The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain (review)

The essayists of The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain ponder the meaning of sexuality in the writings of the British Middle Ages and, in so doing, they expand our conception of the erotic to consider its manifold tensions and pleasures. In genres including romance, lyric poetry, family epistles, and historiography, erotic sensibilities seep through sexuality into issues of politics, culture, and personal identity and prove the power of human desire to dismantle any ostensible cultural projections of erotic ambivalence. Sex matters, in both St Paul's procreative and the Wife of Bath’s hedonistic arguments, and medieval writers grappled with the inescapable frisson inherent in writing about humanity’s erotic drives.

In Cory Rushton and Amanda Hopkins’s introduction to the volume, subtitled “The Revel, the Melodye, and the Bisynesse of Solas,” readers find a concise overview of the meaning of the erotic in the Middle Ages. This admirable survey, relying heavily on Ruth Mazo Karras’s Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing unto Others as well as the works of such scholars as Jeffrey Richards and Karma Lochrie, provides a contextual foundation upon which the subsequent essays build. The editors claim that their collection “differ[s] from recent scholarship on sexuality and gender ... in its insistence on the subject of erotic pleasure, and its identification of a deliberate erotics in texts produced in medieval Britain” (15). Erotic desires, whether acknowledged or not, push many narratives forward, and this genital dynamic merits scrutiny for its often untamed energies and their effect on unfolding narratives.

Sue Niebrzydowski’s “‘So wel koude he me glose’: The Wife of Bath and the Eroticism of Touch” considers the intersection of textual and erotic pleasures in regard to Chaucer’s lusty wife and the textual/sexual pleasures of glossing. This is not altogether new territory, as it is covered by such scholars as Carolyn Dinshaw in her “‘Glose / bele chose’: The Wife of Bath and Her Glossators” (chapter 4 of Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics [Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989]) and Catherine S. Cox in her “Holy Erotica and the Virgin Word: Promiscuous Glossing in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue” (Exemplaria 5.1 [1993]: 207–37). In “The Lady’s Man: Gawain as Lover in Middle English Literature,” Cory Rushton catalogs Gawain’s appearances in the romance tradition to highlight his erotic exploits. The critical apparatus of this essay is somewhat wobbly in several regards, including a naive assumption of heteronormative male desire among readers, an anachronistic contextualization of male eroticism through the figure of James Bond, and an unwieldy application of film theory to medieval texts. Still, Rushton's argument about the ways in which Gawain’s erotic adventures often serve political ends is intriguing, and it is to be regretted that this thesis is not as fully fleshed out as it might have been.

Corinne Saunders, in “Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance,” traces how erotic desire and magic mingle in the portrayal of female otherworldly figures in such romances as Lanval, Partonope of Blois, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Morte D'Arthur, as well as of their male counterparts in Sir Orfeo and Sir Degarré. Saunders observes the complex negotiations of gender and agency in these romances, provocatively suggesting that enchantresses “move in out of empowerment in their relations with men: magic allows them to pursue desire, yet desire also proves threatening to them” (46). Amanda Hopkins addresses clothing and nudity and their relationship to eroticism in “‘Wordy vnthur wede’: Clothing, Nakedness, and the Erotic in Some Romances of Medieval Britain”; she concludes, unsurprisingly and somewhat tautologically, that medieval authors of romance “were aware of the potential eroticism of their descriptions and the interplay of the erotic, clothing and nakedness” (70). In “‘Some Like It Hot’: The Medieval Eroticism of Heat,” Robert Allen Rouse tackles the meaning of summer heat in Sir Launfal by considering how conceptions of the calendar merge with...