Amanda Hopkins & Cory James Rushton 
Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain 

It is often said that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, and perhaps no type of ’doing’ is more fascinating than sexual desires and behaviours. Our modern view of medieval sexuality is characterised bya polarising dichotomy between the swooning love-struck knights and ladies of romance on one hand, and the darkly imagined and misogyny of an unenlightened ’medieval’ sexuality on the other. British medieval sexual culture also exhibits such dualities through the influential paradigms of sinner or saint, virgin or whore, and protector or defiler of women. However, such sexual identities are rarely coherent or stable, and it is in the grey areas, the interstices between normative modes of sexuality, that we find the most compelling instances of erotic frisson and sexual expression.

This collection of essays brings together a wide-ranging discussion of the sexual possibilitiesand fantasies of medieval Britain as they manifest themselves in the literature of the period. Taking as their matter texts and authors as diverse as Chaucer, Gower, Dunbar, Malory, alchemical treatises, and romances, the contributions reveal a surprising variety of attitudes, strategies and sexual subject positions.


Amanda Hopkins teaches in English and French at the University of Warwick; Robert Allen Rouse is Associate Professor of English atthe University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Cory James Rushton is Associate Professor of English at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada.


Contributors: Aisling Byrne, Anna Caughey, Kristina Hildebrand, Amy S. Kaufman, Yvette Kisor, Megan G. Leitch, Cynthea Masson, Hannah Priest, Samantha J. Rayner, Robert Allen Rouse, Cory James Rushton, Amy N. Vines

Innehållsförteckning

Introduction: A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality – Robert Rouse

Introduction: A Light Thrown upon Darkness: Writing about Medieval British Sexuality – Cory Rushton

Open Manslaughter and Bold Bawdry: Male Sexuality as a Cause of Disruption in Malory’s
Morte Darthur – Kristina Hildebrand

Erotic (Subject) Positions in Chaucer’s
Merchant’s Tale – Amy S. Kaufman

Enter the Bedroom: Managing Space for the Erotic in Middle English Romance – Megan G. Leitch

’Naked as a nedyll’: The Eroticism of Malory’s Elaine – Yvette Kisor

’How love and I togedre met’: Gower, Amans and the Lessons of Venus in the
Confessio Amantis – Samantha J. Rayner

’Bogeysliche as a boye’: Performing Sexuality in
William of Palerne – Hannah Priest

Fairy Lovers: Sexuality, Order and Narrative in Medieval Romance – Aisling Byrne

Text as Stone: Desire, Sex and the Figurative Hermaphrodite in the
Ordinal and
Compound of Alchemy – Cynthea Masson

Animality, Sexuality and the Abject in Three of Dunbar’s Satirical Poems – Anna Caughey

The Awful Passion of Pandarus – Cory Rushton

Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance – Amy N. Vines

Om författaren

ROBERT ROUSE Associate Professor, Department of English at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada.