Marie Antoinette as Ghostly Lover

One of the hazards of any vast sprawling research undertaking, such as the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, is anxiety about doing any sort of synthesis or conclusions with incomplete material. I still give an ironic mental wince when I recall that my original idea for the Project was to gather all the research and write a definitive sourcebook on lesbian motifs in history.

But it regularly happens that I'll create some sort of topical essay and then later trip over material that it would have been nice to incorporate into it. For example, Castle's detailed tracing of the development of the "lesbian Marie Antoinette" motif would have been useful as source material when I put together the podcast on the Anandrine Sect, with its side-bar on Marie Antoinette. Somewhat more seriously, the podcast on classical Roman sexuality would have been significantly improved in nuance if the English translation of Boehringer's work on female homosexuality in classical societies had been published three or four years earlier, so I'd had a chance to read it before doing that podcast. And there are definitely potential podcast episodes that I haven't produced yet because there are publications I want to cover before doing so.

And yet, you can't spend all your life being perfectly ready and sufficiently skilled to Do The Thing. Otherwise you may never do it at all.

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