times during the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Homosexual relationships, crossdressing, and genderqueer identities were openly celebrated by the upper levels of Islamic society during the Abbasid and Mamluk periods, among them lesbian sexualities and female crossdressing. This contributed to the production of an overwhelming abundance of homoerotic poetry in Islamic cultural centres in the Near East, North Africa and al-Andalus. This is not to imply that any kind of post-gender or sexually egalitarian society existed, far from it, just that sexual mores and acceptable behaviours extended far behind the limitations of strict religious prohibitions.

Medieval Islamic perceptions of lesbians did not develop in a vacuum, they drew heavily from pre-Islamic Near Eastern and Classical Graeco-Roman thought. To my knowledge, Medieval European discourse on sexuality also drew from Graeco-Roman literature in addition to Christian morality. We can see parallels in Medieval Islamic and Graeco-Roman thought in the terminology used to describe lesbians and lesbian-like women. Many of the Arabic terms for female same-sex activities and orientation (for example sahq meaning lesbianism, and sahiqa, musahiqa, sahaqa meaning lesbian) are etymologically derived from roots which denote “rubbing” or “pounding” (as in pounding or grinding spices). Greek and Latin terms (like fricatrix and tribas) have similar roots in their respective languages. The origin of these descriptive terms is fairly self-explanatory, they connote the physical aspect of sexuality, something which is fairly common for both languages. Other terms like the Arabic nisa’ mutarajjilat connote masculinity and describe a woman with manly virtues or characteristics (a Latin equivalent to this term might be virago).

The etymology of these former of these terms ties back into the medical and anatomical explanations that ancient and Medieval authors had to offer for homosexuality. Mild NSFW warning because while I will try to avoid explicit discussion of sex I am going to briefly dip into Medieval medical theory concerning sexual orientation and intercourse. The 2nd Century AD physician Galen was supposed to have diagnosed the cause of lesbianism in his daughter as an “itch” between the major and minor labia. The only way to relieve this “itch” was by rubbing, particularly rubbing against another woman’s labia in order to “cool” it. This theory is echoed by the 9th Century scholar al-Kindi who claimed that:

Lesbianism is due to a vapor which, condensed, generates in the labia heat and an itch which only dissolve and become cold through friction and orgasm. When friction and orgasm take place, the heat turns into coldness because the liquid that a woman ejaculates in lesbian intercourse is cold whereas the same liquid that results from sexual union with men is hot. Heat, however, cannot be extinguished by heat; rather, it will increase since it needs to be treated by its opposite. As coldness is repelled by heat, so heat is also repelled by coldness.

Medieval Islamic literature took this medicalization of lesbian desire in other directions by postulating pre-natal causes of lesbianism. Namely, the consumption of certain foods by nursing women was believed to pass through the milk and cause labia itching, and therefore life-long lesbianism, in infants. The interesting thing about all of these theories is that lesbianism was viewed as an innate, biological, reality which could not be reversed or cured. Obviously, the medical theory behind these diagnoses was far from sound but it is significant that these authors believed that homosexuality was something which occurred naturally in certain individuals rather than an affliction or perversion. This is reinforced by other Medieval Islamic literary traditions which mention homosexuality in humans and animals.

Asl al-Aila al-Arabia cites the 8th Century scholar al-Jaheth who reports homosexuality and bisexuality as a natural condition in both male and female pigeons as well as humans. This is succinctly summed up in one line:

There are men who do not want women, and women who do not want men.

However, fixating on physical acts and outright desire makes the task of identifying lesbians in Medieval literature a bit difficult, because it limits our scope to women who actively engage in sexual relations with other women. This leaves out, for instance, unfulfilled same sex attraction as well as romantic friendships and non-sexual intimacy. We must also take care when figuring out where, when, and if we draw the line between strong platonic emotional attachments, homoerotic interactions, and homosexual relationships.

Continued below: