Key scholars in the field of lesbian and sexuality studies take part in an innovative conversation that offers a radical new methodology for writing lesbian history and geography, drawing new conclusions on the important and often overlooked work being done on female same-sex desire and identity in relation to premodern cultures.

Preface: Lesbian Studies Meets the Premodern; K.Lochrie Introduction: The Lesbian Premodern; N.Giffney, M.M.Sauer  & D.Watt PART I: THEORIES AND HISTORIOGRAPHIES 'The Present Future of Lesbian Historiography'; V.Traub ''A Wrangling Parliament': Terminology and Audience in Medieval European Literary Studies and Lesbian Studies'; A.Laskaya 'Lesbian History and Erotic Reading'; L.Farina 'The Queer Time of the Lesbian Premodern'; C.Freccero ''Virgins' and 'Not Women': Dissident Gender Positions'; T.Jankowski PART II: READINGS AND HISTORIES 'Virgin Desires: Reading a Homoerotics of Female Monastic Community'; L.M.C.Weston 'Medieval Barbie Dolls: Femme Fatales in Ascetic Collections'; A.Klosowska 'Naming Love: The God Kama, the Goddess Ganga and the Child of Two Women'; R.Vanita 'Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge'; J.M.Bennett 'Towards a Philology of the Premodern Lesbian'; H.Puff PART III: ENCOUNTERS WITH THE LESBIAN PREMODERN 'Lesbian Time'; H.Bauer 'A Usable Past?'; L.Faderman 'Sacramentality and the Lesbian Premodern'; E.Freeman 'Invention is the Necessity of Lesbians'; L.Garber 'Lesbian Ghosts'; M.Vicinus Afterword: The Lesbian Premodern Meets the Lesbian Postmodern; R.Wiegman

Noreen Giffney is a research coordinator in the Graduate Research and Education Programme in Gender, Culture, and Identity in the Humanties Institute at the University College Dublin, Ireland.