Consent: Marriage Practices and Raptus Law
Medieval concepts of consent were situated within two different discourses: the definition of marriage in canon law and the legal concept of
raptus. In theory, marriage had been dependent on consent from the time of the Church fathers. However, this was not established in canon law until the 1130s, under the influence of Gratian, Peter Lombard, and Pope Alexander III.
1 For a good summary of medieval marital practices, see Elisabeth van Houts, Married Life in the Middle Ages, 900–1300 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 1–25. By the end of the twelfth century, following the decretal Alexander III issued c. 1180, there was widespread understanding that marriage was formalised upon the exchange of words of mutual consent in the present tense. If consent was formulated in the future tense, a marriage became binding once consummated.
2 See van Houts, Married Life, pp. 1–3, 7–9; Cathy Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), p. 7; Shannon McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 22. Marriage should, but did not have to, take place in a church; witnesses were necessary for a marriage to be upheld in a church court but not to sanctify marriage before God.
3 McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, pp. 21–2. In theory, this gave priority solely to the consent of the individuals being married.
4 See further Conor McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England: Law, Literature and Practice (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2004), p. 19. The use of ‘force and fear’ to coerce people into marriage was expressly forbidden, offering an important backdrop against which to consider romance depictions of coercion.
5 Ibid., pp. 24, 27–8. In practice, however, things were more complicated: familial interests, wealth, and political power probably continued to have as much, if not more, influence than individual consent upon the marriages of the middle and upper classes,
6 See further Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, pp. 12–16; Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 146; McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, pp. 17–18; McCarthy, Marriage in Medieval England, p. 44; Women of the English Nobility and Gentry, 1066–1500, ed. & trans. by Jennifer Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 15. the primary audiences for the romances I discuss.
7 Middle English romances have been associated with gentry and urban middle-class readers (as well as some aristocrats, especially in connection with Arthurian romances), although they could have reached lower-class groups, including household servants, through reading aloud. See Michael Johnston, Romance and the Gentry in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Amy N. Vines, Women’s Power in Late Medieval Romance (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2011), pp. 8–10; Melissa Furrow, Expectations of Romance: The Reception of a Genre in Medieval England (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009); Felicity Riddy, ‘Middle English romance: family, marriage, intimacy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Romance, ed. by Roberta L. Krueger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 235–52 (pp. 235–9); Carol M. Meale, ‘“gode men / Wiues maydnes and alle men”: Romance and Its Audiences’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. by Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 209–25; Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Bart Besamusca, ‘Readership and Audience’, in Handbook of Arthurian Romance: King Arthur’s Court in Medieval European Literature, ed. by Leah Tether and Johnny McFadyen (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017), pp. 117–32; Michael Johnston, ‘New Evidence for the Social Reach of “Popular Romance”: The Books of Household Servants’, Viator, 43.2 (2012), 303–31; Ad Putter, ‘Middle English Romances and the Oral Tradition’, in Medieval Oral Literature, ed. by Karl Reichl (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012), pp. 335–51; Karl Reichl, ‘Orality and Performance’, in A Companion to Medieval Popular Romance, ed. by Raluca L. Radulescu and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2009), pp. 132–49; Ad Putter, ‘A Historical Introduction’, in The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ed. by Ad Putter and Jane Gilbert (London: Routledge, 2013; first publ. 2000), pp. 1–15 (p. 8). For these groups, consent, as many scholars have pointed out, may have been not so much a matter of free choice as a question of whether you accepted your family’s will.
8 Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, p. 6; Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 21. For a fuller discussion of the influence of family and friends on late medieval marriages, see McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, pp. 74–109. While canon law upheld the idea of individual, freely given consent, in practice marital arrangements were embedded in wider networks of human agency. At times this may have resulted in coerced marriages, but in other ways this focus on negotiating consent with regard for different concerns and agencies partially echoes contemporary work that challenges the association of consent with what it sees as the illusion of individual autonomy in the modern world.
9 See Kukla, ‘A Nonideal Theory of Sexual Consent’.The establishment of consent as a principle within canon law affected contemporary marriage patterns and expectations. Marriages increasingly took place between people of a similar age, although amongst royalty there could still be a significant age gap, with young women (in their early to mid-teens) marrying much older men.
10 van Houts, Married Life, p. 90. The age of consent was twelve for girls, fourteen for boys, though children could be betrothed before this.
11 For marriages that took place at a very young age consummation would be expected only after puberty. See van Houts, Married Life, pp. 88–9. In addition to age, broad parity in social standing was essential. There was room for intermarriage between the closest classes, such as the aristocracy and gentry, or the gentry and the urban elite later in the period,
12 Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, pp. 15–17. but ‘all levels of society adhered to the social (and ideal) norm that its young people were best married as “equals”, that is of the same social rank’.
13 van Houts, Married Life, p. 30. Age and status parity aligned with the increasing expectation that love would develop within marriage – that is, rather than marrying
for love the emphasis was on the ‘
potential for love’, as Shannon McSheffrey puts it.
14 McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, p. 19. Late medieval secular society seems to have expected and accepted marriage as a social norm,
15 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 88; Hume, Chaucer and the Cultures of Love and Marriage, pp. 18–19; Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, pp. 75–6. and to have encouraged and desired love within it, a development perhaps arising from the indissolubility of marriage.
16 See John Gillingham, ‘Love, Marriage, and Politics in the Twelfth Century’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 25.4 (1989), 292–303.This is not to say that marriage was the dominant, celebrated pattern within medieval English society. Although marriage was a sacrament, the church still primarily viewed it as a compromise and not an ideal. Ruth Mazo Karras weighs up the secular and religious perspectives, suggesting:
Perhaps it would be wrong to call marriage the norm for medieval people, since many ecclesiastical writers saw marital sex as a necessary evil, but it was certainly the expectation for most. That does not mean that heterosexual desire was a good thing, or even the default condition against which other desires were set; it was ‘concupiscence,’ the result of Eve’s and Adam’s disobedience.
17 Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, p. 8.The church, secular practices, and literary representations had different but overlapping conceptions of love, marriage, and sexuality. While love and marriage were not always celebrated, secular society and its imaginative fiction tended to uphold their value.
The other major cultural discourse of consent was the legal discussion of rape and
raptus. By 1275, rape and abduction had begun to be amalgamated into the single crime of
raptus in English law with the introduction of the First Statute of Westminster. This statute did focus on consent, describing
raptus as a crime that occurred ‘maugre seon [gre]’ [‘against her will’].
18 The text and translation of this statute are given in Caroline Dunn, Stolen Women in Medieval England: Rape, Abduction, and Adultery, 1100–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 196–7. However, the Second Statute of Westminster, issued in 1285, changed this emphasis.
19 While Christopher Cannon argues that the first lines of Westminster II actually show renewed attention to consent, he agrees that a woman’s (non-)consent is not what medieval lawyers are interested in: Cannon, ‘Chaucer and Rape: Uncertainty’s Certainties’, in Representing Rape, pp. 255–79 (pp. 260–1; first publ. in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 22 (2000), 67–92). As Caroline Dunn notes, the broader focus of Westminster II is legislation against abduction rather than rape.
20 Dunn, Stolen Women, p. 31. The French text of Chapter 34 is the only ambiguous case, where ravishment may refer to rape instead of or as well as abduction. This addresses cases both with and without the woman’s consent:
Purveu est que si homme ravist femme espouse, damoisele, ou autre femme desoremes, par la ou ele ne se est assentue ne avaunt ne apres, eit jugement de vie e de membre.
E ensement par la ou homme ravist femme, dame espouse, damoisele, ou autre femme a force, tut seit ke ele se assente apres, eit tel jugement come avaunt est dit si il seit ateint a la suite le Rei, e la eit le Rei sa suite.
21 ‘It is provided, that if a man from henceforth do ravish a married woman, maid, or other, where she did not consent neither before nor after, he shall have judgment of life and member. And likewise where a man ravisheth a woman, married lady, maid, or other, with force, although she consent after, he shall have such judgment as before is said, if he be convicted at the king’s suit, and there the king shall have the suit’: Dunn, Stolen Women, p. 197. Raptus could still be prosecuted as a crime that occurred without a woman’s consent, but consensual
raptus (elopement or consensual sex) could also be prosecuted. Dunn argues that this reflects ‘an increasingly concerted effort to prohibit, and more stringently punish, elopements disguised as ravishment’, though notes that there was still concern for the victim of ravishment and options for appealing rape remained.
22 Ibid., p. 41. The 1382 Statute of Rapes continues the marginalisation of individual consent, ruling that a family’s or husband’s right to sue for
raptus was equivalent to that of the woman.
23 The text of this statute is given in Dunn, Stolen Women, pp. 198–200. Corinne Saunders and Caroline Dunn have taken different approaches to the effects of these laws. While Saunders argues that they create ‘a legal marginalisation of the raped woman’, Dunn suggests that they rather ‘fail[ed] a specific type of female victim – those women stolen and forced into marriages for profit’, observing that fifteenth-century laws subsequently turn to this problem.
24 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 62; Dunn, Stolen Women, pp. 50, 90–4. While
raptus laws did seek to determine whether a woman had consented, they did so, as Christopher Cannon writes, ‘to make the victim’s consent
irrelevant’: consent was not the primary concern in legal assessments of
raptus.
25 Cannon, ‘Chaucer and Rape’, p. 261. Raptus, rape, and (non-)consent were also discussed in canon law, scholastic literature, and vernacular writing. As in secular law, consent was not the primary concern of medieval canon lawyers, although Saunders argues that there was ‘a general sense that non-consensual sex was a graver crime than other forms of illicit intercourse’.
26 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, pp. 84–5. Consent was more central, however, to scholarly discussions of virginity, sin, and rape. St Augustine of Hippo was a key influence here, as his defence of rape victims’ chastity (which accompanies his condemnation of Lucretia’s suicide) crucially affirmed the power of the soul and the will to preserve chastity even if the body was forcibly violated.
27 Augustine, De civitate Dei, i, i. 16–19. As Elizabeth Robertson points out, Augustine acknowledges that ‘consent is also a profoundly internal phenomenon, an act of the soul, governed by will and reason, and therefore interior, private, and ultimately indiscernible’.
28 Elizabeth Robertson, ‘Response: A Telling Difference – Sexual Violence, Consent, and Literary Form’, in Rape Culture and Female Resistance, pp. 167–80 (p. 171). This, as Robertson also notes, has been one of the key points of contention around consent in modern law, and indeed represents an epistemological challenge to attempts to determine non-consent, even as it ‘grants that faculty of the soul its greatest freedom’.
29 Ibid. While there were other perspectives focused upon the priority of the body in maintaining virginity, Augustine’s words echoed through medieval scholastic and vernacular writing and provided a powerful affirmation of the importance – and unknowability – of consent.
30 See Ibid., pp. 169–73; Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, pp. 89–91. As examples of vernacular writings influenced by this Augustinian perspective, Saunders mentions the dialogue Vices and Virtues (A Soul’s Confession of its Sins with Reason’s Description of the Virtues) and Dan Michel of Inwit’s Ayenbite: see Rape and Ravishment, pp. 114–16. There were, then, multiple discourses of consent in the Middle Ages. While canon law in theory prioritised consent as
the crucial factor in solemnising marriage, the marital practices of the middle and upper classes offered a more muted focus on consent as
assent that took into account a variety of factors beyond individual preference. By 1285 individual consent was sidelined in English
raptus law in favour of a focus on abduction or sex against the will of the family or husband – although this may have been against the woman’s will as well, and the option to appeal cases of rape remained. Outside of the legal system, scholastic and theological writers affirmed the importance of consent by suggesting that rape could not violate virginity. These ideas were carried over into vernacular religious writing and the hagiographical tradition.
31 For a discussion of rape, violation, and consent in hagiography, see Saunders, ‘The Threat of Rape: Saintly Women’, in Rape and Ravishment, pp. 120–51. Consent was a prominent and flexible concept in a range of medieval discourses, and romance portrayals engage with, add to, and in some cases recalibrate its significance and functions within these discourses.
32 Shannon McSheffrey and Julia Pope provide a helpful account of how ‘law, chivalric culture, and social practice […] formed a feedback loop, each playing into and reinforcing the others’: McSheffrey and Pope, ‘Ravishment, Legal Narratives, and Chivalric Culture in Fifteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 48.4 (2009), 818–36 (p. 819).Raptus, Coercion, and Rape Culture
This book is not primarily about rape or raptus: ‘resistance to love’ would be an inadequate, insensitive, and unethical term in which to group victim-survivors of rape. However, resistance to love does intersect with portrayals of rape and raptus at times, particularly with regard to men’s experiences. In the medieval period, raptus was considered a gendered crime (hence why I have been referring to rape victims as ‘she’ or ‘her’). As Saunders writes,
Ravishment was not a gender-specific crime, in that medieval laws addressing ravishment of ward apply to both male and female children; men as well as women could be abducted or sexually violated, but any such crime would have been considered assault rather than ravishment in legal terms. Ravishment takes on a special significance with regard to women: only women could bring a legal appeal of
raptus (an appeal defined in terms of potential sexual violence and/or abduction). Thus although the issue of rape is associated with wider notions of abduction, the crime of
raptus was understood as one against women and related to other gendered issues of marriage, virginity and consent. Whereas the issue of sexual violence against women is treated in detail and gains a symbolic resonance in various discourses, legal, theological and literary, for men there was no legal counterpart to the process of appeal of rape open to women.
33 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 20.There are some isolated discussions of whether men could be victims of rape, but these are the exceptions to a gendered understanding of
raptus and rape in the law.
34 Dunn finds only one example in the legal record: Stolen Women, p. 55 n. 13. Saunders notes the references to men as victims and/or women as perpetrators in the works of Stephen of Tournai and Thomas Sanchez: Rape and Ravishment, pp. 83, 86. Katherine Harvey uncovers cases that seem to be of male rape but were tried as sodomy: The Fires of Lust: Sex in the Middle Ages (London: Reakton, 2021), pp. 132–3, 197–8, 200–1. This often remains the case in modern law: in the UK only people with a penis can commit rape, though people of any gender can be the victims of rape.
35 ‘Sexual Offences Act 2003’ (2003) <https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2003/42/section/1> [accessed 6 January 2023]. However, legal frameworks – medieval or modern – are not the sole criteria by which people recognise violating and harmful behaviour.
36 Lucia Akard makes a similar point, observing that ‘the sources typically used to study rape do not offer many avenues for analyzing those sexual violations that fell outside the narrow legal definition of rape’, when these experiences ‘still could have been upsetting, traumatic, and harmful’: ‘Unequal Power and Sexual Consent: The Case of Cassotte la Joye’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 44 (2022), ‘Colloquium: Historicizing Consent’, ed. by Harris and Somerset, 285–92 (pp. 286–7). Literature offers a more flexible context in which additional forms of violation and unethical sexual behaviour can be explored. I argue that medieval literature
does attend to men’s experiences of coercion and at times acknowledges the possibility of male rape. Because there is no clear medieval vocabulary to describe men as victim-survivors of rape, such portrayals intersect with those of resistance to love. On a wider scale, the romances I discuss depict varied forms of physical and psychological coercion, sexual violence, and assault, often with an awareness that they are violating and coercive practices. These features indicate that literature acknowledges experiences of violation and harm unrecognised in contemporary law and may have enabled people who had similar experiences to make sense of what happened to them. In this respect, my book responds to Lucia Akard and Alice Raw’s call to ‘look to understand the power of such an expression [of non-consent] for those who read or heard it’, while also reflecting current understandings of literature as a vehicle through which trauma can be recognised and perhaps healed.
37 Akard and Raw, ‘Futures of Medieval Consent’, p. 366. For a discussion focused on trauma and recovery in medieval literature, see Christina Lee, ‘Healing Words: St Guthlac and the Trauma of War’, in Trauma in Medieval Society, ed. by Wendy J. Turner and Christina Lee (Leiden: Brill, 2018), pp. 259–73. While this book is not about rape or
raptus, my discussion intersects with these topics, as the motif of resistance to love illuminates the workings of medieval rape culture.
Rape culture can be defined as
a complex of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women. It is a society where violence is seen as sexy and sexuality as violent. […] Rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women
as the norm. […] In a rape culture both men and women assume that sexual violence is a fact of life.
38 Emilie Buchwald, Pamela R. Fletcher, and Martha Roth, ‘Preamble’, in Transforming a Rape Culture, ed. by Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth, rev. edn (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2005), pp. i–xii (p. xi). Italics in original.Sexual violence is often present ‘on the margins of romance’ and sometimes enters the foreground as part of the hero’s chivalric development, as Vines has argued.
39 Quotation from Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 187; Vines, ‘Invisible Woman’. We need not necessarily agree that romance ‘must
create the threat of rape’ to acknowledge that romances assume sexual violence to be a fact of life and thus reveal the workings of medieval rape culture.
40 Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens, p. 43. Italics in original. Chaucer’s
Wife of Bath’s Tale famously begins with a rape; in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight the lady tells Gawain that he could rape her if she refused his advances; in
Blanchardyn and Eglantine the hero’s adventures begin by rescuing a lady from rape. Aside from rape, there are a multitude of other instances involving sexual violence more broadly defined: Arthur and Alexander are conceived in acts that, at least in some versions of their stories, are deceptive if not actually rape itself, while other romance characters are pressured, coerced, tricked, and even blackmailed into sexual relationships against their will.
41 I am indebted to Caitlin G. Watt’s work on consent and deception in Alexander the Great narratives. The almost inevitable conclusion of resistance to love in acceptance of a relationship, often through physical or psychological coercion, aligns with the operations of rape culture both in the emphasis on coercion and in the assumption that ‘no’ can eventually be transformed into ‘yes’ through persistence and pressure. Romance’s nature as fictional, fantastic writing, and often even as wish-fulfilment, ought not to make us underestimate its investment in medieval rape culture.
Scholarship on medieval rape culture has recently received renewed impetus and redirection following the discovery of new records that unsettle previous understandings of Geoffrey Chaucer’s implication in a charge of
raptus.
42 For details, see Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki, ‘Geoffrey Chaucer, Cecily Chaumpaigne, and the Statute of Laborers: New Records and Old Evidence Reconsidered’, Chaucer Review, 57.4 (2022), 407–37; Euan Roger, ‘Appendix 2. Transcriptions and Translations’, Chaucer Review, 57.4 (2022), 440–9. These records suggest that
raptus had an even broader remit than previously recognised, in this case apparently reflecting a context of procurement for employment rather than denoting abduction or sexual assault. Yet this discovery – as many have observed – does not detract from important feminist work on sexual violence and coercion in Chaucer’s writing.
43 See, for example, Carissa M. Harris, ‘On Servant Women, Rape Culture, and Endurance’, Chaucer Review, 57.4 (2022), 475–83; Samantha Katz Seal, ‘Whose Chaucer? On Cecily Chaumpaigne, Cancellation, and the English Literary Canon’, Chaucer Review, 57.4 (2022), 484–97; Roger and Sobecki, ‘Geoffrey Chaucer, Cecily Chaumpaigne, and the Statute of Laborers’, pp. 436–7. As Sarah Baechle argues, ‘the real liberatory potential of Roger and Sobecki’s discoveries’ is that
in effectively removing the question of a single man’s guilt in a single moment of violence, they offer Chaucerians a moment to disengage – to remove at last the question of a specific moment of (ostensibly) true-or-false accusation from the reading of Chaucer’s violated women, and instead to examine his narratives for the myths they embrace and the scripts they reproduce. In short, they free us to prioritize a
structural approach to the sexual violence in the Chaucerian canon. […] We are freed to ask not what happened to one woman, but what discourses governed the lives of
all women.
44 Sarah Baechle, ‘Speaking Survival: Chaucer Studies and the Discourses of Sexual Assault’, Chaucer Review, 57.4 (2022), 463–74 (p. 468). Italics in original.Taking up Baechle’s invitation, this book explores how romance discourses reflect, challenge, or reinforce contemporaneous forms of structural oppression and coercion (often, but not always, in gendered ways), while also focusing on individual examples.
I also extend Baechle’s call for structural engagement to representations of consent, coercion, and violence in Sir Thomas Malory’s
Morte Darthur. As with Chaucerian studies (though to a lesser degree, perhaps because of the relative size of the field), feminist work on Malory has sought to address the two counts of the
raptus of Joan Smith brought against Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell in a 1451 inquisition at Nuneaton.
45 See Amy S. Kaufman, ‘Malory and Gender’, in A New Companion to Malory, ed. by Megan G. Leitch and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2019), pp. 164–76; Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 234; Catherine Batt, ‘Malory and Rape’, Arthuriana, 7.3 (1997), 78–99. For a full record of the crimes of which Malory was accused, see Edward Hicks, Sir Thomas Malory: His Turbulent Career (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928; repr. 2014), pp. 33–6, 93–107; A. C. Baugh, ‘Documenting Sir Thomas Malory’, Speculum, 8.1 (1933), 3–29. In keeping with current scholarly consensus, I assume Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revell was the author of Le Morte Darthur. These accusations remain uncertain: while the language used indicates that
raptus refers to rape rather than abduction, the charges were brought against Malory by Joan’s husband, Hugh Smith, and Joan herself gave no evidence – which was ‘in keeping with the procedure of bringing a charge of
raptus by writ rather than appeal’.
46 Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 235. Because the charges were brought in Hugh’s name, some scholars have suggested that Malory may have had consensual but adulterous sex with Joan, arguing that the charges reflect Hugh’s desire to punish Malory and his wife in keeping with the increasing use of
raptus law to gain restitution for adultery.
47 Christine Carpenter suggests that ‘the fact that the offence allegedly took place on two separate occasions, that the woman was abducted on the second occasion and that the husband appealed Malory of rape […] suggests that this was one of those raptus pleas brought to bring to heel an errant wife or daughter’: see ‘Sir Thomas Malory and Fifteenth-Century Local Politics’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 53.127 (1980), 31–43 (pp. 37–8 n. 54); see further Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 235. Batt takes a different view, arguing that ‘the extant evidence also intimates that Joan Smith, as a married woman who had suffered a rape, would not have had any other remedy in law but to allow her husband to bring the case on her behalf’: ‘Malory and Rape’, p. 82. It is also possible that these charges and the other crimes Malory was accused of may have been politically motivated, either invented or exaggerated by Malory’s enemies.
48 Saunders notes that Malory may have been ‘if not “framed,” then at least the victim of heightened pursuit’, while Field argues that ‘the number of people involved, the variety of the allegations, and […] their timing suggests that they were not wholly invented; but their comprehensiveness makes it plain that someone looked for people with grievances against Malory and organised them into court’: Saunders, Rape and Ravishment, p. 236; P. J. C. Field, The Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), p. 106. Rather than focusing restrictively on Malory’s guilt or innocence of
raptus, I address the portrayal of coercion within his work. The capacious nature of
Le Morte Darthur lends itself to varied and at times contradictory perspectives, reminding us that, no less than today, ‘alternative perspectives about rape […] existed concurrently, and a nuanced approach […] is required to understand how the same person might decry rape in certain cases and yet approve of, or engage in, the act in other contexts’.
49 Dunn, Stolen Women, p. 54. At times it does feel necessary to acknowledge the accusations against Malory, as a reminder of the potential links between literary and real-life violence, but overall I am more interested in thinking about how the
Morte – and romance more generally –
is entangled with the values of medieval rape culture than in focusing on one case pertaining to its author.
50 I consider the Morte Darthur a romance, in line with its sources, dominant narrative motifs, and many other critical discussions by scholars of romance literature, though I acknowledge that there is ongoing debate about its genre: see, for example, K. S. Whetter, Understanding Genre and Medieval Romance (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016; first publ. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 99–149.Sex, Sin, Gender, and Desire
Both medieval and modern societies facilitate the workings of rape culture through patriarchal and hierarchical systems, but their dominant cultural understandings of sex and sexuality differ greatly. The official view of the medieval church was that sex was permitted solely within marriage and for procreation, although sex to prevent oneself or one’s partner committing adultery was also acceptable.
51 See further Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, pp. 8, 37, 75–6; James A. Brundage, ‘Sex and Canon Law’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 33–50 (pp. 33–6, 40–1). Indeed, following St Paul, the concept of the ‘conjugal debt’ made sex a duty within marriage if one partner desired it (chaste marriages had to be agreed by both parties).
52 On the conjugal debt, see van Houts, Married Life, pp. 6, 8; McSheffrey, Marriage, Sex, and Civic Culture, p. 23. On chaste marriage, see Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, p. 58. This meant, of course, that there was no concept of marital rape, but it also meant that consent to marriage effectively entailed consent to sex, which holds implications for understanding resistance to love, particularly where we might wish to compare this with modern conceptualisations of asexuality. Other ideas about sexual acts also differed greatly from our own: homosexual and other kinds of queer sex were considered sinful and strictly forbidden, but so too were adultery, non-procreative marital intercourse, and even marital intercourse in certain positions.
53 See Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, pp. 92, 107, 172–3; Brundage, ‘Sex and Canon Law’, pp. 40–3. Instructions detailing how priests should deal with confessions of such acts suggest that they were practised, but the labelling of them as sinful may still have profoundly shaped lay perceptions.
54 See Brundage, ‘Sex and Canon Law’, p. 41.The wide variety of sexual acts deemed sinful by the church clearly foregrounds the limitations of our modern designations ‘homosexual’ and ‘heterosexual’, and even the more expansive term ‘queer’.
55 See the discussion in Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, pp. 7–10; James A. Schultz, ‘Heterosexuality as a Threat to Medieval Studies’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 15.1 (2006), 14–29. Medieval sexualities were defined in drastically different terms to modern perceptions, predicated on an understanding of sexual
practice rather than sexual
orientation.
56 See the extensive discussion in Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe. This does not mean that we should not use modern terms to discuss medieval sexualities, but it does mean that we should exercise caution and an awareness of the very different models of sexuality when doing so. Tracing LGBTQ+ histories is essential work that has unequivocally demonstrated queer identities to be an ‘inextricable part of humanity or gender diversity’.
57 I take this quotation from the accessible overview of medieval trans lives, which sets out the value and stakes of such work, by Gabrielle Bychowski: ‘Were There Transgender People in the Middle Ages?’, The Public Medievalist (1 November 2018) <https://www.publicmedievalist.com/transgender-middle-ages/> [accessed 17 September 2022]. Using modern terms can carry intense affective and political value for people whose history has been hidden or erased. For this reason, I use the terms ‘asexuality’ or ‘aromanticism’ where resistance to love appears not to be willed but simply to be what we would recognise as a person’s sexual or romantic orientation. I deploy these terms with attention to the similarities and differences between medieval and modern understandings, aiming not to judge the medieval according to modern ways of thinking but to draw upon modern language where this is the most concise, useful, and sensitive way to do justice to transhistorical resonances. I do not use ‘asexuality’ or ‘aromanticism’ as identifying terms throughout because most of the examples I discuss depart from modern understandings by presenting resistance to love as willed and even wilful. However, while resistance to love is more deliberate, temporary, and sometimes more specific than asexuality or aromanticism, there are resonances between these concepts. I draw particularly on Angela Chen’s discussion of how asexual people can ‘draw attention to sexual assumptions and sexual scripts – around definition, feeling, action – that are often hidden and interrogate the ways that these norms make our lives smaller’.
58 Angela Chen, Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Boston: Beacon, 2020), pp. 6–7. This is one of the main things I think resistance to love in romance does and is what I want this book, in turn, to do. Moments of resistance to romance’s sexual and romantic scripts expose those scripts and the means by which they are upheld, while also offering brief glimpses of alternative possibilities for consent, gender, desire, and sexuality. In exploring these alternatives, as well as how they are usually closed down and normative scripts (re)asserted, I reveal how romance attempts to naturalise particular forms of love and desire.
I likewise make occasional use of ‘heteronormativity’, ‘heteropatriarchy’, and ‘heterosexuality’ – which have received particular criticism when deployed in relation to the medieval past – where they offer the most concise point of reference for the modern reader
and reflect the specific context within the romance discussed.
59 See, for example, Karma Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xvi; Schultz, ‘Heterosexuality’, p. 20. While chastity and virginity were arguably ‘the most fundamental’ of the ‘dominant sexualities organizing the self-definition and self-representation of medieval subjects in the world’,
60 Glenn D. Burger, Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), p. 24. English romances place greater emphasis upon love and sexuality within marriage – and thus by necessity in this period love and sexuality between a man and a woman. Moreover, this book reveals the coercive lengths to which romances go to erase resistance to love and uphold desire and marriage. I therefore use modern terms where and because medieval romances deploy repressive strategies akin to those of modern heteronormativity, proceeding from the assumption that we cannot challenge a repressive framework if we do not recognise its history. In this respect, my argument aligns with Louise Sylvester’s work on romance and heterosexuality, though I focus more on how points of tension illuminate romance’s normative trajectory.
61 Louise M. Sylvester, Medieval Romance and the Construction of Heterosexuality (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).As a social construct, understandings, representations, and expressions of gender have also differed throughout history. The church again offered a dominant framework, which argued that gender difference was God-given, with the subjection of women to men and the concurrent valorisation of masculine over feminine attributes part of the divine plan.
62 Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, ‘Women, Gender, and Medieval Historians’, in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, ed. by Bennett and Karras (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1–18 (pp. 1–2, 5). However, recent scholarship has uncovered more fluid, varied, and queer manifestations of gender, with key work exploring medieval trans lives.
63 See Trans Historical: Gender Plurality before the Modern, ed. by Greta LaFleur, Masha Raskolnikov, and Anna Kłosowska (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021); Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, ed. by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021); Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism, ed. by Dorothy Kim and M. W. Bychowski (= Medieval Feminist Forum, 55.1 (2019)). While trans and non-binary people existed in the Middle Ages, concepts of masculinity and femininity were also varied in this period, shifting according to social status, relationship to the church, and age, pointing to the ways in which categories of difference intersected and exacerbated the effects of discrimination within medieval society.
64 See Ruth Mazo Karras, From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). As Susan Crane observes, another factor that influenced expressions of gender was genre.
65 Crane, Gender and Romance, pp. 3–4, 6, 12. Romance focused on displaying and performing gender: knightly masculinity is demonstrated by victories in battle and success in love, while femininity is upheld in part through romantic fidelity. Gender in romance thus requires repeated acts, resonating, as critics like Molly Martin have argued, with Judith Butler’s argument that gender is ‘performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence […] constituting the identity it is purported to be’.
66 Molly Martin, Vision and Gender in Malory’s ‘Morte Darthur’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), pp. 12–13; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2002; first publ. 1990), p. 33. Butler’s understanding of gender as a social construct created through repeated performance shapes my consideration of gender in this book. The first two chapters explore how resistance to love was understood and interpreted in gender-specific ways, but rather than perceiving this as a one-directional process in which resistance to love is influenced by gender, I argue that resistance to love forms one of the means by which romance defines and creates gendered norms.
Desire, too, was treated in different ways within individual literary frameworks and cultural contexts. For the church, desire was the result of the Fall and could be seen as innately sinful even within marriage, though this perspective became less common after the thirteenth century.
67 Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, p. 92. Medical models offered a different view. The understanding that conception ‘could not take place unless both the man and the woman ejaculated […] requir[ed] them both to feel pleasure’.
68 Ibid., p. 61. In romance, as Cooper has persuasively argued, this develops into a broader acceptance and encouragement of women’s ‘desirable desire’ – desire properly directed for and within marriage.
69 Cooper, ‘Desirable desire’. Resistance to love diverges from representations of desirable desire, offering a means by which we might probe to whom this desire was indeed desirable, but it also often transforms into this model, upholding the central place of desire, love, and marriage within romance.
These were the contexts from which romance representations of resistance to love and its related views of and insights into consent, coercion, gender, desire, marriage, sexuality, and rape culture emerged. Consent held a prominent yet ambiguous role in both marriage and accounts of raptus; legal definitions of raptus offered limited understandings of who could experience sexual violence and ravishment, upon which romances elaborated; while the church considered many kinds of sexual practices sinful, romance again offered a somewhat more flexible context, although one that in Middle English works tends to align with the celebration of love and marriage. The church, secular society, and literature offered varying ways of understanding these concepts in theory and in practice; in the literary sphere, attitudes also depended upon specific generic frameworks.