Introduction

COLLOQUIUM

Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires Edited by Carissa M. Harris and Fiona Somerset [End Page 268]

Introduction

Silence means consent. Or does it? In the early twenty-first century, we have all seen protest signs that make this assertion and urge us to action.¹ Do something—and at the very least speak up and speak out, even if there is not much else you can do. As Archbishop Stephen Langton says in his 1207 letter to the English Church and people, who among you is there who cannot be of some help in anything?² Yet the costs of speaking out can be high, in terms of personal relationships and even physical safety, especially for those with fewer resources and less power.³ We are acutely aware of this high cost of speaking out when it is interpersonal consent to sexual intimacy, or the terms of a contract such as marriage or labor, that is in question—such as when a woman named Margery was raped in 1249 by the heyward of a powerful local prior, and subsequently detained and imprisoned by five of her attacker's friends when she tried to raise the hue and cry, or when numerous medieval victim-survivors were imprisoned after failing to appear in court, withdrawing their appeals, or finding their claims disbelieved by all-male juries.⁴ Saying nothing when it is not safe to speak is not the same as saying yes. What is more, even saying yes, even behaving as if yes were the answer, might be a survival strategy rather than the affirmative consent it seems to be. Geoffrey Chaucer's Criseyde demonstrates her awareness of this when she replies to Troilus's asking her to yield by commenting "Ne hadde I er now … / Ben yolde, ywis, I were now nought heere."⁵ She has been yielded, long since, but that is not the same as yielding on her own behalf.

Consent tends to pose problems, rather than solving them. As the medieval examples we have given reveal, these problems are not new. Medieval thinkers and literary characters from barmaids to poets to archbishops grappled with them. If we attend closely to past conversations about consent rather than imposing our own assumptions, their insights into what is at stake can bring new perspectives to our own present. This colloquium emerges from a series of recent conference sessions, papers, and books that have brought new attention to medieval consent in the #MeToo era, at a historical moment when the hierarchies that skew consent are under more pressure than perhaps ever before, and when our understanding of gender, sexuality, class, race, disability, and a range of other factors—as well as the roles these factors play in shaping consent—is becoming increasingly intersectional. As in the sessions at the 2018 Sewanee Medieval Colloquium that the editors organized, we bring together a range of methodologies and texts, putting historians and literary scholars into conversation with one another. Essays are paired thematically for close attention from a respondent with similar interests to create four smaller conversations. An early modernist working on literature and law brings the threads of conversation together in an overall response from a perspective outside the field. Finally, the two organizers of "Medieval Consent: A Critical Symposium" (April 2021) share their vision for the field's potential trajectories.

The eight essays and six responses collected here analyze the problems posed by consent, examining the ways that both literary characters and real individuals sought to show how their consent had been violated or constrained, as well as illuminating how consent could be reframed or manipulated for nefarious purposes. They demonstrate how medieval ideas about consent were far more complex, dynamic, and nuanced than we typically acknowledge, as we can see in Robert Mannyng's declaration that it is wrong "To do a womman synne thurgh stres" and extract a "yes" from her when she sees few options for escape: "Hyt ys no wyl" on her part "but maystry," he concludes.⁶ With this colloquium, we seek not only to illuminate the varied and complex ways that...