Jemma Louise Forster

Thesis Title: Dianic Networks of Female Homoeroticism in Early Modern Europe  

Supervisor: Dr. Tania Demetriou  

This thesis examines the function of Diana as a signifier of female homoeroticism in Elizabethan and Jacobean texts, interrogating the critical understanding of Diana’s primary association with Elizabeth I and the cult of chastity in early modern English literature.  Providing multiple new European sources for the representation of Diana’s train in English texts – such as Montemayor’s La Diana and Luigi Groto’s La Calisto – I call attention to the nuances of literary transmission and reception, demonstrating that the literary interest in Diana as a signifier of female homoeroticism does not derive solely from the vogue Ovidianism of the Elizabethan period, and is instead often in response to earlier European texts that integrate Diana into a framework of pastoral homoeroticism. Whilst the central concern of this thesis is the pervasiveness of Diana’s association with female homoerotic behaviours in texts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period (Philip Sidney, John Lyly, Shakespeare, Thomas Heywood), my historicist approach also sheds light on the transmission of European texts into England and on the complex, mediated relationship between early modern readers and classical texts. 

I completed my English BA at The University of Cambridge in 2022, and my MA in Early Modern English Literature at King’s College London in 2023. My OOC AHRC DTP studentship is co-funded by Trinity Hall.