Posted on 11/07/2020 10:10:40 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1721, a woman named Catharina Margaretha Linck was beheaded with a sword in the Halberstadt fishmarket for homosexuality.
One projects modern sexualities into the past at peril but as Rictor Norton concludes, “there seems no reason why we should not agree with the lawyers at the trial, who defined her as a fricatrice, a ‘rubbing woman’ — in other words, a lesbian.”
Linck (English Wikipedia entry | German) busted out of the anonymous drudgery due an orphan seamstress and into historical monographs by joining an itinerant Quaker movement called the “Inspirants”.
Under those circumstances her habit of going about in men’s clothing might really have been an expedient to elude the male gaze just like Joan of Arc.
It was also a door into the male world: the gender-bending “Anastasius Rosenstengel”, as she called herself, proceeded to enlist herself by turns in the Hanoverian, Prussian, and Polish armies and fight in the War of Spanish Succession....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
well I felt my IQ drop after reading that... :O
It seems clear enough.
This person had a career posing as a man, apparently with success.
The problem came when she married an 18 year old girl under false pretences - it does not seem that the girl knew what she was getting into. This person Link benefited, it seems, from the custom at the time of doing the business clothed, and with the use of “accessories”, but the “thing” was revealed by the girls mother.
Marrying under false pretences would have been a very serious charge on its own, as well as the attempted corruption of a young woman.
The problem was with the leather appendage.
She was convicted because “she kept it in her pants.”
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