BiblioVault - Books about Germany

Queenship and Sanctity

The Lives of Mathilda and the Epitaph of Adelheid (Medieval Texts in Translation)

Sean Gilsdorf

Catholic University of America Press, 2004

Queenship and Sanctity brings together for the first time in English the anonymous Lives of Mathilda and Odilo of Cluny's Epitaph of Adelheid. Richly annotated, with an extensive introduction placing the texts and their subjects in historical and hagiographical context, it provides teachers and students with a crucial set of sources for the history of Europe (particularly Germany) in the tenth and eleventh centuries, for the development of sacred biography and medieval notions of sanctity, and for the life of aristocratic and royal women in the early Middle Ages.

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The Queer Art of History

Queer Kinship after Fascism

Jennifer V. Evans

Duke University Press, 2023

In The Queer Art of History Jennifer V. Evans examines postwar and contemporary German history to broadly argue for a practice of queer history that moves beyond bounded concepts and narratives of identity. Drawing on Black feminism, queer of color critique, and trans studies, Evans points out that although many rights for LGBTQI people have been gained in Germany, those rights have not been enjoyed equally. There remain fundamental struggles around whose bodies, behaviors, and communities belong. Evans uses kinship as an analytic category to identify the fraught and productive ways that Germans have confronted race, gender nonconformity, and sexuality in social movements, art, and everyday life. Evans shows how kinship illuminates the work of solidarity and intersectional organizing across difference and offers an openness to forms of contemporary and historical queerness that may escape the archive’s confines. Through forms of kinship, queer and trans people test out new possibilities for citizenship, love, and public and family life in postwar Germany in ways that question claims about liberal democracy, the social contract, and the place of identity in rights-based discourses.

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Queer Livability

German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing

Ina Linge

University of Michigan Press, 2023

This book brings together an exciting new archive of queer and trans voices from the history of sexual sciences in the German-speaking world. A new language to express possibilities of gender and sexuality emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, from Sigmund Freud’s theories of homosexuality in Vienna to Magnus Hirschfeld’s “third sex” in Berlin. Together, they provided a language of sex and sexuality that is still recognizable today. Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing shows that individual voices of trans and queer writers had a significant impact on the production of knowledge about gender and sexuality during this time and introduces lesser known texts to a new readership. It shows the remarkable power of queer life writing in imagining and creating the possibilities of a livable life in the face of restrictive legal, medical, and social frameworks.

Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing will be of interest to anyone who wants to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and literature. It also provides a fascinating insight into the historical roots for our thinking about gender and sexuality today. The book will be of relevance to an academic readership of students and faculty in German studies, literary studies, European history, and the interdisciplinary fields of gender and sexuality studies, medical humanities, and the history of sexuality.

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