Sexual Culture in the Literature of Medieval Britain

It is often said that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently and perhaps no type of doing is more fascinating than sexual desires and behaviours. Our modern view of medieval sexuality is characterised by a polarising dichotomy between the swooning love-struck knights and ladies of romance on one hand and the darkly imagined and misogyny of an unenlightened medieval sexuality on the other. British medieval sexual culture also exhibits such dualities through the influential paradigms of sinner or saint virgin or whore and protector or defiler of women. However such sexual identities are rarely coherent or stable and it is in the grey areas the interstices between normative modes of sexuality that we find the most compelling instances of erotic frisson and sexual expression. This collection of essays brings together a wide-ranging discussion of the sexual possibilities and fantasies of medieval Britain as they manifest themselves in the literature of the period. Taking as their matter texts and authors as diverse as Chaucer Gower Dunbar Malory alchemical treatises and romances the contributions reveal a surprising variety of attitudes strategies and sexual subject positions. Amanda Hopkins teaches in English and French at the University of Warwick; Robert Allen Rouse is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia Vancouver British Columbia Canada; Cory James Rushton is Associate Professor of English at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia Canada. Contributors: Aisling Byrne Anna Caughey Kristina Hildebrand Amy S. Kaufman Yvette Kisor Megan G. Leitch Cynthea Masson Hannah Priest Samantha J. Rayner Robert Allen Rouse Cory James Rushton Amy N. Vines