Introduction

I use ‘resistance to love’ as an umbrella term that encompasses active refusal to love or marry; indifference; resistance to loving or marrying a particular person because of factors like their social status, race, or religion; rejections of adultery; and also what we might identify today as asexuality, aromanticism, or sometimes other queer sexual orientations.5 In keeping with current usage, I deploy ‘queer’ as a general term encompassing a range of LGBTQ+ sexualities and genders, including asexuality and aromanticism, in line with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s now-classic definition of queer as referring to ‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’: Tendencies (London: Rout ledge, 1994), p. 7. I recognise, however, that individual preferences on terminology differ. As this breadth indicates, ‘resistance to love’ encompasses rejections of romantic relationships, but also of marriage and sex. Middle English romances tend to conflate love, sex, and marriage, because they focus on love as a constitutive element in marriage and usually depict sexual relationships primarily within matrimony. There are, therefore, relatively few scenarios in which resistance to love does not also entail resistance to sex, though sex with one person can be rejected while romantic commitment to another is upheld. Chapter 5 deals specifically with situations in which adulterous sex is rejected in order to maintain fidelity to a prior romantic commitment, but even there the person who issues a proposition usually presents it as a request for love rather than sex. Sex, love, and marriage can and should be treated distinctly in some cases, but Middle English romance frequently collapses these categories and so ‘resistance to love’ often stands in for ‘resistance to love, marriage, and sex’ in this book.

My focus on ‘resistance’ is intended to align with other recent work attending to sexual and gendered violence in medieval literature; to point to the potentially subversive nature of resistance to love as a questioning of or challenge to romance’s normative trajectory; and to anticipate the discussion of resistance as a reading practice.6 For example, Rape Culture and Female Resistance in Late Medieval Literature, ed. by Sarah Baechle, Carissa M. Harris, and Elizaveta Strakhov (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022); Sara V. Torres and Rebecca F. McNamara, ‘Female Consent and Affective Resistance in Romance: Medieval Pedagogy and #MeToo’, New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession, 2.1 (2021), 34–49; Boyda Johnstone, ‘“Far semed her hart from obeysaunce”: Strategies of Resistance in The Isle of Ladies’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 41 (2019), 301–24. The term ‘resisting reader’ was coined by feminist literary critic Judith Fetterley in The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978). It has been applied to medieval romances: see Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 226; Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 111; Roberta L. Krueger, Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender in Old French Verse Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). I do also use other terms, including ‘unwillingness to love’ where the will and wilfulness are particularly at issue. The will held an important place in scholastic discussions of consent and innocence, and takes on a prominent role in secular writing, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer.7 For example, in the works of St Augustine of Hippo, including De civitate Dei. The City of God, trans. by George E. McCracken, Loeb Classical Library, 411, 7 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), i, i. 16–19; De libero arbitrio, ed. by William Green, Corpus christianorum series latina, 29 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970). For discussions of Chaucer’s varied explorations of the will, see Jill Mann, ‘Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale’, in Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Malory, ed. by Mark David Rasmussen (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), pp. 42–61; Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Apprehending the Divine and Choosing To Believe: Voluntarist Free Will in Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale’, Chaucer Review, 46.1–2 (2011), 111–30; Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). But I also draw on modern work on the will, particularly Sara Ahmed’s discussion of how ‘the judgement of willfulness derives from a social scene: how some have their will judged as a problem by others’, and how it is particularly ‘parts that are not willing the preservation of the whole [that] are charged with willfulness, including nonproductive and nonreproductive parts’.8 Sara Ahmed, Willful Subjects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), pp. 19, 20. This resonates with the portrayal of resistance or unwillingness to love, which can involve a rejection of socially and sexually reproductive roles. However, ‘resistance to love’ remains the overarching term used throughout this book to bring together a variety of individual manifestations and explore the sum of their parts.

Because of the extensive and varied nature of this motif, this book cannot be comprehensive. I leave out resistance to love because of age difference; rejections of lesbian, gay, or other kinds of queer relationships; and resistance to incest.9 These forms of resistance do appear within romance writing. Resistance because of age occurs in Le Bone Florence of Rome, Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, and arguably The Wife of Bath’s Tale; resistance to incest appears in Emaré and John Gower’s ‘Tale of Apollonius of Tyre’. An explicit rejection of a queer relationship features in the French Roman de Silence. While the latter would sit uneasily within the framework of resistance to love because of its associations with violence and abuse, I leave out resistance on the grounds of age or queerness because this tends to serve more simplistic ideological functions. Age is not open to negotiation and debate (though of course attitudes to it are), unlike the social constructs of gender, status, race, and faith on which I focus. Explicit rejections of queer relationships are unusual in Middle English romance, perhaps because its focus on love and sexuality within marriage leads to queer desires being represented more rarely and subtly.10 For discussion of the subtle ways in which lesbian desires may be represented in Middle English romances, see Lucy M. Allen-Goss, Female Desire in Chaucer’s ‘Legend of Good Women’ and Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020). Where this does occur, it tends to serve homophobic and transphobic purposes: even in the Roman de Silence, a work that interrogates binary perceptions of gender through its portrayal of Silence, Silence’s rejection of the Queen operates in a homophobic manner that also seems to re-impose binary gender. In addition, I do not discuss characters who simply do not fall in love in romance literature, of whom there are a good many, though they are not usually the central protagonist. Instead, I focus on active expressions of resistance or indifference to love. This departs from the broader romance trope of love as so overpowering that experiencing it is almost by definition against one’s will.11 Cooper describes the sense of loss of agency as fundamental to romance’s heroic conception of love: The English Romance in Time, pp. 230–1. This trope is clearly connected to what I call resistance to love and it offers valuable insights into how medieval people understood the emotions and psychology of love in their own terms; it also at times intersects with resistance to love when it is weaponised as a means to convince a reluctant partner of the suitor’s helplessness. However, active resistance or absolute indifference hold different implications for understanding romance as a genre, because they offer an opportunity to either question or reinforce its normative trajectory towards love and marriage.

This book explores why romance characters resist love, both in terms of the reasons romances provide for such resistance and the functions this resistance serves on a narrative level. I attend to the implications for understanding medieval sexualities and how relationships were actively negotiated in romance writing and real life. This focus on negotiation aligns with contemporary reconsiderations of how we talk about sex and rape in the modern world,12 Rebecca Kukla, ‘That’s What She Said: The Language of Sexual Negotiation’, Ethics, 129.1 (2018), 70–97; Michelle J. Anderson, ‘Negotiating Sex’, Southern California Law Review, 78.6 (2005), 1401–38. connected to the recognition of the ‘narrow parameters’ and ‘conceptual thinness’ of consent as a term that has been collapsed into other, meaningful different, ways of talking about sexual practices.13 Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. xiii; Joseph J. Fischel, Screw Consent: A Better Politics of Sexual Justice (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), p. 4. See further Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and Desire in the Age of Consent (London: Verso, 2021); Quill R. Kukla, ‘A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent’, Ethics, 131.2 (2021), 270–92. I do frequently use the term consent (and coercion) in this book: while recognising that consent is an inadequate concept for ethical sexual conduct, its limitations reflect its use in the medieval period, where it was largely considered a granting of permission or assent by one person to another. Consent is, therefore, a useful framework for medieval scholarship, as ‘the historical sources themselves speak to and about consent’, but I supplement it with a focus on negotiation to highlight the active exchanges and influences that could affect the decision to consent (or not) to a particular relationship.14 Lucia Akard and Alice Raw, ‘Global Response: Futures of Medieval Consent’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires’, ed. by Carissa M. Harris and Fiona Somerset, 363–7 (p. 364).

Continuing this focus on exchange and influence, I investigate how resistance is received and interpreted by other characters and the narrator within a romance, revealing how these intradiegetic responses reflect contemporary social categories and perceptions of different kinds of relationships. I use an intersectional approach, attending to how romance not only makes love and marriage desirable goals but presents particular kinds of love and marriage as desirable and in doing so discriminates in overlapping ways along axes of race, status, and gender.15 Kimberlé Crenshaw first used the term intersectionality to explore how race and gender overlap as layers of discrimination in the experiences of Black women. Intersectional approaches respond to ‘the need to account for multiple grounds of identity when considering how the social world is constructed’, including those of race, gender, class, and sexuality. See Kimberlé Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, 43.6 (1991), 1241–99 (p. 1245). I also track the usual, though not inevitable, development of resistance into love. This pattern can be a consensual one, involving the immediate and unexpected experience of love at first sight, which indicates love’s ability to overcome willed determination to avoid it. It can also involve a process of active negotiation, a deliberation of the terms on which a relationship might be acceptable or advantageous, particularly when social status or religious conversion is at stake. Such moments of negotiation are particularly valuable because they offer insights into medieval expectations as to how relationships might develop and the factors that influence this. As A. E. Brown notes, medieval representations of the borders between friendship and romantic love are rare, and the lack of distinction drawn between types of love can make it difficult to tell at precisely what point a friendship might moderate into the pull of romantic or sexual attraction.16 A. E. Brown, ‘Lancelot in the Friend Zone: Strategies for Offering and Limiting Affection in the Stanzaic Morte Arthur’, in Emotion and Medieval Textual Media, ed. by Mary C. Flannery (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), pp. 75–97 (p. 76). As Brown also observes, this is not a problem exclusive to medieval literature, as we still struggle to find the terms with which to frame different kinds of affection today.17 Ibid., pp. 85–6. While the examples I discuss are mostly positioned as potential romantic relationships within their generic contexts, points of negotiation may nonetheless provide insights into how relationships develop into new categories, offering different perspectives to portrayals of love at first sight. In contrast to the models of both negotiation and spontaneous desire, transformations from resistance to acceptance can also be coercive, at the extreme involving sexual violence, psychological manipulation, or even magic to enforce love. Rape itself is not usually a means by which unwillingness becomes acceptance, as romances tend to preserve an illusion of consent, combining portrayals of sexual violence with a focus on the affects of love, for example.18 Corinne Saunders argues that ‘the lady may be gained through force, but not force enacted against her person’: ‘A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus’, in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. by Noël James Menuge (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 105–24 (p. 116). But the romances discussed in this book demonstrate that a certain level of force – sometimes moderating into pressure or persuasion – is acceptable within the genre, and at times even endorse this as a means of punishment or subjugation for someone who considered themselves above love and marriage.

Portrayals of resistance to love in romance literature, and the various ways in which it is or is not rewritten as desire, therefore offer an opportunity to reassess the genre’s relationship to sexual violence, coercion, and consent. While previous discussions have focused most often on the contrasting extremes of representations of rape and raptus versus free consent to love, resistance to love illuminates more diverse and subtle coercive practices.19 Kathryn Gravdal, ‘The Poetics of Rape Law: Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian Romance’, in Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), pp. 42–71; Saunders, ‘A Matter of Consent’; Corinne Saunders, Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), pp. 187–264, 283–310; Amy N. Vines, ‘Invisible Woman: Rape as a Chivalric Necessity in Medieval Romance’, in Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. by Amanda Hopkins, Robert Allen Rouse, and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2014), pp. 161–80. For a focus on mutual consent, see Helen Cooper, ‘Desirable desire: “I am wholly given over unto thee”’, in The English Romance in Time, pp. 218–68. While not primarily focused on romance, see also Baechle, Harris, and Strakhov, Rape Culture and Female Resistance; Carissa M. Harris, Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Suzanne M. Edwards, The Afterlives of Rape in Medieval English Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Teaching Rape in the Medieval Literature Classroom: Approaches to Difficult Texts, ed. by Alison Gulley (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2018); Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Amy Vines has argued that we need to consider coercion and sexual violence in medieval literature more broadly, ‘reading all sexual misconduct, from the innocent yet unwanted kiss to the more overt acts of forced coitus’ to reveal ‘the fundamental place of male sexual aggression in the implicit expectations of medieval chivalric behaviour’.20 Vines, ‘Invisible Woman’, p. 180. Coercive responses to resistance to love can uncover diverse manifestations of male sexual aggression, but can also go beyond the aims Vines outlines, exposing forms of coercion and pressure that are perpetrated upon, as well as by, men. Complementing and adding to previous work on rape and consent, I seek to uncover a wider and more nuanced picture of sexual violence, gendered constraints, and coercive practices, in keeping with the focus on ‘the problems posed by consent’ in the recent Studies in the Age of Chaucer colloquium ‘Historicizing Consent’.21 ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent: Bodies, Wills, Desires’, ed. by Carissa M. Harris and Fiona Somerset, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), 267–367. I argue in particular that imaginative literature enabled discussion of coercive practices that fall outside of the medieval legal category of raptus, facilitating recognition of such practices as coercive.

This book, then, uses the motif of resistance to love to expose how romance constructs normative models of consent, gender, and desire, as well as to probe the tensions and limitations of these constructions. On the simplest level, its aim is to uncover the widespread use of resistance to love as a motif within medieval English romance. Following Helen Cooper’s field-changing book The English Romance in Time, motif studies have become a well-­established approach to Middle English romance in particular, which is the primary focus of this book. Motif studies offer a means of acknowledging the disparate textual connections of Middle English romances, connections which have traditionally been difficult to account for because of the formulaic nature of romance, the sporadic survival of Middle English romances and uncertainties about their transmission, and the widespread medieval practice of borrowing without citation.22 Megan G. Leitch’s discussion of romance intertextuality is helpful here: ‘Introduction, Middle English Romance: The Motifs and the Critics’, in Romance Rewritten: The Evolution of Middle English Romance, A Tribute to Helen Cooper, ed. by Elizabeth Archibald, Megan G. Leitch, and Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–24. I do not argue for direct lines of influence between individual romances but pursue connections between different kinds of works by tracing the recurrence and adaptation of resistance to love through romance’s generic diversity. Liz Herbert McAvoy’s use of Nicholas Royle’s and Hélène Cixous’s writing on textual haunting, the idea of widespread but shadowy networks of influence, provides a helpful model here.23 Liz Herbert McAvoy, ‘Textual Phantoms and Spectral Presences: The Coming to Rest of Mechthild of Hackeborn’s Writing in the Late Middle Ages’, in Women’s Literary Cultures in the Global Middle Ages: Speaking Internationally, ed. by Kathryn Loveridge, Liz Herbert McAvoy, Sue Niebrzydowski, and Vicki Kay Price (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2023), pp. 209–24. McAvoy draws on Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008) and Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The “uncanny”)’, trans. by Robert Dennomé, New Literary History, 7.3 (1976), 525–48. McAvoy uses textual haunting to investigate the previously overlooked influence of medieval women’s devotional writing; her work offers a suggestive prototype for the way motifs recurring across apparently unconnected romances can reveal a broader nexus of generic relationships spanning canonical and non-canonical romances. As well as tracing the development and variation of this motif within romance, I examine its implications for understanding contemporaneous views of consent, gender, and desire. To establish the particular functions of resistance to love in medieval English romance, and especially its subversive or conservative potential, the remainder of this Introduction first places it in the context of contemporary cultural and literary discourses.