Rejecting adulterous sex serves an exemplary function in the romances discussed in this chapter, aligning with prohibitions of adultery in monogamous Christian culture and often offering models of behaviour for medieval readers to reflect upon and emulate. These works indicate some of the appeal romances may have held for married readers: while this genre is often thought to hold special appeal for the young and unmarried, the works explored in this chapter reveal how romances attended to the desires, concerns, and fears of married readers.
1 See Cooper, The English Romance in Time, p. 225; Riddy, ‘Family, marriage, intimacy’, pp. 239–45. Although romance ‘audiences […] resist generalisation and easy classification’, married couples certainly owned romances, and Felicity Riddy argues that they were ‘read within the family’.
2 Carol M. Meale, ‘“gode men / Wiues maydnes and alle men”: Romance and Its Audiences’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. by Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 209–25 (p. 225); Riddy, ‘Family, marriage, intimacy’, p. 237. The Erle of Tolous is preserved in a manuscript that may have been a wedding or engagement gift from a groom to his bride: as Wade argues, despite the ambiguous representation of the Empress’s relationship with the Earl, attending to the nuanced virtues associated with the Empress in this work reveals ‘why a young man in the 1520s might think it appropriate reading matter for his bride-to-be’.
3 James Wade, ‘Confession, Inquisition and Exemplarity in The Erle of Tolous and Other Middle English Romances’, in The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, ed. by Mary C. Flannery and Katie L. Walter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013), pp. 112–29 (p. 129). For a discussion of this copy of The Erle of Tolous (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 45), see Meale, ‘An Early Sixteenth-Century Presentation Copy of The Erle of Tolous’; Perkins, ‘Introduction: The Materiality of Medieval Romance’, pp. 1–3, 10–18. The exemplary nature of the characters who reject adultery functions, for those invested in the virtues they represent, to invite empathy with them, including through their experiences of coercion, false accusation, and violence. Yet this empathy can function in more unexpected ways. Rather than simply exhorting readers to avoid adultery, the portrayals explored here also shed light upon, question, and at times explicitly critique the ideas upon which medieval rape culture depends. While they all support the idea of the perfect victim, they expose other beliefs entrenched within rape culture as false. In contrast to the assumption that women will be unfaithful and the accusation of ‘asking for it’ that may accompany this stereotype, they present women who are ‘trewe as stele’ no matter the temptations they are offered.
4 ‘Syr Tryamowre’, lines 17, 27. They show that coercion and violence are caused solely by the perpetrator but also acknowledge that perpetrators are structurally enabled by dominant cultural narratives of misogyny, victim-blaming, and even the illegibility of male victim-survivors of sexual violence. They also do not perceive prior sexual history to negate non-consent: where Alice Raw notes that scholars have traditionally treated
Dame Sirith’s Margery differently from other comparable figures because she is not a virgin, sexual experience is not seen to undermine non-consent in the works I have discussed, perhaps reflecting the extent to which romance values fidelity over virginity
per se.
5 Raw, ‘Coerced Consent in Dame Sirith’, pp. 313–14. The works explored in this chapter thus exist in productive tension with the other romances analysed in this book, exposing their coercive practices and assertions that love is obligatory as ideological structures that can be challenged. But they also align with the ways in which the other romances discussed complicate gendered ideas about sexual violence, offering a more capacious consideration of violence and power, as well as one attuned to the precise nuances of individual situations. If the works centred in previous chapters overall present a view of romance as an ideological structure that seeks to impose love, desire, and sexuality where it is not freely given, those explored here draw out some of the possibilities for resistance that exist within this varied and capacious mode of writing.