Inserting "A grete tente, a thrifty, and a long": Sexual Obscenity and Scribal Innovation in Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts of The Canterbury Tales

In his Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer repeats the obscene sexual verb swyven—the Middle English equivalent of the Modern English fuck—a total of seven times.¹ Even while using the most explicit vernacular term for intercourse more times than any other medieval English writer, he nevertheless restricts the taboo word's speakers to characters and narrators who are male laymen. In contrast, female characters and narrators in the Tales utter far more polite, polyvalent, and often periphrastic sexual constructions such as "flesshly ... knewe," "pleyde with," "dighte," "knowe compaignye of man," and "suffre hym do his nycetee."² Thus, in Chaucer's socio-linguistic rubric, gender difference profoundly restricts the speakers of vernacular sexual language: English-speaking female narrators in the Tales do not have access to the full expressive range of their own native language. Scribes copying The Canterbury Tales in the fifteenth century deliberately revised Chaucer's paradigm for obscene sexual language in manifold tantalizing ways: while some replaced his existing "swyved" with a less-explicit synonym, others were inspired by Chaucer's sexual obscenities to add further obscene words and verses of their own. This essay explores fifteenth-century scribal responses to Chaucer's sexual language, focusing upon one especially fascinating mid-fifteenth century manuscript, Oxford, New College, MS D.314. I argue that the scribe copying this particular manuscript was spurred by Chaucer's existing obscenities to insert additional obscene words and verses of his own, revising the existing sexual-linguistic rubric of the Tales with the unexpected result of privileging female sexual subjectivity and mutual erotic pleasure, and allowing female speakers unprecedented access to the full expressive range of the Middle English sexual lexicon, thus demonstrating obscenity's powerful creative impetus and highlighting the poetic utility of the obscene. Mary Caputi defines the cultural category of "the obscene" as the "determined violation of established norms, [and the] eagerness to proclaim from beyond the acceptable," arguing that "obscenity not only presupposes a distinction between the licit and illicit realms but depends on this distinction for its own appeal." For Caputi, obscenity's integrality to language lies in the very fact that it "underscores the function of cultural norms, necessarily calling into question the threshold that delineates the accepted from the perverse."³ In the case of fifteenth-century renderings of The Canterbury Tales, scribal rewritings of Chaucer's sexual obscenities—either replacing them with terms they deemed less offensive or expanding upon them with further obscenities—offer modern readers a valuable window into the perceived problems and possibilities of Middle English sexual language. The former method of revision sheds light upon the relative acceptability of multiple sexual terms to medieval English readers, whereas the latter mode highlights which specific obscene words had the power to function as creative catalysts. After looking briefly at scribal strategies for censoring Chaucer's sexual obscenities, I devote the rest of my essay to examining how the New College scribe boldly deploys obscene poetic innovation throughout his manuscript as an overarching scribal strategy to authorize female sexual subjectivity, both corporeal and linguistic, and to highlight the possibilities of mutual erotic pleasure. I contend that this scribe, in Caputi's words, seeks to "eager[ly] proclaim from beyond the acceptable" throughout his particular rendition of The Canterbury Tales, in order to make a textual case for women's equal access to the obscene sexual vernacular, to expand upon Chaucer's notion of intercourse as a strictly penetrative act, and to highlight the potential for erotic reciprocity within Chaucer's text.

As Barry Windeatt argued in a seminal 1979 essay, fifteenth-century copyists of The Canterbury Tales served as Chaucer's earliest critics, and close examination of the variations among individual manuscripts provides modern readers with valuable insight into contemporary attitudes toward the relative acceptability of various sexual terms.⁴ Scribal treatment of swyve, the word that fifteenth-century scribes most consistently found objectionable, is particularly fascinating, and reveals Chaucer's early readers' attitudes toward sexually explicit language. As Windeatt notes, "scribal rewriting reflects a...