E arly Christianity emerged in a world in which people from various walks of life acknowledged that women could have sexual contact with women. Close textual analysis of several early Christian writers demonstrates that they knew more about sexual relations between women than previous scholars have assumed, which accords with a heightened awareness of female homoeroticism within the cultural environment of early Christianity. Whereas pre-Roman-period Greek and Latin literature contains very few references to female homoeroticism, the awareness of sexual relations between women increases dramatically in the Roman pe¬ riod, as a detailed study of astrological texts, Greek love spells, Greek medi¬ cal writings, ancient dream interpretation, and other sources reveals. Because a strict distinction between active and passive sexual roles gov¬ erned the prevailing cultural conceptualizations of sexual relations in the Roman world, it shaped the way that people viewed female homoeroti¬ cism. 1 The distinction between active and passive shaped Roman-period
Bernardette J. Brooten – Love Between Women. Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Univ of Chicago Press, 1996)
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