“If she would also already be done away with, it would still remain the same”

Abstract

The literary scholar Angela Steidele meticulously traces the sole fragmentarily documented life of the assumedly last woman in Germany to be executed “because of so-called sodomy with another woman” (1). The history of love between women is “still to a great extent unwritten,” this particularly true, as Steidele in the afterward writes, for the time period between 1500 and 1850. With this monograph, Steidele succeeds in constructing a piece of German social and gender research in which, as she herself suggests, “the adventurer Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel” finds “her honorable place” (152).